I have started this thread to discuss issues relating to the proposed update to Antonia for Wardrobe Wizard support, and how this may relate to the Walk Designer. Please note that this thread relates to a proposed new version of Antonia, not to the current "Antonia v1.0.0" version.

Is this only related to the Walk Designer? I am testing PuppetMaster Biped Support at the moment and would like to know if you recommend to post results here or in the "classic" Antonia thread (as far as you want to see the super-ugly results...).

Quote - Is this only related to the Walk Designer? I am testing PuppetMaster Biped Support at the moment and would like to know if you recommend to post results here or in the "classic" Antonia thread (as far as you want to see the super-ugly results...).

Yes I think this would be a good place to discuss those issues, as they are probably similar to the Walk Designer issues.

This would save cluttering up the "Antonia - Opinions?" thread with technical details that may only be of interest to a few.

SaintFox,

The dat files are from PuppetMaster, yes?

I don't have PuppetMaster, so probably can't help much. But it looks like you might have IK turned on for both hands and feet. If so, you might try turning IK off, as a first step.

Previously in the Antonia thread... :laugh:

Just for people who may know about Walk Designer, but not Antonia: the issue is that Antonia has a non-standard rig in the abdomen-hip region. In the current version, we have a hip actor which is at the root of the actor hierarchy and thus works pretty much like the hip in traditional Poser figures. We also have an actor hip2, which is a child of hip and the parent of the thigh actors. That hip2 actor takes up most of the figure's actual hip region.

Now in order to make Wardrobe Wizard support possible, we are planning to rename the current hip actor to waist and the current hip2 actor to hip. The hierarchy, however, will not be changed, because having a hip that can be posed independently of the rest of the body is immensely useful. So in summary, we'll end up with a figure that's rooted at the waist actor instead of the hip, which obviously causes a number of problems with software that assumes figures can be picked up and shoved around at the hip.

... and now the conclusion:

(well, hopefully!)

Well, interesting.  :blink:

Apparently they've changed the Walk Designer since I used it, back in the early P5 days.  In earlier versions, I recall being able to paste in pose files and have them show up in the designer.  This no longer seems to be true.  :sad:

But I'm not convinced that we need it.  Who has tested the Walk Designer so far, and what did they do?  Because I'm not seeing any oddities in the results.  If I select the correct Antonia .cr2 file as the "Figure Type", it correctly applies translations to the Waist actor and keyframes the Hip (former Hip2) with zero translations through the whole animation.

So it sort of looks like the WD can already handle Antonia, assuming you specify the Figure Type and don't just try to run the default.  I'll try again and make sure this wasn't some odd fluke result.  :unsure:

Cage,

Quote - Apparently they've changed the Walk Designer since I used it, back in the early P5 days.  In earlier versions, I recall being able to paste in pose files and have them show up in the designer.  This no longer seems to be true.

Oh bugger! I hope not. I'm using P6, and can still add new poses. But note that you have to restart Poser, before the WD will read in the new poses. That may be your problem. Please check that and report back.

I am sorry, I have absolutely no experience with the walk designer so far so I am afraid that I am not of any help here.

Quote - Oh buggar! I hope not. I'm using P6, and can still add new poses. But note that you have to restart Poser, before the WD will read in the new poses. That may be your problem. Please check that and report back.

I re-started Poser twice, but no dice.  :sad:  There's a set of the old P4 walk poses in the WD folder and they don't show up in the designer, either.  I don't see any kind of configuration file or setting I can tweak to try to get it to recognize the new files.  It does look to me like they must have changed something.

And... the results I'm seeing are the result of locking the translation on the Hip.  I keep forgetting about that.    With those limits removed, it bobs up and down.  :sad:

Yeh.  Sigh.  The hip moves improperly on Y if it doesn't have limits, but the figure moves like a robot if it does have them.  The best idea I have is still unlocking the Hip (to allow the WD to apply its posing to the figure) and then using a script to transfer its settings to the Waist.  Either that or use a pre-WW version of Antonia with the WD and creating poses which can be converted with the actor renaming process.

So... not a very technical thread at all.  :lol:  There don't seem to be many options, and they've all probably been hashed out in the main thread, anyway.

@SaintFox: Is Puppet Master the Poser add-on by... umm.  He's not Darth_Logice any longer.  Oh, dang.    Anyway, what's the format of the data files?

My personal solution so far is using Antonia (first final version) with puppet Master, tweak the poses and save them, the run the script and volià, here are Antonia-for-WW2-ready poses. No biggie IMHO as long as we can offer the first Antonia along with the renamer for use with Puppet Master. May the same thing work with the walk designer?

Excuse my ignorance, but googling "poser walk designer" I found some products by Nerd3D which supposedly introduce new walk cycles for the DAZ figures into Walk Designer. It seems to me that that's exactly what we would need to do: create a number walk cycles specifically designed for Antonia's rig and convince Walk Designer to use those. Now to find out how to do that kind of thing...

Yes, Cage, Puppet Master is the tool made by PhilC. He sold it to Smith Micro and they no longer offer any support on it, unfortunatly - and after the forum was closed when Smith Micro rebuilt Content Paradise (after buying this and Poser and whatnot from Efrontier) the situation is even worse. Back then you where able to discuss such things with other members and there was always one to help you or to pass you a dat-file.

