Dial-controlled IK posing (G3x figures)

Tobor

What are the options for posing by using IK control that doesn't involve the mouse? I might be (and probably am) missing something obvious, but I'd like to be able to pose a full arm using the concise motion of dials for the hand, that then uses inverse kinematics to calculate the position of all the the joints. I find the whacky non-anatomical interface -- where's the "elbow bend"  -- or more properly, the elbow flexion/extension -- control?) very time-consuming to work with, and the existing mouse interface for IK is touchy and not very exacting..

There are pose controls for things like the fingers of the hand, and there are some for full limb manipulation, but for the arms, these control *both* arms, and the movement is simplistic and not IK-based. What I'm hoping for something that allows me to rotate and translate the hand (or the foot) and all the intermediate bones properly bend and twist. As with normal mouse IK positioning, pins can be used to inhibit movement further up the node.

Is there a feature in D|S I'm overlooking? A plug-in that's available? 

Richard Haseltine

IK should work with the parameter sliders - though most bones can only be rotated, not translated, if you were looking for an equivalent to the viewport dragging. You can select a bone with the Universal tool or the Translate tool and use the single axes, or the two-axis where the axes join, to translate with more control than simply clicking and dragging allows.

Looking at the Pose Controls>Arms groups for Genesis 3 Female I see separate left and right controls.

Tobor

Not sure if I was looking at the wrong Pose Control group, but only saw symmetrical controls. This was for G3M. I need to do this for both characters. (That said, I only have the basic G3M add-ons -- no morphs, etc. I'm not sure what these other packages provide, as for G3F I simply bought a bunch of stuff together and dumped it all into a new runtime.)

Ideally, the way to do this is is by setting a goal position, possibly with a small temporary object like a sphere, and having the hand move to it with IK turned on. I could script it, but while I know the scripting language itself, I'm not very familiar with the D|S object model to know which object to use to expose the functionality for replicating an IK grab-and-move. It *must* be in the program somewhere, since we can do it manually, but whether it's exposed to the scripting language I don't know. I might ask around in the scripting sub-forum, but I had hoped to get something more basic up-and-going sooner.

What frustrates me is that D|S already does what I need -- internally it's very robust. It's just finding the user interface to accomplish it.

 

Tobor

Richard Haseltine said:

IK should work with the parameter sliders - though most bones can only be rotated, not translated, if you were looking for an equivalent to the viewport dragging. You can select a bone with the Universal tool or the Translate tool and use the single axes, or the two-axis where the axes join, to translate with more control than simply clicking and dragging allows.

Separately to respond to this, I must be missing a step. When I select a bone the parameter sliders only move that bone, without IK. I can do an IK-move with the mouse, so I know it's enabled. Is there another setting that turns IK on for slider control?

 

Tobor

Hmmm... To answer my own question, this might do the trick, or at least have some code I could learn from:

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts6/mcjautolimb2015

 

Tobor

Followup on the missing separate limb control: It may have been pilor error, but I had another issue with the scene where I couldn't advance to the next frame in the animation without it crashing D|S. So I remade the scene from scratch, including fresh figures, and lo-and-behold, I do see both symmetrical and separate controllers for limb posing.

Still looking at mCasual's AutoLimb script. It appears to be goal-based IK, so it may do what I need right out of the box.