Animation help

[virtamater]

I've started to figure out animating a bit.

Thanks in advance!

I made some joint presets that I thought would help my char kick by rotating the knee to extend her feet. Moving the feet this way only seemed to work if the feet and toes were off.. because they're off tho, the position of the feet doesn't seem to be saved in the timeline..
So I went back and tried to turn the foot on in the position for the moment on the timeline it would have been at if it was on the whole time.. this didn't do much either.


jump kick experiment... I'm wondering about using synergy with this as a starting pose, the kick extensions done with synergy?

walkings fun.. lol

 

[Femcore]

I am not sure what you mean with joint presets, but here is what I see:
In your second video, it seems like the feet are moving because the knees are animated. The feet themself are not on (red nodes) and are not moved by timeline.
Your toes are also red and you don't even have their controls in the timeline. But you don't need to add them. You already have controls for some red nodes there, which you don't need, if you don't turn them on by some trigger on the timeline (which might be a bit much if you just get started with animating and timeline).

Maybe try to start simple? Only turn on either the foot or the knee and only add that one control to the timeline, nothing else, and just animate that to make the kick ... and when you know what is going on and how it works, then you can go from there.

By the way: If you are like me and want a larger UI on your 4k monitor:

SallyUIscale4K - Plugins + Scripts -

This is intended for high resolution 1440p+ 3840x2160+ monitors only! Some 1440p and ultrawide resolutions are now supported. TLDR: Make the UI scale usable for 4K+. allow resolution change 'on the fly' without VAM restart scale the bottom left...

hub.virtamate.com

And 500 MB for a two minute video is a bit much (it took me 10 minutes to download). We don't need the 4k for that, right?

 

[virtamater]

Hi, My monitor is an 80+ inch flat screen tv lol. The UI's plenty large on this. That's why the vids 4k lol

I'll have to see which settings allows my feet to follow knee rotation as it seemed easier to move the legs around for kicking that way.

I forgot the parenting arrangement I had on her.

I'll change the playback resolution before I post a new video. There are a few things I noticed since this original post, I'm not sure how to describe.

I've made a few more idles and started a flip /kick.
There's something that moves her around at the start of each frame that I'd like to turn off.
Not sure how else to describe that, so a shorter vid would help.

 

[Femcore]

Just turn the feet off and then animate only the knee. That should be enough for only doing that kick?

If you use obs for recording, you can set the output resolution different than the native one. You find it at settings/video.

 

[hazmhox]

- Always have your main nodes enabled for your animations. Save the pose.
- Forgot one node? Go back to first frame, enable your node. Save the pose. Update the anim.

Beyond technical aspects, you should look at body mechanics references. (there are hundreds of them on YT) It will help you:

1. Hints on how to animate
2. Hints on what are the important nodes to have on

 

[virtamater]

Thanks! I record with the NVIDIA Overlay..It's clunky lol. I check out the links you provided
Toggling the controllers on/off when needed seems like a win lol

Thanks again!

 

[Origin69]

Check out my Mileena's return scene. That has a long martial arts display with a lot of kicks timed to the music. Having the knees feet and toes on were the only way for me to get realistic snappy kicks, with the knee moving into each position first and the foot and toes moving from cocked to extension in 0.1sec smooth (local) key-frames. The whole scene is basically one long animation, but if you select one of the feet as the target in timeline, you can skip through the key-frames to see the timing of different motions.

 

[virtamater]

Thanks! I'll check that out..

Something I've also noticed..
After I make a frame pose.. when I move on to a new frame, it also moves the model.. Is there a setting to keep the atom from moving
That's been making the movements jagged as I dont remember the exact position of the previous pose, when I move on to the new timestamp. the model has moved making any new movement pointless as the entire model is somewhere else wit regard to the previous segment/.

 

[Origin69]

Thanks! I'll check that out..

Something I've also noticed..
After I make a frame pose.. when I move on to a new frame, it also moves the model.. Is there a setting to keep the atom from moving
That's been making the movements jagged as I dont remember the exact position of the previous pose, when I move on to the new timestamp. the model has moved making any new movement pointless as the entire model is somewhere else wit regard to the previous segment/.

I like to copy key-frames on all of the major joints and paste them to the next key-frame position and then move them. I often have alot of key-frames that haven't actually moved, it's just handy to keep the model in place. It's anoying if you haven't moved something in a while and adding a new point means it slowly moves from one position to the other messing up the look of the animation you have done so far. If you find that this has happened, you can skip back to the previous keyframe and copy and paste it to just before the part you moved.
I often find it useful to add a second (clone) person atom with the collisions off and the same control nodes active (and change the skin colour to easily differentiate them.) That helps my visualize the pose I'm moving from and to. You can select the joints from the person you are animating and select align from scene to snap them to position with the clone, or you can save a pose on the clone and add it to the person.

 

[virtamater]

Cool! I'll implement those tricks Thanks for the advice all. I'll be back with updates .. in about a week

 

[Origin69]

Cool, look forward to it. Here's an example of what I do with the clone method to make poses and animate between them. Thanks for your love on the scene btw.

 

[virtamater]

I was hoping for some taco flavored Kesses from Hennifer too lol..
That's some kick ass kicking
This will be fun figuring this all out..
Peace!

 

[Origin69]

I was hoping for some taco flavored Kesses from Hennifer too lol..

shhhh