[Carrara]Looking for advanced info on Carrara IK - Polyloop

DaveH · 23rd October 2007, 04:20

Is there a net place, book(s), or a group of people who use Carrara IK tools in a more advanced way than basic limbs?

I've seen a few tutorials in these forums and elsewhere that helped get me started. There were a few on simple limbs and bipeds, and one on a spine robot arm that had very basic movement. But I need to use it more effectively, and I'm hoping there are people who've been working with Carrara longer than I who would know, or that more advanced info would be available somewhere. But I'm not in any of those loops. Most of my film work has been in motion control, miniatures, cable operated puppets, and stop motion; I know enough about those techniques to get me through whatever I've needed to do. However, this is my first attempt at CG on a (minor) film, and I'm starting essentially from scratch.

I've used Maya 5.0 IK on a UT2004 player model, and Maya supports spine IK (which is what I *really* want for my current project). It also allows you to define the plane the IK actions took place, and a couple of other things that escape my memory at the moment. I'm hoping there are ways to get more out of the Carrara tools than I am, but manuals and tutorials stop at the basics.

Any ideas on where I can look for more info?

Thanks!

bwtr · 23rd October 2007, 05:49

http://www.markbremmer.com/pages/TutMain.html

Have you looked here?

markbremmer · 23rd October 2007, 16:10

I'm afraid my IK tutorials are basic as well since that's the target audience. However, I've used IK for facial animations in conjunction with morph targets for more advanced stuff. You can also constrian the motion to planes complete with specific range of motion limiters.

Honestly, it's not that hard to apply information from any other program into Carrara. Most of my advanced IK knowledge from slumming though CG Society and various Maya sites and then dabbling a little with Carrara's tool set until I could reproduce the results.

If you're interested in imitating stop-motion movement or don't actually want organic IK interactions, then using the motion constraints and building a Parent/Child structure on your figure is really fast and easy to implement and control. Any concerns about abrupt mechanical movement can be massaged with the tweener functions.

Mark

DaveH · 23rd October 2007, 18:50

> I'm afraid my IK tutorials are basic as well since that's the target audience.

Is that true of the ones I'd pay for as well as the free ones (which I've seen)?

A bit 'o context here. What drove me to posting this thread was a problem I'm having here: http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html

Quick if not completely accurate analogy: I'm kind of animating an octopus where some of the tentacles have forks at the end. It's really a neuron, but you get the idea.

> Honestly, it's not that hard to apply information from any other program into Carrara.

I have no doubt that's true up to a point, and I'm hoping what I'm trying to do falls into the category of needs that are common enough that they can be addressed by most products, though perhaps in different ways. But there is so much that I don't know about the nuts and bolts of any program and how things can be combined that I'm having difficulty trying to determine what, if anything, I can do to help myself.

For example: I think it was the robot arm tutorial where I saw someone specifying using ball joints in their IK rig. I discovered though experimentation that the rig didn't work unless I specified ball joints. So I looked at "canned" IK created using the Carrara tool, expecting that the joints would have the ball joint modifier applied automagically by the IK tool. They didn't - they were unadorned, and yet they worked just fine. So there's at least one rule I don't understand.

Another example is the Maya spine IK; I have absolutely no idea how they do that and didn't understand some of the steps needed to set it up, so I wouldn't be able to map that on anything in Carrara. I don't know enough to guess whether there is a different set of rules than for regular IK, or if it could have been done with existing primitives and all they did was automate some of the steps.

Tutorials for me are kind of hit or miss. I've read them in many different disciplines (CG, software development, sculpting, and a few others) and a common thing is that most don't say *why* some things are done, just that they are done. Sometimes omissions like that are for brevity, sometimes because the audience is expected to know certain things, and sometimes because the people writing the tutorials aren't good teachers. The difficult thing is that the omissions tend to be critical to the process and you *need* to understand them in order take that information and apply it to different situations.

Someone must know how all the parts interact and when certain features are desirable. Certainly the developers at Carrara would, but the manuals just barely skim the surface. Hence my plea for help.

DaveH · 24th October 2007, 01:50

Figuring this stuff out is apparently a challenge regardless of the toolset. Here are a couple of threads in other forums where people are dutifully Googling for tutorials, reading manuals, and so on, and yet still coming up blank or confused:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...ight=kinematic
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...ight=kinematic

Again, I would seriously appreciate any suggestions.
- Tell me to buy a particular book. Your book, whoever you are, if you happened to write a good one!

