Move node past thresh hold?

[cmramlow]

I saw this posted in discord, but with no answer and I too keep encountering issues where I want to bend a head/arm/hand/leg etc to a humanly normal position but in VAM it appears to be impossible, the hand or whatever keeps snapping back or resetting and refuses to cooperate.

One example is I wanted a female atom to take her hand to a certain area on her body while on her knees and the hand just kept refusing to be placed without tremendous effort, sometimes wont go at all, and as mentioned before, these arent extreme poses, just normal easily feasible reaches any real person can do and VAM should allow it but doesnt seem to even though I have none of the nodes I'm trying to move are locked or held; they're all set to either comply or in some cases off just to see if I can drag it into placement.

Is there something I can do with the springs or other settings to help facilitate better cooperation with head and appendage placement? I've tried to manipulate the spring and damper settings but dont know what I'm doing and never see any improvement and wonder if anyone can please advise on this.

 

[TToby]

Hi, as you may know, the VaM figures have an underlying "skeleton" where one joint is affected by many others like in real-life, have limits and thresholds. Each joint not only has its position in 3d space, but also an angle and physics tension. So if you want to turn the hand, for instance, you have to control the elbow and the shoulder joint, too. So, posing a joint is sometimes a bit more complicated than only dragging one of the joints around. I bet you allready know this. So if you want to pose the hand, to keep with the example, and you switch off the shoulder and elbow joints, the wrist joint can't keep the position like one might think and is dragged away. Think of a person who is fainting. You could attach her hand in place, but that wouldn't look natural.
Switching off a joint means you have no control. "Comply" is something between off and on, a compromise for some kinds of movement.
You can edit all those many joint physics settings, but those will take effect mainly in the physics mode. For normal usage, you most of the time don't need most of those settings. You can alter the tension by moving the joint node a bit(!) further away, but don't overdo that, or you get some physics shaking.
You have to keep in mind that there are different kinds of usage. For movement you will need some other compromises like you would have for static poses:
If you want to statically place the hand on the knee, you would maybe like to enable all joints at the arm and pose each of them. For simple moving the hand with a force atom, for instance, you would like to disable (or set comply) most of the joints and only drag the wrist joints around. The latter one would not be as controlled or looks as natural, only a compromise for easy use. To move the arm more natural, you would have to control each joint seperately, like it is done with animations, where the position and angle of each joint is recorded.

To see some good example for natural looking poses, you maybe want to have a look at KLPHGZ's great and free pose packs.

 

[cmramlow]

Great info once again TToby, thank you.