The Mysterious Case of the Levitating Ladies

mavante

I have three G3 females in an animation—and two of them are levitating themselves a virtual inch or so above the floor! The third, by some miracle, stays well grounded. (Yeah, it's a pun.) 

I am attaching three Front-view screen captures: Frame 150, Frame 210, and Frame 300. There is a thin grey line in each showing the floor (a plane I created to show where the floor is). Up through Frame 210, the girls are all down-to-earth (so to speak)—but that's where the Linda Blair effect sets in on the two girls on the left (no political jokes, please). They start gradually lifting up, frame by frame, from the floor! As you can see at Frame 300, they are levitated!

I have checked, and double checked, and triple checked, and quadruple checked the Y-translation settings for each character, at every key frame for all three of the girls throughout, and have made absolutely certain they were the same at every keyframe for each of the girls.

Are they possessed? Do I need to call in a priest? Am I likely to hear voices coming out of my computer speakers? Or is there some simple thing I'm missing that could cause this new (to me) visitation of the weird sisters? Thanks for any help.

WendyLuvsCatz

you have Auto ground or manual ground checked?

if auto it always levels at the lowest point each frame and one might be going below Y-0 with thier foot

mavante

Thanks, Wendy, but I tried it both ways to see if it made any difference, and it didn't. I didn't really expect it to, because of you look at the screen grabs, all three of the girls have small bits of their heels and a smidge of their shoe soles sticking "through" the floor from frame 0. I also had inserted the fixed plane into the scene as a reference point to show that the two girls were lifting up relative to it, while the third girl didn't move up at all relative to the "ground" or the fixed plane.

I don't know what's going on, but it sure is wreaking havoc on trying to get this animation finished.

nemesis10

Does the animation begin with the ladies properly place on the ground plane (command D) on a Mac?

mavante

nemesis10 said:

Does the animation begin with the ladies properly place on the ground plane (command D) on a Mac?

Well, see, there might be a difference of artistic opinion about what a character being placed "properly" should mean. These particular ladies have high heels on, and when the heels go on, they invariably sink a ways into the "floor."

I know that Cmd-D (on a Mac) does adjust for that, as in the attached image. And I do sometimes use it—but usually only as a starting point, because I often want a tiny bit of the soles of the shoe, and of the heels, to "poke" through the ground/floor, just a skosh (technical term). So I generally tweak the Y-axis translatiion just a bit after Cmd-D, and often I just do it manually to begin with.

As you can see in the image, all Cmd-D did after I put the heels on 'er was just lift the character on the Y axis by 9.38 units.

Is there some secret, arcane differece in using Cmd-D and just dialing the girl up on the Y axis, said difference being able to account for the girls being where they are expected to be for 210 frames—and then suddenly beginning to lift off the "ground"? If so, I'm not understanding the connection. Would certainly love to learn, though.

mavante

[ [ [ By some warp in the flux, I ended up with a double post. Sorry. ] ] ]

margrave

I had some problems with spooky ghost movements that weren't showing up in the timeline.

Turns out Daz Studio hides some keyframes periodically--when properties are locked, I think. You need to right-click the timeline and hit "refresh" for them to show up again.

mavante

margrave said:

I had some problems with spooky ghost movements that weren't showing up in the timeline.

Turns out Daz Studio hides some keyframes periodically--when properties are locked, I think. You need to right-click the timeline and hit "refresh" for them to show up again.

Thanks for that tip, margrave. I implemented a workaround, and that lonnnng animation is rendering right now, but I will definitely look into that. I had no idea! How did you figure that out?