- Or maybe I should subscribe to some site so I can buy permium service things.
- I'd pay for access to Mark Bremmer's tutorials, but he sez his are too basic.

My Maya experience is 3 years old and under 5.0 PLE, so much of what I know is, um, stale at best. All I have to work with right now is Carrara. We have a copy of Maya for the film, but I'm licensed only for Carrara.

The fate of an independent film is at stake!

Ok, it's not that bad, but we really want this to look as good as the non-CG stuff.

Grendel · 24th October 2007, 02:38

DaveH - Was it my robot arm thing you looked at?

Are you using the same technique with helper objects

Do I get this right that you only want the bending to occur in one direction everytime?

If so did you use ball joints for the costraints?

Did you set up the motion as limited more on on axis than the other(eg. more on the positive X than the negative X to prevent the tendril from bending the wrong way)

DaveH · 24th October 2007, 04:54

Grendel - thanks for responding!

> DaveH - Was it my robot arm thing you looked at?

Yup! This thread was involved:
http://forums.polyloop.net/3d-work-p...-tuf-chic.html
as was this thread:
http://forums.polyloop.net/3d-work-p...rrara-5-a.html

Though I relied more on the former.

> Are you using the same technique with helper objects
I believe so. I have a helper at the end of each IK section. Check out this thread if you haven't already - there's a shot of the thing with rig:
http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html

You can see that I've chained several IK sections together. Each locator represents an IK target similar to what's in your robot arm example.

> Do I get this right that you only want the bending to occur in one direction everytime?
Not really, but if I had to I could accept that. There are a couple of places where I would have liked it to bend one way then cross the center and bend the other way, but I've given up on that. Mostly I just want it to bend consistently.

I remember from Maya that the joints in the chain needed to be slightly bent to tell the IK creation tool which way to do the initial bend. But that was for the kind of IK you'd use on a limb rather than a spine IK for a tendril.

> If so did you use ball joints for the constraints?
I did use ball joints, but they're set at +-90 degrees on each axis.

My current frustration is that the IK solution displayed in the animating window is not the same as what it chooses to render - it chooses to bend the other direction sometimes. I found that one big reason that my renders were not being approved by the director was because he was seeing something different from what I was animating.

Grendel · 24th October 2007, 12:24

+-90 seems like allot of range of motion. A spine in a vertebrate would not rotate that much for each bone. In a neuron I don't know but it would probably be more pleasing to the eye not to allow the tendril to bend at a right angle at any one location and allow a smoother silhoutte but whateve the director wants.

On thing you can do is to bias which way the direction of bend is occuring by setting one direction to say +45 and the other to -90. It would then favor movement in the larger range of motion axis.

So you can scrub the timeline and it looks one way when you render just a frame and the batch render renders something else? Now that's just plain odd, no really good answer for that one.

I'll wip up a similar neuron thing and post it.

DaveH · 24th October 2007, 16:02

I could post my file as well, if that would help. I'm running 5.1 Pro. It's kinda large, though.

> One thing you can do is to bias which way the direction of bend is occuring by setting one direction to say +45 and the other to -90. It would then favor movement in the larger range of motion axis.

Favor, but not restrict? Do you have a feel for how it would decide to allow movement in the smaller range so that one can use that knowledge to predict what the solver will do and animate with that in mind?

I've gotten the thing to sort of do what I want by setting keys for one or two joints in a chain. This forces the solver to bend in a certain direction, but that doesn't look smooth or good and introduces similar overhead to keyframing all the joints.

> So you can scrub the timeline and it looks one way when you render just a frame and the batch render renders something else?

Sadly, yes. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I had caved in to all the other issues I didn't understand how to work around, but when it wouldn't even render what I animated I realized I was not in control and needed to understand...something... in order to at least be able to render what I scrub.

> Now that's just plain odd

Yup.

> no really good answer for that one

Grendel · 24th October 2007, 17:22

Post it if it will fit, strip all the shaders and other items not related to the problem.

Since you are on 5.1 Pro you can smooth out the keys allot better using the graph editor, are you using that?

For the batch problem if you have the Driven plug-in then you can bake your IK animation into explicit keyframes. Then there is no way it can be interpreted wrong for batch rendering.

three3dguy · 24th October 2007, 21:45

Instead of me reposting all the infor here i decided to try this instead:

Hi everybody, can somebody please explain to me on how to close a proper morph mouth? Pix's are included with all info at this bottom link and thank you for your time.

