Helgard opened this issue on Mar 25, 2005 ยท 17 posts
williamsheil posted Fri, 25 March 2005 at 4:40 PM
I tend to the opinion that it's a bad idea to lock the head to a look direction, it should really be a combination of head, neck, eye and to some degree chest and upper body movement to appear natural. Plus the "Point at" function is absolute, you cannot move the without also keyframing the "Point at" parameter which ends up defeating the purpose of the automation somewhat. Plus in this case the hands and steering wheel shouild also turn automatically so at best its only a partial solution. Maybe you consider another solution: assuming the car model is set up as a figure, create a (non-geometry) bone structure for the upper body in the driver's seat with standard body part names and then conform the driver figure to the car. You can then use ERC for the phantom body parts to animate the conformed driver figure, splitting the twist between several parts. Also you should be able to set ERC for the steering wheel rotation and even set some controller dials on the car body to push the gas pedal, check mirrors etc. I've never tried this and there may be problems with origins etc. but it could be worth experimenting with. Different base figure may need different cr2's but at least the geometries and maps can be re-used. Why does the neck have seperate controls on Poser models? Not neccesary at all. Wel actually it is necesssary, not for the twistinghead turning operation, but the action of thrusting the head forward does require a double jointed bend between the shoulder and head. Bill