ARG based animations, trouble, tricks and some tutorials

[borchi_2b]

Hi guys,

 

I started this threat, cause right now I am animating parts in a 6 DOF cockpit.

I figured that there are alot of things in the arg based animation, that I did not think of before.

 

For me, I figured, that I cannot access curves in the curve editor.

I figured, cause I did come up with a work around for a chain ainmation in DCS, cause I had to animate a little key in our cockpit, thats fixed to the panel with a little wire or something like that and the key has 3 stages, so the wire would move from stage to stage as an animation.

 

I made that with 1 set of 2 bonechains. 1 ik chain and a twin of the ik chain, since ik chains do not work in dcs.

to explain it here in a fast and simple way.

I made the animation first with the ik chain with a certain ammount of keys.

As soon this animation was final, I made the next step and assigned the controller to the 2nd bonechain and aligned the bones to its twin for each step i preanimated.

This was a very boring workaround and time consuming, but here is the video of the work

 

 

this videolink shows the key and its wire, and I used it to present it to the team.

 

so sorry if you expect to see something else then just the animation :-)

 

I hope I started a nice threat here, where we can show some of our tricks that help others out there.

If there are any questions to this, feel free to ask, I try to answer as soon as possible and as clearly in description as possible.

 

cheers

POLYCHOP sven

Edited November 25, 2014 by borchi_2b

[Cobra847]

Hi guys,

 

I started this threat, cause right now I am animating parts in a 6 DOF cockpit.

I figured that there are alot of things in the arg based animation, that I did not think of before.

 

For me, I figured, that I cannot access curves in the curve editor.

I figured, cause I did come up with a work around for a chain ainmation in DCS, cause I had to animate a little key in our cockpit, thats fixed to the panel with a little wire or something like that and the key has 3 stages, so the wire would move from stage to stage as an animation.

 

I made that with 1 set of 2 bonechains. 1 ik chain and a twin of the ik chain, since ik chains do not work in dcs.

to explain it here in a fast and simple way.

I made the animation first with the ik chain with a certain ammount of keys.

As soon this animation was final, I made the next step and assigned the controller to the 2nd bonechain and aligned the bones to its twin for each step i preanimated.

This was a very boring workaround and time consuming, but here is the video of the work

 

 

this videolink shows the key and its wire, and I used it to present it to the team.

 

so sorry if you expect to see something else then just the animation :-)

 

I hope I started a nice threat here, where we can show some of our tricks that help others out there.

If there are any questions to this, feel free to ask, I try to answer as soon as possible and as clearly in description as possible.

 

cheers

POLYCHOP sven

 

Very nice.

 

And easier method is to collapse a controller, which should convert the animation into euler xyz keyframes. This does not always work, however.

[borchi_2b]

ok,

never collapsed an ik controller. have to check that out

[borchi_2b]

@cobra847:

 

I looked through everything so far, but right now I have to be honest and admit, that I am puzzled about your post. Why, simple as that, cause the only collapse function I know of, can be applied in the modifier stack and I cannot assign IK solver via the modifier stack, or am I missiing something.

 

Normaly I animate for films and I did argumentation animations the last time in 2010, so it has been awile and in animationfilms I never needed to collapse an IK chain in any Rigg I made, so this is something I have never done before.

 

Can you maybe explain this a bit closer, cause if there is a functioning way of handeling this the way you speak about, it would give back animations that look like curvebehaviors, cause what is totally messed up in the arrg plugin, you cannot access any curves and adjust that, but well, some good cobinations of a couple woorkarounds might do the trick.

 

Why I am so curious about the stuff you wrote, cause I still have 2 high detail pilots I made for our project, which need thier animations, and since I concider myself a perfectionist, I want the animations to look as good as possible, like my colleagues to want that too.

 

So I hope we can share further informations about all this

 

cheers

 

Polychop Simulations Sven

[The_Fragger]

or maybe export your animation in *.FBX and re-import it. The whole range of the animation is then filled with keyframes

The orginal file should be backuped for doing additional changes.

[borchi_2b]

Well thats also a good idea, have not thought about it. if that works fine, i have the solution for all the wires and so on, plus a solution for the cables of your pilots and well the other pilots i am working on right now.

 

what i wonder about it, as soon there are so many keys, would that have some impact on the performance ingame, cause that are all numbers and calculations that need to be made.

[Chlebakus]

Hello,

This thdread is one of the few related, so I will post here. I have pretty annoying issue with using bones. Same as already mentioned here, 3ds Max crash during export to EDM when I use Skin modifier. I have working bounding box to include bones within animations. I assume you have more experiences in EDM exports and animations. I can provide any more info about it. There are many animations I can handle using basic rotation, but some of them would be nearly impossible without even simple bone chain.

 

It works in Max, but doesnt export. When I delete Skin modifier, export is possible (with error message that there are unused bones). Is there some rule in using envelopes or something?

Edited December 21, 2014 by Chlebakus

[BR55Sevas]

As I know IK not supports by ED`s plugins, you have to assign keys for each individual bone.

[Chlebakus]

If this is reply to my question, it is not the problem. I already figured out there is no use for IK, but it keeps crashing even when I in example need rotating or moving bone for object. I somewhat figured how to make some animations without bones. But I still wonder why this keeps crashing. It has something to do with Skin modifier.

[storm363]

If this is reply to my question, it is not the problem. I already figured out there is no use for IK, but it keeps crashing even when I in example need rotating or moving bone for object. I somewhat figured how to make some animations without bones. But I still wonder why this keeps crashing. It has something to do with Skin modifier.

 

Have you tried to update your plugins?

 

UPD: Also, have you tried to create a new scene, create a shape and bones, apply the skin modifier and export it?

Edited December 22, 2014 by storm363

[Chlebakus]

I figured it out already. There was problem with wrong hierarchy. And, also I didnt know I must link parent bone to bounding box.