• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Mocca align tool

  Posted by Alan Lacey on November 3, 2009 at 9:35 am

  I’m working my way through Maxon’s character rigging tutorial and have a question about the align tool.

  This is obviously important but the tutorial brushes over exactly what it does and how it’s used. R11.5 help doesn’t give any either.

  It’s applied to a bone object and presumably aligns the bone local axis but to what?

  Also in it’s use: at one stage in the tutorial the tool’s selected and then applied to a series of bones in a heirarchy whereas later on the tool is selected each time before it’s applied.

  I’d really like to get to the bottom of this.

  Thanks

  Alan

  FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
  FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
  G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

  Alan Lacey replied 16 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Cactus Dan

  November 8, 2009 at 4:00 pm

  Howdy,

  A Joint’s Z axis must be aligned to the next joint down in the chain (its child joint) before applying IK to the joint chain. This is what the Align tool does.

  The reason for this is because of the internal rotation order of Cinema 4D, which makes the Z axis the perfect twist axis. Animating an object’s rotation around the Z axis gives you stable interpolation between keys. If you’ve ever tried to animate an object rotating around any other axis than the Z axis, while the object is not originally oriented to the world 0,0,0, then you’ve probably experienced wobbly rotation interpolation between the keys.

  If you’re not familiar with my rigging tutorials, you can check them out here:
  https://www.c4dportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4374

  The tutorials are based on using my rigging plugins, but there are a lot of explanations of why things are done a certain way which can be applied, no matter what tools are used or what software application is used.

  Adios,
  Cactus Dan

  Cinema 4D R10 XL Bundle, BodyPaint, Dynamics
  http://www.cactus3d.com
  http://www.cactus3d.com/Plugins.html
• 

  Alan Lacey

  November 9, 2009 at 3:18 pm

  Thanks a lot for this Cactus, that makes sense.

  I’ll check out your tutorials

  Alan

  FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
  FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
  G5,MBP,Vista64,XP
• 

  Alan Lacey

  November 11, 2009 at 4:12 pm

  Really useful tutorials Cactus, great of you to make them available freely and I’m learning a great deal.

  Alan

  FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
  FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
  G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

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