Code:

http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-eng/12982-i-could-use-tips-making-tutorials-using-carrara.html

DaveH · 24th October 2007, 23:19

three3dguy, you probably meant for that to go in a different thread...

OK, time has both made a liar out of me and confirmed that I need to do something different.

I rendered the frames in the other thread on October 19, which was 5 days ago. At that time, I tried opening and closing the car file to reset the solver or whatever in order to coax the batch renderer and scrubber to sync up and show the same thing. To prepare a trimmed version of my .car file, I naturally needed to open the file to delete shaders & stuff. However, before I deleted anything, scrubbing showed *exactly what the batch render did*! So no one can reproduce the discrepancy problem, even when using my original file. Not even me.

But it *does* confirm that I need to find some way of telling the solver which way to go. Instead of not being able to trust that the batch renderer will show the same thing as the scrubber, now I can't trust that the scrubber will solve IK deterministically.

> if you have the Driven plug-in

I don't. I need to research that.

> the graph editor, are you using that?

DEFINITELY! I don't think I'd try this without the graph editor. I became dependent on that kind of a tool when I wrote a similar program back in the '80s for my motion control system. I used it on several movies and commercials, and wouldn't have been able to make the deadlines without it.

three3dguy · 25th October 2007, 01:52

NOooo... I meant to place that in this thread can you please checkout the info at the above link and thank you.

Grendel · 25th October 2007, 18:06

DaveH - I've tried to get ahold of the associatedFX site for the Driven plug-in but no reply. I don't know if he is still pursuing the plug-in or not.

three3dguy - Start a new thread with your morph problem that way it is easier for everyone to learn from the problem your having.

Couerl · 25th October 2007, 21:19

Well, I just rendered it and I'm not exactly sure what your problem is, I saw on the other thread that you had one chain bending the wrong way or something but am not sure which chain it is/was.. It's too bad you don't have C6 because I think that using NLA on this might ease some of your woes. To me anyway, this model has a lot of bones, perhaps more than are needed for the relatively simple movement in the animation. I haven't looked yet really but there can also be some weight painting issues that might make one tendril go out of whack in respect to others. Definately ambitious work and I doubt you'll find anything more complex as far as tuts go..

three3dguy · 25th October 2007, 22:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grendel

DaveH - I've tried to get ahold of the associatedFX site for the Driven plug-in but no reply. I don't know if he is still pursuing the plug-in or not.

three3dguy - Start a new thread with your morph problem that way it is easier for everyone to learn from the problem your having.

Yes but throughout this forum I notice other users saying something of
the effect relating to another thread. That why there wasn't nothing
else being posted in this thread far as me posting nothing more then
a short description with a jump link.

But regarding about starting a newer thread,.. sure thing and i'm am sorry for
bumping this thread to stay on the first page.

Grendel · 25th October 2007, 22:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by three3dguy

But regarding about starting a newer thread,.. sure thing and i'm am sorry for
bumping this thread to stay on the first page.

No problem

DaveH · 26th October 2007, 06:03

@Couerl
The arm that's misbehaving in the screen shots is prefixed with a10 in the bones.

There could very well be more bones than absolutely needed, but even then is there some way to coax them into behaving a certain way? Grendel's comment about tweaking ball joint axis restrictions was interesting ("It would then favor movement in the larger range of motion axis"), but that sounds like there's still some room for the solver to have a mind of its own and thwart the intentions of the animator. I'd just like to tell the thing "bend this way" and be done with it.

Trying Grendel's suggestion of limiting an axis, I adjusted one of the ball joint axes to be limited in one direction but I couldn't get the setting to "stick". I set the scrubber to 0 seconds to get my reference pose, adjusted the Y axis limit on one side from +90 to +10. I tried setting a key frame and I tried saving the file, but both times it kicked back into the full +90 limit position.

What must I do to get Carrara to accept the setting?

Couerl · 26th October 2007, 06:20

Um... Well, with IK sometimes for very organic and complex forms only some of the bones in the chain may need to be constrained. Some could be free of IK like the outer ones and leave IK up to maybe 1/3rd the length of each tendril with limited ball joints like Grendel suggested. That would at least help you be able to set it up or make it turn whatever way you wanted without it wrapping up like a pretzel. All that said, this looks like a perfect candidate for NLA testing because you could make each tendril it's own animation group and animate it independantly of all the others and then blend it all together without any of the "keyframe crunch" that you get otherwise. Carrara can interpolate the NLA without it looking like a mime doing the robot if you know what I mean. That's a job for C6 though, well worth the upgrade for stuff like this..

