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pose to pose animation


betty

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while being very busy modeling i've been trying do some animation work as well.

here is an example of how i've set up "pose to pose" animation. i've just figured it out in houdini so it's my first set-up. i'm sure it could do with a 'lot' of streamlining. suggestions would be appreciated.

actually once i set it up, it was pretty easy from there on but i'm a little worried with all the parameters in the constantCHOP........considering this is such a simple character, i imagine this method could be a nightmare for a complex character, ie; one with hands, fingers, etc....

let me know what you think!!

poseAnim.zip

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unzip'd fine over here.

Barely got a look at the setup, but I thought that you can probably create an easy script to make those constant chops for you every time you want to save a pose. create one with channel references to all the animated/significant bone channels, then opscript it and set it up so that it evaluates the channel reference, rather than put the actual expression in there, so that when the new chop gets added, it'll add in the values only.

Just an idea, anyway.

Out of curiosity, what were you hoping to use your setup for?

Cheers,

Jens

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i just thought that something like this could be useful.

for instance if you are animating a scene of combat with swordplay, well there are so many moves you might just save as poses and then use these pose 'states' to interpolate through along with other methods of animation.

it also seems far cleaner than keyframing, as you easily re-use a pose by copying and then simply tweaking a couple parameters to make it different from you last pose so they are not all the same while also allowing you to drop in animation quite freely with less fuss than cleaning up keyframes.

this method would obviously best suite a situation where repetitive actions are at play.

this really is just my first attempt at it, so i'm sure it needs heaps of work. i just threw it up here to start discussion on it.

i will continue playing with this and try to integrate it with other animation methods. i am building a character or two at the moment will develop this along with it as i want to animate the character.

re; "I thought that you can probably create an easy script to make those constant chops for you every time you want to save a pose"

by this do you mean, using the pose operation in OBJECTS and posing your character in whatever pose then having some script read the parameters which you want. if so, yeah this does sound good, but problems for me is i can't script.....and there are so many more basics i have to worry about before even considering hscript.

the other thing is i make the basic constantCHOP with all the animatable parameters in it then copy'n'paste this. after having a few of these i wire them all into a switchCHOP and just use the sliders to position my character while switching from one pose to another to compare. so i never end up touching the character again. well, at least that is what i was doing for this example and it was just a simple thing meant as a demo.

maybe i'm just going down the wrong path and this is unneccessary...

we'll see what goes down when i try a detailed character............

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I agree with Jens. There is a lot of data you had to enter into those constant Chops. It might be better to do some scripting to get around that effort.

You might want to check out http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/VEX_file_out/

Mark Story has been doing some interesting work ( hope he won't mind me plugging the link;) ). It might give you an idea or two.

I recently used a scripted Object Operator to write out and read in animation to control lipsync. We wrote out animation channels based on a channel group to disk and use that information in a pull down menu to set keys for the right phoneme. Bascially is was a pose to pose set up, without the Chops jazz you had going.

It worked fairly well, excepted when I foolishly tried to call a dsreload inside the callback script to add a new pose into the pull down menu.

Just another way to do it I guess.

-k :o

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yep, sorry, my mistake.

anakin78z's idea seems fine, indeed i thought of something similar when Dante (was him right?) posted that great intro to vtcl. It was more of a tool to quickly place keyframes along the timeline for a given set of channels-objects (useful for roughing pose to pose).

regarding the scene, I think I would use bone rotations instead of goal translations at the chops level. There are more blending options with all the quaternion stuff etc and it also brings a more natural arc motion to the bone chains.

So one can use IK to pose a chain but it's bone rotations and the main parent object's rotation and translation what the chops work on. This is meant to completely override any ikchops then not depend on the specific chain behavior or the need for ik-fk blends.

Still it's possible to use goals positions and then interpolate in-space. I've done it and that's the base of the isner spine ripoff i'm doing. But you need to feed chops with the goal's initial and final direction vectors (this makes saved poses not reusable, at least in my setup). So maybe worthy only for spines and such.

What i'm doing on the spine is interpolate spatially between the top and the bottom of the spine. The resulting path is where the vertebra bones fall. A similar approach can be done with a chain goal if you take it's initial and final positions as the spine top and bottom but then you place the single goal along the path, along time.

sorry for digressing

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hey betty,

I guess with the whole scripting bit I imagined that you would have 2 characters... one for posing, the other with the setup applied. I think that posing a character in the viewport any way you like is probably a much more natural way of doing it, rather than moving sliders around in the constant chop. And then you could just pose, save state, pose, save state, and so on, and so forth, quickly building a nice library of poses.

Actually sounds like an intriguing setup that I wish I had the time to try and build myself.

Anyhoo, great to see someone playing with all this stuff. :)

Good luck!

Jens

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