Sunday, March 11, 2012
Morpheus Joint Rotation
So I just realized that I have rotation on some of my joints. I figured out that when I rotated the placement control it rotates my feet and root joint, changing my Z axis. Are you not supposed to rotate the placement control? I can fix the problem by re-referencing the rig and copying the anim, but I have to rotate him in place using the root and feet controls, which means that they have intial keys. Thoughts?
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Actually that solution didn't work. Even if I just rotate the feet or root controls, the move tool rotates are messed up.
ReplyDeleteyea you shouldn't key the placement control at all. just move the root and feet.
ReplyDeleteSo if I rotate the IK foot controller using the normal gimble control it changes the movement control axis. I can achieve the same movement using the foot controls, which is fine I suppose, but the rotation on the IK feet isn't locked and it's a serious problem if you rotate the feet on accident.
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteYou can definitely move the placement control to get the initial or average position for your character in the scene before continuing with the poses. You won't want to animate the placement control moving over the course of your scene, but it is a good idea to get the character's orientation set with the placement control. For instance, if Bob is always facing, let's say, South, and Tom is facing North looking back at him for most of the piece, it may be a good idea to rotate the placement control to initially face them toward each other. The benefit of this is that the positive z axis for all the controls will be forward as far as the characters are each concerned. This is also better for avoiding Gimbal lock because the characters root controls rotations are more or less zeroed out in the poses they spend the most time in. If I'm understanding what you said in your initial post, you are noticing that when you rotate the placement 90 degrees in y you see that the z axis is now pointing where the x axis was. This is normal and what you want. You would typically want the z axis pointing forward. This consistency helps an animator work quickly in the graph editor. (y is always up, x to the side, positive is out negative is in, etc.)
Bottom line for everyone is that you want to use the placement control to position and rotate the character into the position and orientation they will spend most of the shot in.
Hope that helps!
~Joe