Wesgraphics · 26th October 2007, 07:00

Is this a mechanical or organic object? Just wondering, because it makes a difference.

I saw the word tendril in there, so I'm assuming organic?

If you ever looked at an octopus arm or a jellyfish they move in smooth waveform.

Robots move more linearly with set pivot or rotate points.

Just trying to guess what is being discussed here without it ever being said.

23rd October 2007, 04:20	#1 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44 My Photos: (0)	[Carrara]Looking for advanced info on Carrara IK Is there a net place, book(s), or a group of people who use Carrara IK tools in a more advanced way than basic limbs? I've seen a few tutorials in these forums and elsewhere that helped get me started. There were a few on simple limbs and bipeds, and one on a spine robot arm that had very basic movement. But I need to use it more effectively, and I'm hoping there are people who've been working with Carrara longer than I who would know, or that more advanced info would be available somewhere. But I'm not in any of those loops. Most of my film work has been in motion control, miniatures, cable operated puppets, and stop motion; I know enough about those techniques to get me through whatever I've needed to do. However, this is my first attempt at CG on a (minor) film, and I'm starting essentially from scratch. I've used Maya 5.0 IK on a UT2004 player model, and Maya supports spine IK (which is what I really want for my current project). It also allows you to define the plane the IK actions took place, and a couple of other things that escape my memory at the moment. I'm hoping there are ways to get more out of the Carrara tools than I am, but manuals and tutorials stop at the basics. Any ideas on where I can look for more info? Thanks!

23rd October 2007, 16:10	#3 (permalink)
markbremmer Escaping to 3D worlds... Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 175 My Photos: (0) Images: 3	I'm afraid my IK tutorials are basic as well since that's the target audience. However, I've used IK for facial animations in conjunction with morph targets for more advanced stuff. You can also constrian the motion to planes complete with specific range of motion limiters. Honestly, it's not that hard to apply information from any other program into Carrara. Most of my advanced IK knowledge from slumming though CG Society and various Maya sites and then dabbling a little with Carrara's tool set until I could reproduce the results. If you're interested in imitating stop-motion movement or don't actually want organic IK interactions, then using the motion constraints and building a Parent/Child structure on your figure is really fast and easy to implement and control. Any concerns about abrupt mechanical movement can be massaged with the tweener functions. Mark __________________ Mark Bremmer Beginner, intermediate and advanced Carrara tutorials are here.

24th October 2007, 16:02	#9 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44 My Photos: (0)	I could post my file as well, if that would help. I'm running 5.1 Pro. It's kinda large, though. > One thing you can do is to bias which way the direction of bend is occuring by setting one direction to say +45 and the other to -90. It would then favor movement in the larger range of motion axis. Favor, but not restrict? Do you have a feel for how it would decide to allow movement in the smaller range so that one can use that knowledge to predict what the solver will do and animate with that in mind? I've gotten the thing to sort of do what I want by setting keys for one or two joints in a chain. This forces the solver to bend in a certain direction, but that doesn't look smooth or good and introduces similar overhead to keyframing all the joints. > So you can scrub the timeline and it looks one way when you render just a frame and the batch render renders something else? Sadly, yes. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I had caved in to all the other issues I didn't understand how to work around, but when it wouldn't even render what I animated I realized I was not in control and needed to understand...something... in order to at least be able to render what I scrub. > Now that's just plain odd Yup. > no really good answer for that one Last edited by DaveH : 24th October 2007 at 16:24.

24th October 2007, 17:22	#10 (permalink)
Grendel Moderator Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 1,172 My Photos: (25) Images: 23	Post it if it will fit, strip all the shaders and other items not related to the problem. Since you are on 5.1 Pro you can smooth out the keys allot better using the graph editor, are you using that? For the batch problem if you have the Driven plug-in then you can bake your IK animation into explicit keyframes. Then there is no way it can be interpreted wrong for batch rendering. Attached Thumbnails

24th October 2007, 21:45	#11 (permalink)
three3dguy Ray Harryhausen Maddness Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 45 My Photos: (0)	Instead of me reposting all the infor here i decided to try this instead: Hi everybody, can somebody please explain to me on how to close a proper morph mouth? Pix's are included with all info at this bottom link and thank you for your time. Code: http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-eng/12982-i-could-use-tips-making-tutorials-using-carrara.html

23rd October 2007, 05:49	#2 (permalink)
bwtr Brian Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: South Australia Posts: 2,042 My Photos: (6) Images: 49	http://www.markbremmer.com/pages/TutMain.html Have you looked here?

