saving and animating poses in CHOPs

[betty]

If i was to set up a character in a certain position, eg - crouched down. is there a CHOP that i could store all of this info in. i was thinking having all these parameters worked out in a constantCHOP and name it whatever the pose may be. then use another constantCHOP for posing the character in another state. i would then interpolate between them.

Is there any other way that is more suited for such things, CHOPs that handle such a method best?

thanks

betty

[edward]

I think currently, that's probably the best way. One thing you might want to explore is adding an Attribute CHOP to mark your rotation channels after the Constant CHOP. And then figure some way to use the Sequence CHOP to blend between the poses. This way you can make use of the Sequence CHOP's Quaternion Blend and Shortest Path Rotation Blending abilities to give you non-gimbal-lockable rotation interpolation.

Another idea which some of us have had for awhile is an improvement on the usual method of fetching your channels, immediately locking them, and then exporting them to exactly where they came from. The first problem with this is that it requires locking your fetch chop so that you don't get infinite recursion errors. The second problem is what if you want to tweak your original keyframed curves? Then you need to do the following in order: un-export your chops, tweak your curves, unlock the the fetch chop, relock the fetch chop, re-export your chops. These problems stem from the fact that there is a recursive dependency cycle going on here: object channels -> chops -> back to original object channels again.

So the idea is to simply break this dependency cycle. You first keyframe your objects as normal. When you want to move into CHOPs, you create one or more Constant CHOPs and channel copy (see the chcp textport command) your translate & rotate channels onto the Constant CHOP's parameters. This now serves as the source of your channels for the fetch chop. No locking required. Everything else is the same as the old method. You export to the original object parameters from where the channels came from.

The nice thing about this over the usual method is now once you've copied & fetched the channels, you can override the original parameters without needing to lock the fetch chop at all. And now what if you want to tweak the keyframes? You can just scope the channels from the Constant CHOP and tweak your curves and have everything update.

Now that I think about it, the script which I included in the IK/FK example could easily be modified to take all your currently selected objects and then automatically generate this setup.

Hope that helps.

-Edward