Character Flying Around
Hi,
I have been trying to make a simple animation for a G2F character to get up from the chair and walk around it to get to the other side of it. Believe it or not I am in my third week in trying to accomplish it! I got the getting up part ok, although the feet sliding slightly bother me, but I can live with it.
The major problem is walking with turning and walking three steps around the chair. I tried rotating the figure around the Y axis but that affects previos animations's positioning. I tried moving body parts one by one using the dials but the the animation looks clumsy, unnatural and robot-like. I like the tool with a bone icon (forgot what it's called, I am not at my pc now), it makes the movements look smooth and natural as it affects other limbs as they supposed to in real life.
Here's my bottleneck. As people walk and turn, some bones rotate, joints bend etc. When I try to make the character to turn at 45 degree to right and walk a few steps I adjust the limbs and the figure starts flying around like crasy unpredictably. I use pins to fix some parts, like feet and shindles, rotate the pelvis, the hips, the neck etc using that "bone" tool.
Using Aniblocks is not making my lif easier, with all the adjustments it's almost the same as to animating it afresh. I am so disappointed and frustrated. This movement is the final part of the scene. Other 3/4 I made in one or two days with no issues. I use DAZ3D v. 4.9 Any ideas? Thank you
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Comments
What you are trying to do is not easy, it takes a lot of work. I have a couple of suggestions that might work for you.
Use the root node for translation and rotation of the whole figure. Make sure you create keyframes for all directions and rotations (xyz) every time.
Avoid rotating the hip if you can, just use it for minor corrective translations along the y and x axis.
Everytime you make a movement/pose be sure to create a keyframe for the root node, the hip, pelvis and ALL the sub bones (thighs, shins, feet and toes).
The abdomen etc won't affect the movement of the figure but if you drag something with the mouse DS will create a keyframe for the hip aswell.
That can mess things up, so you will most likely have to delete that keyframe manually if it is not happening at the same time as the keyframes you already created.
Make the three step poses first, then start filling in the keyframes inbetween.
It is possible to do this without keymate/graphmate but they are a great help for finetuning timing and velocity curves, copying and moving keyframes and so on.
The active pose tool has good pinning but it often causes the hip to rotate which can cause you trouble.
Using the universal tool makes it possible to pin the rotation but the translation pinning is not very good as you may have noticed.
If I have pinned the feet and drag the hip I usually have to go to the parameter pane to dial in some corrections which is a little annoying (to say the least).
I hope you found something useful here, it's not easy to give good advice especially since everyone has their own workflow.
I would love to hear if you make any progress;) Good luck!
Thank you so much, Sven! Those are very useful and detailed tips. I've noticed the mess happens when I try to rotate the pelvis by pulling it with a mouse with the Active Poser tool (I remembered the name!) on and the right foot, leg and hip pinned. The pelvis and the left leg should rotate together with the rest of the body, otherwise the figure looks unnaturally and awkwardly twisted. I also tried to apply poses but they turn around in the other direction even though I hold Ctrl button and unflag the Scale and Translation values.When I move the slider between the previous pose I created and the next/preset pose, the figure flies and slides around to take the preset position. I can rotate the pelvis with the dial but there is a limit to the rotation value. I guess I need to to turn the limitations off, not sure how though. Let me see what happens.
that walk it plugin isnt too bad (google). I guess would need a lot of tweaking afterwards to make smooth though.
I just make monty python style walks with it (easily amused) ;-)
Thank you DigiDotz. Going to try it!
Ok. I purchased the Walkit. Not that totally regret the $13 spent, but it is not good for what I have been trying to accomplish. It lacks the natural movement. The tool simulates a basic walk, there are lots of dials to make it walk like an old man, a monster, limping and all those oddities. My goal is the character to move as natural as possible yet catwalk-ish, sexy young woman. The Catwalk dial would not give the desired result.
I returned to manual adjustmnet of the poses. I am stuck on the pose where the figure's upper part has already twisted for a turn but the lower body is still in previous position. Simply rotating hips and legs leaves pelvis in the awkward position and she looks like she is frozen in concrete half-way. When I try to drag and twist the pelvis part with the Active Pose on, it triggers the weird turnaround and flying in the air. Tried moving it gradually with more keyframes, but there comes a moment when it starts flying. Experimenting with the root node rotation. I just don't want to mess all previous animations. I created a whole new scene for this movement only. Let me see what comes out of it. Ugh...:(
What's probably happening for you is when you rotate the figure or hip bone from 0 to -180 degrees the -180 becomes 180 in the parameter rotation pane.
You have to check those values and convert the rotations to - values! (90 degrees equals -270 and so on). That will atleast stop the spinaround I think.
I had no problems creating a (very) ruff Genesis1 animation rising from a chair, take a few steps while turning with a full 360 degree rotation to
stop behind the chair. Just had to correct those rotation values (-360 degrees equals 0 degrees).
Hope this helps;)
Thank you Sven! I will certainly try that. Let me get this clear for myself though. So, a change in the value for a node, in this case, pelvis translates to an overall characters xyz parameters?