23rd October 2007, 18:50	#4 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44 My Photos: (0)	> I'm afraid my IK tutorials are basic as well since that's the target audience. Is that true of the ones I'd pay for as well as the free ones (which I've seen)? A bit 'o context here. What drove me to posting this thread was a problem I'm having here: http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html Quick if not completely accurate analogy: I'm kind of animating an octopus where some of the tentacles have forks at the end. It's really a neuron, but you get the idea. > Honestly, it's not that hard to apply information from any other program into Carrara. I have no doubt that's true up to a point, and I'm hoping what I'm trying to do falls into the category of needs that are common enough that they can be addressed by most products, though perhaps in different ways. But there is so much that I don't know about the nuts and bolts of any program and how things can be combined that I'm having difficulty trying to determine what, if anything, I can do to help myself. For example: I think it was the robot arm tutorial where I saw someone specifying using ball joints in their IK rig. I discovered though experimentation that the rig didn't work unless I specified ball joints. So I looked at "canned" IK created using the Carrara tool, expecting that the joints would have the ball joint modifier applied automagically by the IK tool. They didn't - they were unadorned, and yet they worked just fine. So there's at least one rule I don't understand. Another example is the Maya spine IK; I have absolutely no idea how they do that and didn't understand some of the steps needed to set it up, so I wouldn't be able to map that on anything in Carrara. I don't know enough to guess whether there is a different set of rules than for regular IK, or if it could have been done with existing primitives and all they did was automate some of the steps. Tutorials for me are kind of hit or miss. I've read them in many different disciplines (CG, software development, sculpting, and a few others) and a common thing is that most don't say why some things are done, just that they are done. Sometimes omissions like that are for brevity, sometimes because the audience is expected to know certain things, and sometimes because the people writing the tutorials aren't good teachers. The difficult thing is that the omissions tend to be critical to the process and you need to understand them in order take that information and apply it to different situations. Someone must know how all the parts interact and when certain features are desirable. Certainly the developers at Carrara would, but the manuals just barely skim the surface. Hence my plea for help.

24th October 2007, 01:50	#5 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44 My Photos: (0)	Figuring this stuff out is apparently a challenge regardless of the toolset. Here are a couple of threads in other forums where people are dutifully Googling for tutorials, reading manuals, and so on, and yet still coming up blank or confused: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...ight=kinematic http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...ight=kinematic Again, I would seriously appreciate any suggestions. - Tell me to buy a particular book. Your book, whoever you are, if you happened to write a good one! - Or maybe I should subscribe to some site so I can buy permium service things. - I'd pay for access to Mark Bremmer's tutorials, but he sez his are too basic. My Maya experience is 3 years old and under 5.0 PLE, so much of what I know is, um, stale at best. All I have to work with right now is Carrara. We have a copy of Maya for the film, but I'm licensed only for Carrara. The fate of an independent film is at stake! Ok, it's not that bad, but we really want this to look as good as the non-CG stuff.

24th October 2007, 02:38	#6 (permalink)
Grendel Moderator Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 1,172 My Photos: (25) Images: 23	DaveH - Was it my robot arm thing you looked at? Are you using the same technique with helper objects Do I get this right that you only want the bending to occur in one direction everytime? If so did you use ball joints for the costraints? Did you set up the motion as limited more on on axis than the other(eg. more on the positive X than the negative X to prevent the tendril from bending the wrong way)

24th October 2007, 04:54	#7 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44 My Photos: (0)	Grendel - thanks for responding! > DaveH - Was it my robot arm thing you looked at? Yup! This thread was involved: http://forums.polyloop.net/3d-work-p...-tuf-chic.html as was this thread: http://forums.polyloop.net/3d-work-p...rrara-5-a.html Though I relied more on the former. > Are you using the same technique with helper objects I believe so. I have a helper at the end of each IK section. Check out this thread if you haven't already - there's a shot of the thing with rig: http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html You can see that I've chained several IK sections together. Each locator represents an IK target similar to what's in your robot arm example. > Do I get this right that you only want the bending to occur in one direction everytime? Not really, but if I had to I could accept that. There are a couple of places where I would have liked it to bend one way then cross the center and bend the other way, but I've given up on that. Mostly I just want it to bend consistently. I remember from Maya that the joints in the chain needed to be slightly bent to tell the IK creation tool which way to do the initial bend. But that was for the kind of IK you'd use on a limb rather than a spine IK for a tendril. > If so did you use ball joints for the constraints? I did use ball joints, but they're set at +-90 degrees on each axis. My current frustration is that the IK solution displayed in the animating window is not the same as what it chooses to render - it chooses to bend the other direction sometimes. I found that one big reason that my renders were not being approved by the director was because he was seeing something different from what I was animating.

