Inverse Kinetics Constraints (long over due improvement)

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Sun Jul 11, 2010 8:13 pm

The bone tools have been great however the method of locking the bones to replicate Inverse Kinetics has been difficult/frustrating to get good results out of.

Please add the real Inverse Kinetic system to work with the bones.

-ray

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Sun Jul 11, 2010 9:07 pm

I know bone locking should be improved*, but check this thread, it has some tips to tame it. It works fine for me.
viewtopic.php?t=11457

*Actually some time ago I discovered an amazing way to lock bones. It would be a dream to see it well implemented on AS some day viewtopic.php?p=82520

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Mon Jul 12, 2010 2:51 am

thanks selgin.

I've actually read and learned a lot from your helpful posts and saw your bone locking trick a while back. I just figured I'd request IK since it has been around in other programs for so long.

crsP · Post by **crsP** » Sun Jul 18, 2010 11:47 am

Inverse Kinematics is present in Anime Studio, and has been even since being Moho. You're confused as to what IK is. Briefly, Forward Kinematics is the movement [kinematics] along the hierarchy, going from parent to child. So you move the parent and all the children in the chain moves with it, but any above do not. In Inverse Kinematics, the movement is inverted up the chain. So you can move a child and the movement travels up the chain. For example moving a character's toe will move the entire hierarchy of the leg.

Sounds like what you really want are goals and targets. These come under constraints, so you're probably best requesting an expansion to the constraints options in AS. Your request for IK in AS will most likely be ignored, especially if you keep insisting that AS does not do IK. Then Hey Vern will ban you from his forum.

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Sun Jul 18, 2010 4:15 pm

crsP wrote:Then Hey Vern will ban you from his forum.

...
It's not Heyvern's forum. He is just the most active moderator (and we need more moderators, most of them don't even post on forum for years).
And Vern is not a crazy guy who is banning people all the time. Actually, I think even Mkelley and Synth haven't been banned of the forum, if you are thinking on them and their forum. A couple of their posts have been erased because its bad tone and violation of the new forum rules, which you can read and see they are not horrible, just a couple coexistence rules.
Personally, I like more a positive and respectful on critic forum, when people starts to say something or someone is just stupid I prefer to stop reading. That new forum have became and eternal Mkelley monologue about how everything is stupid but him. That is sad, Synth and Mkelley used to have great ideas and been very supportive, great scripters too, but since that forum is working I haven't seen anything good from there. Just that Mkelley freedom of speech monologue party.
Now, fractureday just made a mistake of concepts, that is not even close to be motive for banning.

PD: If you weren't thinking about Mkelley and Synth, please just forget my works

neeters_guy · Post by **neeters_guy** » Mon Jul 19, 2010 8:48 pm

Even after a year, there are folks here who don't know about the "new" forum:

Animators Forum

It's a smaller forum, but there's actually quite a lot of wonderful stuff there and people want to help. (As in this forum, you are free to ignore the editorializing.)

Yeah, ASP does have IK as mentioned before. I like it because it's easy, unlike rigging a 3D model (I've rigged models in Lightwave and it takes hours).

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Jul 19, 2010 10:07 pm

I've NEVER banned ANY legitimate forum member ever. The only thing I have ever done as moderator is delete SPAMMERS, remove spam and move posts in the wrong section. On very rare occasions (twice) I have deleted threads that were purely hate filled flames and name calling with no relevance to animation of any type. I have done this at most twice, and only because it was pure vile nonsense with no place here.

Somehow this urban legend of me banning and deleting posts got started back during the version 6 launch. A handful of extremely vocal, hypocritical individuals decided only THEY could speak their minds about what was WRONG with AS and any dissenters or moderators who were trying to keep some order were "stiffing free speech" and "working for the man".

I have not, and will not ever ban or delete or shut down ANY relevant discussion regarding Anime Studio for or against. The only time I have done any such thing is when there is absolutely ZERO discussion of Anime Studio and ONLY attacks and name calling.

-vern

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 9:56 am

Me thinks someone poked vern is a sensitive spot

Getting banned here is actually quite hard. Mike (and possibly Sarina) are the only ones with the ban hammer. The rest of us mods are tasked with keeping the place working, having access only to post related tools.

Currently we are faced with an avalanche of "How to" comments in the General chatter topic area: It's understandable with the release of the new version but many of the comments should have been placed in How do I, Bugs or future requests. The problem is, if we move a post to the right area, people then think their treasured contribution has been deleted and hence Vern gets blamed.

Now the new release is "getting old", we (the mods) will have to start guiding posts to the right places again.