No, pelvis rotations only affect legposition. Hip translations/rotations affect the whole figure. But as the hip's center point is not the same as the root node centerpoint rotating the hip especially along the x and z axis leads to the legs sliding. Therefore it's easier to keep the hip position close to zero and translate/rotate the whole figure using the root node.
What I ment was if you start at frame 0 with the root node at 0,0,0 with zero rotation, then move to lets say frame 20, change the y rot to -90, then go to frame 40 and change the y rot to -180, DS sees the -180 as 180, which will lead to a counterclockwise rotation, so you have to dial in the - in the parameter pane to make sure the figure rotates the right way.
Same goes for the hip, if you decide to use the hip bone for translating/rotating the figure.
Edit to add:
When I make a walking animation I use the root node to move the figure forward (along the z axis). If I need a turn I also use the root node for rotating the figure. I use the hip for minor movements as it needs to move back and forth along the x axis + it also goes up and down a couple of cm. I rotate pelvis along with the legs to make the "swaying movement". Note that if you rotate pelvis sideways you then have to lower the hip a tiny bit because one leg will move up and one will move down.
Right, I'm by no means an expert but I've found a workflow that suits me. Still run into trouble a lot, but it only takes patience and a lot of time to get the work done haha.
Just ask if you have questions and I'll do my best to come up with something.
Now it makes sense to me. So the general advice, and we come back to your original suggestion, not to mess with the hip rotation but rotate the whole figure instead. My biggest worry though is the entire figure rotation may affect previous animation. Ok, I can save this bit as a separate scene and save it as an aniblock. Would that not affect all the previous animation? This was my experience with using a preset aniblock. I created a custom aniblock, then tried to append a preset aniblock and the figure got positioned miles away from its original position.
Well, let me deal with one issue at a time.
Ok, this is just ridiculous. Nothing works. I attached a screenshot showing the change between keyframes. I don't see anything dramatic. Can you? But the figure is just popping and spinning in the air... I am short of giving up on this.
Can you post a screenshot showing the hip parameters, I'm pretty sure it has to do with that. You can tell from the bounding box that the selected root node is behaving, it's just rotated slightly along the y-axis as it should. Atleast check the rotations for the hip, maybe advance one frame at a time keeping an eye on the rotation parameters for the hip. Hard to tell from those screenshots but it looks lik the hip is spinning not only along the y-axis, so you must have made some other rotations too?
Don't give up buddy, there is something causing all this and there must be a solution to it
.
About the aniblocks I can't really help, I just have the animate lite version and rarely use aniblocks, it's more fun and personal to make your own stuff, right? And I've tried to convert some of my animation presets to aniblocks just to be able to scale them, but it seems to me the process messes up the velocity curves so they never look good. Guess you have to have the full version, I might get it at some point.
You never mentioned if you own the keymate/graphmate plug ins. If you don't have them I really recommend them. They've saved me weeks and months
Thank you, Sven! I started from the scratch for the 100th time lst night watching carefully teh hip roation values. Animated two steps, so far ok, no flying around, now it is time for the motion around the chair...Will play with Y node rotation.
I do use keymate/graphmate. Never used graphmate so far, Keymate helps a lot.
ok, Here's the update. The animation is progressing, I managed to avoid the spinning and flying, not sure how though. I did a lot of xyz adjustments to the nod referring to the initial position. I discovered that trying to force the pelvis part to twist by using the Active Pose tool causes a lot of trouble.
Now I am facing yet another problem. When I did the figure rotation after it raises from the chair I changed the figure pivot cneter. Otherwise, changing the Y rotation value causes the figure to rotate around some remote point. I managed to adust that to the figure's Y axis but now in the middle of animation the whole figure moves backwards along the Z axis. As you see in the picture, the Z Translation value remains 0 yet the figure moved back. For some reason the lower pivot point doesn't influence anything at this point. Any thoughts?
Hi, at the second screenshot I see there are no keyframes on the hip for the time between frame 750 and 990. This can be the reason why DazStudio interpolates strage movment on the z-axis in between - try to set the interpolation mode to linear or simply more keyframes should help. Open graphMate and look ar the z-translate curve of the hip bone to see whats going on.
As far as I can see that's the root node expanded, the hip is the line with the most keyframes on it, is it not? Otherwise I agree, it could be an interpolation thing so worth to check out.
Good to hear you're making progress! I usually just rotation pin the thighs and rotate pelvis with the universal tool or from the parameter pane. Then go to the hip and/or legs and dial in some small amounts to correct. (For example if you rotate pelvis side to side you need to lower or raise the hip by a small amount as one leg goes up and the other down.) Then I go to scenetab or keymate and select the hip pelvis and all sub bones and create full translation/rotation keyframes for that pose. And if I use the root node for figure ttranslation/rotation I include that one too.