24th October 2007, 12:24	#8 (permalink)
Grendel Moderator Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 1,172 My Photos: (25) Images: 23	+-90 seems like allot of range of motion. A spine in a vertebrate would not rotate that much for each bone. In a neuron I don't know but it would probably be more pleasing to the eye not to allow the tendril to bend at a right angle at any one location and allow a smoother silhoutte but whateve the director wants. On thing you can do is to bias which way the direction of bend is occuring by setting one direction to say +45 and the other to -90. It would then favor movement in the larger range of motion axis. So you can scrub the timeline and it looks one way when you render just a frame and the batch render renders something else? Now that's just plain odd, no really good answer for that one. I'll wip up a similar neuron thing and post it.

25th October 2007, 01:52	#13 (permalink)
three3dguy Ray Harryhausen Maddness Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 45 My Photos: (0)	NOooo... I meant to place that in this thread can you please checkout the info at the above link and thank you.

25th October 2007, 18:06	#14 (permalink)
Grendel Moderator Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 1,172 My Photos: (25) Images: 23	DaveH - I've tried to get ahold of the associatedFX site for the Driven plug-in but no reply. I don't know if he is still pursuing the plug-in or not. three3dguy - Start a new thread with your morph problem that way it is easier for everyone to learn from the problem your having.

25th October 2007, 21:19	#15 (permalink)
Couerl Polygurbs Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Denver Posts: 1,287 My Photos: (0) Images: 6	Well, I just rendered it and I'm not exactly sure what your problem is, I saw on the other thread that you had one chain bending the wrong way or something but am not sure which chain it is/was.. It's too bad you don't have C6 because I think that using NLA on this might ease some of your woes. To me anyway, this model has a lot of bones, perhaps more than are needed for the relatively simple movement in the animation. I haven't looked yet really but there can also be some weight painting issues that might make one tendril go out of whack in respect to others. Definately ambitious work and I doubt you'll find anything more complex as far as tuts go..

26th October 2007, 06:03	#18 (permalink)
DaveH Spline Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 44 My Photos: (0)	@Couerl The arm that's misbehaving in the screen shots is prefixed with a10 in the bones. There could very well be more bones than absolutely needed, but even then is there some way to coax them into behaving a certain way? Grendel's comment about tweaking ball joint axis restrictions was interesting ("It would then favor movement in the larger range of motion axis"), but that sounds like there's still some room for the solver to have a mind of its own and thwart the intentions of the animator. I'd just like to tell the thing "bend this way" and be done with it. Trying Grendel's suggestion of limiting an axis, I adjusted one of the ball joint axes to be limited in one direction but I couldn't get the setting to "stick". I set the scrubber to 0 seconds to get my reference pose, adjusted the Y axis limit on one side from +90 to +10. I tried setting a key frame and I tried saving the file, but both times it kicked back into the full +90 limit position. What must I do to get Carrara to accept the setting?

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26th October 2007, 06:20	#19 (permalink)
Couerl Polygurbs Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Denver Posts: 1,287 My Photos: (0) Images: 6	Um... Well, with IK sometimes for very organic and complex forms only some of the bones in the chain may need to be constrained. Some could be free of IK like the outer ones and leave IK up to maybe 1/3rd the length of each tendril with limited ball joints like Grendel suggested. That would at least help you be able to set it up or make it turn whatever way you wanted without it wrapping up like a pretzel. All that said, this looks like a perfect candidate for NLA testing because you could make each tendril it's own animation group and animate it independantly of all the others and then blend it all together without any of the "keyframe crunch" that you get otherwise. Carrara can interpolate the NLA without it looking like a mime doing the robot if you know what I mean. That's a job for C6 though, well worth the upgrade for stuff like this..

26th October 2007, 07:00	#20 (permalink)
Wesgraphics Cube Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 71 My Photos: (0)	Is this a mechanical or organic object? Just wondering, because it makes a difference. I saw the word tendril in there, so I'm assuming organic? If you ever looked at an octopus arm or a jellyfish they move in smooth waveform. Robots move more linearly with set pivot or rotate points. Just trying to guess what is being discussed here without it ever being said.