Rhoel

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 11:17 pm

crsP,
I see the mistake I made that has caused some confusion. An "IK Handle" is what is needed. I worked with Maya for several years and we always called it simply IK.

I'll expand on this.
When a person walks the leg swings from the hip. So it makes sense that the feet would swing with it. However When the foot is on solid ground weight is placed on the the foot and the hip is actually being (inversely) moved forward by the foot. Which is basically what locking the feet in place is emulating.

We need an IK handle that we could tag for example: from the hip joint to the ankle joint to inform the computer not to move the ankle or anything below it, unless it has been specifically selected and moved or the hip has moved beyond the normal length of the leg, then the foot can move beyond but act as if a wire is pulling it toward it's original position.

This would also prevent the difficult problem with the feet being locked and unlocked. Because the leg is moving the rotation of the joints are changing. The Lock on the feet ignore this. But once you unlock the feet you get a distorted angle that you have to spend time tweaking. And this means more key frames jumbled up together.

MAYA's IK (handles)
Near the end of this video (2:00 minute mark) the guy will briefly move the hip bone. You will see that the foot does not move when the hip is dragged around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAhykVKTY74

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 12:08 am

neeters_guy wrote:Even after a year, there are folks here who don't know about the "new" forum:

Animators Forum

It's a smaller forum, but there's actually quite a lot of wonderful stuff there and people want to help. (As in this forum, you are free to ignore the editorializing.)

I knew about it. But haven't really checked it out. If it's all related to Anime Studio, I just prefer this forum. I don't like forum hopping for the same software. But that's just me.

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 3:39 am

fracturedray wrote:MAYA's IK (handles)
Near the end of this video (2:00 minute mark) the guy will briefly move the hip bone. You will see that the foot does not move when the hip is dragged around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAhykVKTY74

Just looking for getting that we discovered the flexible bone locking technique posted above. It's very far to be as useful as it would be as implemented as a native feature, but works fine in certain occasions.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 4:53 am

I know this is a long shot but... a better solution than "built in IK/FK" would be "better" and more bone constraints.

Case in point; Animation Master. Animation Master is a 3D program with bones almost identical to Anime Studio. It has no "IK" to speak of. Out of the box it is very much like Anime Studio. Without doing anything with bones Animation Master doesn't do anything. Bones are just bones and have to be animated individually by hand.

However Animation Master has a TON of bone constraints. As a result people have built amazing "rigs" from scratch that not only have IK but also the ability to turn it on and off, switch betwen IK and FK, add squetch etc etc, do all kinds of things. Every "year" there is a new "better" rig someone designed for characters. The developers of Animation Master have nothing to do with these rigs and probably wouldn't be able to create them anyway. Some are built by groups of people sharing their knowledge.

What is needed in Anime Studio is more constraints that deal with IK/FK controls. For example an "aim at" constraint with "scale to reach" and also scale AND translation limits the same as angle limits. The ability to turn constraints on and off with keys. With some of these features character rigs could be created that would work perfectly for "locking" bones properly.

I feel that putting that type of thing in to the application is that it won't please everyone. by giving us a few simple tools we can build our own rigs for IK/FK.

------------------------

p.s. I created a script for bone aiming a while back for body rigs that I have been working with again. I made some improvements and it works great and has the potential for perfect foot bone locking for walk cycles. I need to post some samples. This of course is a layer script. If we had an "aim bone" constraint than this type of rigging could be done natively in Anime Studio.

-vern

crsP · Post by **crsP** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 1:37 pm

No Selgin, I wasn't even thinking about those dudes. Just kidding around, which I thought would be apparent from my statement that it was Hey Vern's forum, which quite obviously it is not. The main intention was to point out the misconception of AS's IK and show that he in fact wanted constraints rather than IK. What is the chance of the developer looking into a thread requesting IK, when he knows his app already has it implemented? Although I have no real vested interest in the function, I see no reason to being against it, and therefore just offered some information so the original poster may request the feature he wants.

Hey Vern, constraints was the point of my post. You should not have concentrated on my joke as much as the information I provided, then you could see that. Don't ban me.

fracturedray · Post by **fracturedray** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 8:15 pm

(snicker) I adjusted the title so maybe it will help grab the developers eyes.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 9:32 pm

crsP wrote:Hey Vern, constraints was the point of my post. You should not have concentrated on my joke as much as the information I provided, then you could see that. Don't ban me.

Sorry for any misunderstanding. Didn't know it was a joke.

p.s. As long as you don't mention pharmaceuticals or cheap handbags there is no danger of banning... from me anyway.

-vern