That is what can happen if you don't keep your hip close to the root node, that's why I suggested to use the hip only for small corrections and basically use the rootnode to translate/rotate your figure. Changing the centerpoint most likely will affect every pose you made, so I wouldn't recommend that. Then again I could be wrong about that. Is changing the centerpoint creating a keyframe, so it can be copied and moved? Anyway try to decide on which method you want to use, then stick to it, try to keep things as simple as possible
.
Keep us informed!
Thank you everybody foir your input! Keeping simple is my dream goal, but it never works :) Now, I am trying to get the pivot point back to its default position so I can see what needs to be adjusted. Changing the pivot point doesn't create a keyframe.
A curious observation I made meanwhile. The green pivot point stays where it is throughout the entire animation, however the figure moves around X and Z axis. My Z translation values show zero change.Any ideas?
A curious observation I made meanwhile. The green pivot point stays where it is throughout the entire animation, however the figure moves around X and Z axis. My Z translation values show zero change.Any ideas?
Found this in one of the threads. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/124431/pivot-point-problems
Am I doomed and should start all over?
In case somebody is interested, here's the latest update. I think I found the reason why all of a sudden the figure is thrown away to the back. For the last two or three keyframes I used a preset pose to save time on actual posing. The pose must have been made for another figure. Moreover, I reposed it using CTRL+Left Click. That must have been the last straw that has broken the back of my camel. I deleted last three keyframes and the figure alignment somewhat normalised. I will carry on posing it manually. Seems like preset poses don't help much at this point. There must be something with their rigging. Rigging or no rigging I carry on digging!
Yup there are all kinds of premade poses out there, some even changing the figure shape, so beware lol.
No you're not doomed, just stay out of the joint editor while animating:) If you need to use premade poses, you can try applying them, then copy the root node and hip keyframes from the previous pose and make the necessary adjustments.
Don't know what else to say at this point, other than I'll keep my fingers crossed
.
Back to square one, the figure is still moving back along the Z axis, pivot point unchanged, Z translation parameter set to zero. What I am going to do is, make a separate scene with this particular movement (raising and and walking around), make an aniblock and then merge it with the main scene. See if that works...Ugh.
For both the root and hip? If so, could it be an interpolation between two keyframes as Syrus suggested in an earlier post?That could quite easely be fixed with keymate or graphmate. Open graphmate and move the mouse over the z-translation slider in the parameters pane to see the curve. Then move the mouse sideways out of the pane without moving over any other slider and you can go to graphmate to adjust the keyframe bias, tension etc to fix the problem.
Worth a try I guess, as long as the root node and hip position/rotation is the same for the last pose and the beginning of the aniblock, otherwise your figure will jump suddenly to a new location where you add the aniblock.
Thank you all so much! I managed to get Z alignment straightened up. There was indeed a lot of mess on the Hip node. So, I will try the Epic Three Steps Around The Chair again with all the lessons learned. See what comes out of it. Mind you, it the 4th or 5th week!
That's great news:)
Lololol! Been there done that
! I just hope she doesn't end up in the basement all alone
Maybe this can help to speed things up:
The last thread is a bit of summary from the abouth but also with the extended main menu for download.
I hope this can help somehow.
@ D Ov
how is it progressing?
Hey try out this new Pose It Plugin @ http://www.pilning.net/
It looks like its including everything to make animation progress an easy task.
Ok guys, it's been a while. A lot has happened^ I've been laid off, I worked on other stuff but I came back to this project again. I had to do a A LOT of adjustments. actually redone half f the stuff. The quality has improved BUT....the same problem again: after making her first stp the character starts rotaing like crasy. Please see:
I used a preset pose to make a transition from seated to standing. It worked just fine, just had to rotate the Hip Y-value to face the other direction. Could that be the culprit. I really don't want to do the raising animation manually, it looks good to me. This is insane how such a simple thing as three walking steps can go terribly complicated. As usual, any advice is appreciated!
Hi, good to see you back:) It has to be either the figure root node or the hip causing the problem. If you can make a new screenshot with the hip node selected it would be easier to see what's happening. There also seems to be an issue with the posing, at 1980 she has her right leg in front and at 2010 she suddenly has her left leg in front. You need some keyframing inbetween or use the symmetry function to mirror the pose at 2010. Hope this helps, I'd suggest you check out rotations for both the root node and hip node from 1980 to 2010;)
I've noticed something else that's odd. I need to rotate the Hip valueor little bit more than 180 degrees clockwise around the Y-axis for the walk start position. But that is it, it won't turn anymore, and I still ned her to walk around the chair. I have the limits on, if I turn them off it screws up the rest of my animation. If I rotate the figure 180 dgreee counter clockwise it gives me more room, but it does a wicked flight around in the air between seated and standing positions. I can resort to copying this scene, deleting all previous animation and only doing the walk. That would be a little lame, but I would like to try everything before doing that.
Alright, it's been almost three months and I am back to SQ#1. Please see three screenshots, #1 - figure stands on the start position, #2 - she makes one step, #3 - what she does in between. Any thoughts?