Rotating bones after creating new figure

Aabhnormal

Hi folks... I'm back with an all new problem that I can't seem to figure out:

So, I originally had a spaceship that I built in Blender and imported individually into Daz, the problem was that one of the objects (The tails of the spacecraft) needed to "Extend" upward and the way that the bones worked, they only moved on the "Global" Y Axis. since the tails were tilted 30 degrees, this meant in order to deploy them, you had to adjust the Y AND X axis at the same to get it to extend.  Something that made it a mathematical nightmare for animation. 

Many folks felt that the solution was to make a figure and then adjust bones. That was cool, it would solve a few other problems as well, so I spent the last two or three months learning how to do that (You may remember me in here before with a car model I was working on). 

Now I've made the figure, but I'm still running into the same problem: The tail bone is oriented 30 degrees, but it still MOVES Globally, so when I move the "Y Translate" wheel, it goes straight up, not in line with the bone (See attached picture).

What am I missing?   The end-goal is to have a wheel that says "Extend".

Thanks again.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Wouldn't that be a scale operation, as opposed to a translation?

Richard Haseltine

I know you don't want to use it, but as a diagnostic tool what happens when you apply the Twist parameter?

Aabhnormal

So, twist works correctly; it is on the line (mostly, the bone needs adjusting, but I haven't fine tuned it since it's not moving like it's supposed to).  

Scale doesn't do what I'm looking for (It just stretches the tail)

But here's a head-scratcher: If I grab the red arrow on the widget, it does what it's supposed to! 

If this becomes an ERC freeze thing, though... I'll need very explicit instructions as I have yet to get that to actually work...  I'm clearly missing something. likely some step that everyone knows you are supposed to do and typically doesn't add that in the steps.  I tried many times with the car and never got it to work; ultimately just giving up and manually animating the steering system. 

Aabhnormal

So, I modified my Google Fu and found another thread that has a similar problem: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/456926/how-do-i-rotate-pivot-points

 

HOWEVER.  Opening the Tool Settings tab allows me to adjust the point... but none of the rotates actually rotate the Green Widget to -25 degrees.  In fact, there is no "rotate" that actually moves the green widget at all.  The Green widget stays with Y = 0 degrees. So Y Translate still goes straight up.

Richard Haseltine

The widgets for moving the end points ar emeant to stay oriented to world space, as far as I know, since manipulating them will - among other things - determine the bone's orientation. One option might be to simply spawn a morph for each translation; since morphs are linear they are perfectly suited to this, unlike rotation and scale. That is, move the mesh using the Translate or Universal tool, with the model otherwise zeroed and the coordinate system set to local, export as OBJ, and import as a morph target (Edit>Figure>Morph Loader Pro, taking care to use the same preset for both export and import). Hide the native transaltion sliders and place the morph sliders in their slot (or just use them from the figure node).

Aabhnormal

(Sorry, I got called to my day job for a week or so :) )  That's probably what we will do, then.  It's only the tail objects that need this, so I'll simply make morph targets for it and that should work. 

In fact, that could be cool for landing gear doors and gear as well so that all of the doors open and gear drop at the same time. :) 

Thank you all! :)