Benjamin Graham
Forum Replies Created
-
Just wanted to say this work great and I’ve been using it extensively.
-
Oh there’s another important reason I used the duik tools. Dans expression is great but only works on cutout style stuff so to make it work on puppet tools as I’ve been needing to do I’d basically have to create a bunch of solids aligned to each puppet pin and then setup the ik chain on the solids and then connect the puppet pins to the solids. Which, wouldn’t you know it, is exactly what the duik toolset does. And I get to type and click less, which always makes me happy.
-
For the record. What I’d do here at least in 3d (honestly in 3d I’d probably do more but in 2d simple is good) is simply setup the arms as usual with the hands as the end of the ik chain and then parent the ik handles under the rifle and then parent the rifle to the root control of the character. Now just animate the rifle movement and as you move his root around (you decide – hips or masterControl) the gun moves with him so if he’s walking the gun follows along. a bit of vertical movement is okay but you may need to isolate the gun so it moves around in x but not in y or something if it looks weird although chances are good that a straight parent under the root is all you need.
Hope this is helpful and that I’ve properly understood your question.
-
Not to take away from Dans fantastic work on the ik stuff but have you seen https://www.duduf.com/ressources/duik/en/index.html. I found it much simpler to work with and more robust (which is important in character setup). I’ve found the other things in this little toolkit useful too. I’d love to pay for it but I don’t have a paypal account. Should do in the coming months and then I totally will. Dans expression is a really good learning resource though I just found the Duik tools a little less intimidating to be honest. It’s also a bit easier to debug (another biggie in character setup). Still I’m in awe of Dans understanding of the mathematics that goes into ik, and his tireless dedication to providing useful learning examples for the less mathematically inclined is fantastic.
Benjamin. -
Works perfectly. Thanks so much. And also thanks so much for your contributions on motionscript.com they have been helpful and inspirational.
Thanks. -
And for the record a nifty way to connect objects between comps is actually quite useful to me.
-
Hi. I feared it might come to this. I’m amazed how fast you churned out all this info. Thanks so much for your help. Just a quick question. Is toon boom designed for this? Yes it does cutout like nobody’s business but I’ve yet to figure out an equavalent for puppet tools so I can’t achieve the nice deformations that I can get in AE. Is there a way to nicely deform things without having to actually cell animate or create a whole bunch of seperates (which is kind of the smae thing, just in advance of the fact)? I’ve finally just figured out a workflow that I think works which means I (or whoever else) never need to scale the actual character. I’m trying to make other peoples lives easier but I think this is one occasion where it just isn’t feasible.
Thanks again.
-
Hi Chris.
Yup just opened your file and yeah I’m afraid I think we missed each other. I’m not great at explaining these sorts of things but yes what should happen is the precomp should scale up as the master control is scaled and the triangle should fit exactly to it’s control points without losing volume, if the controls are merely stretched apart that loss of volume is correct and to be expected but when you scale the master control it should scale up the precomp to match the new positions of the control points. Like I said earlier, its actually pretty hard to explain.
-
Hi. Thanks so much for the advice. I’ll try and give a more detailed description of things. I spent most of Thursday fighting with this and am coming to the conclusion that it isn’t possible but if you still would like to apply your mind to it I’m including a script that might help describe the problem better.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ma79dih776pymvi/scale_test_anim.aep
Sorry about the dodgy animation, and it’s a really simple little test scene because of obvious NDA issues. I promise the characters we’re working on are far better looking than this rather plain triangle.
Basically what should be happening is that the geometry scales up but because of the way puppet tools works it simply stretches the geometry. But if you make the char comp a child of the master control you end up with double transformations.
I even hooked up the position of the controls rather than the anchor point after zeroing those controls out in both comps then I hooked up the control solids to the character solids and deactivated the expressions on the character solids. I then unparented them in the control comp and scaled up the master control. The control solids followed and then I froze them again. And switched the “polarity” of the expressions so that the control comp was in charge again. This kind of works but as you move the controls it becomes obvious that it’s not a perfect 1 to 1 relationship. For failry obvious if tricky to explain reasons.
Does this explain it better? If you have time to spare to look at this I’d really appreciate it. There’s a debate as to whether we should be looking at toonboom which seems really cool but doesn’t seem to offer anything I can’t do in AE with a little bit of ingenuity. The one swing vote would be something like puppet tools. For character work it really is great, and it’s just this scaling issue thats holding me back.
Benjamin.
-
Hi. This does exactly what I asked thanks. But the problems continue. I’m not even sure how to describe this but suffice to say puppet tools is tricky when it comes to scaling of any sort.