The format of the dat-files is, well... dat You can open it with any text editor and it contains the names of the bodyparts and data:

waist    0.000000    0.381689    -0.028740    0.000000    0.407000    -0.022000
hip    0.000000    0.407000    -0.035000    0.000000    0.507000    -0.035000
abdomen    0.000000    0.449000    -0.035000    0.000000    0.549000    -0.035000

and so on.

And you have a text file that contains the joint rotation order in the form of

YZX    waist
YZX    hip
YZX    abdomen

and so on.

Quote - The best idea I have is still unlocking the Hip (to allow the WD to apply its posing to the figure) and then using a script to transfer its settings to the Waist.

That sounds at least worth a try. It would also solve some of the problems associated with applying poses from other figures, including previous versions of Antonia.

Quote - My personal solution so far is using Antonia (first final version) with puppet Master, tweak the poses and save them, the run the script and volià, here are Antonia-for-WW2-ready poses. No biggie IMHO as long as we can offer the first Antonia along with the renamer for use with Puppet Master. May the same thing work with the walk designer?

That's looking best to me, too.  The Walk Designer doesn't want to play nice.  :lol:

@Les:

Poser 8 can still import walk poses.  I was loading them into my P7 Runtime, which is still my main use Runtime.  :blushing:  No wonder they didn't show up.

Unfortunately once they do show up, they don't seem to make a difference.  The Hip actor still bobs on Y.

So, to quote a former employer of mine, "Sht!  Dmm*t!  It ain't gonna work!"  :sad:

Quote - Excuse my ignorance, but googling "poser walk designer" I found some products by Nerd3D which supposedly introduce new walk cycles for the DAZ figures into Walk Designer. It seems to me that that's exactly what we would need to do: create a number walk cycles specifically designed for Antonia's rig and convince Walk Designer to use those. Now to find out how to do that kind of thing...

That's what we were hoping to accomplish here.  :laugh:

A quick, very limited, uncontrolled, and haphazard test seems to show that the actor named "Hip" will still end up with undesirable translations on Y.

I kind of hope the test was wrong.

pardon my posting here but I am used to telling the walk designer in Poser what cr2 is being used before fiddling the walk parameters. It was my understanding that the walk designer used the cr2 to calculate the required angles for each figure.

Am I saying anything meaningful ? 

Quote - The format of the dat-files is, well... dat You can open it with any text editor and it contains the names of the bodyparts and data:
waist    0.000000    0.381689    -0.028740    0.000000    0.407000    -0.022000
hip    0.000000    0.407000    -0.035000    0.000000    0.507000    -0.035000
abdomen    0.000000    0.449000    -0.035000    0.000000    0.549000    -0.035000

and so on.

Those look like they're probably origin and endpoint listings for the actors.  Possibly if those are edited along with the names and rotation orders, the results will be better.  Or possibly not.  :lol:

Quote - > Quote - Excuse my ignorance, but googling "poser walk designer" I found some products by Nerd3D which supposedly introduce new walk cycles for the DAZ figures into Walk Designer. It seems to me that that's exactly what we would need to do: create a number walk cycles specifically designed for Antonia's rig and convince Walk Designer to use those. Now to find out how to do that kind of thing...

That's what we were hoping to accomplish here.  :laugh:

A quick, very limited, uncontrolled, and haphazard test seems to show that the actor named "Hip" will still end up with undesirable translations on Y.

I kind of hope the test was wrong.

I meant create walk cycles externally (and admittedly, I have no idea how). Everything Walk Designer now uses is designed for figures with the hip actor at the root, so it's not surprising that we get strange effects, and it does not seem likely that any amount of tweaking within Walk Designer will fix that.

But maybe I misunderstood what you've been testing. What's this thing about loading poses into Walk Designer? How is that done, and what is it supposed to accomplish?

If anyone had a nice non-video tutorial on advanced walk-designering in Poser handy, that would be very much appreciated.

Before we make ourself completely mad: How many people do actually use Puppet Master and Walk Designer? I can only speak for Puppet Master - whenever I mention it I get reactions like "Puppet What?!" by the majority and very few "I should try this as well...".

I think that both tools are something advanced users have and use while WW2 and the Crossdresser are pretty popular (especially as long as a figure is new and has few native clothes). So if the solution is to leave Antonia in this state each version may go along with a counterpart for users of these tools or people who want to try to use poses of other figures directly on her. Of course: Translating them to WW2-Antonia requires saving the poses and running the script.

Another solution would be to have a script that deals with clothes that come out of WW2 and rename their body-parts to work with Antonia "classic" (maybe this is more elegant?).

I made a walk blend with all the hip transforms all set to zero, to see if the WD added any. Unfortunately when I try to apply the blend in the WD, the slider keeps resetting to zoro. I have several other custom walk blends, and dontt have a problem with the slider resetting on any of those. I'm testing on the P4 man, so the figure is not the problem. No idea what's up with it. :sad:

I am sorry that I have to leave you at this stage. I just tried out the Walk designer but I am so not used to it that all I get is a kind of zombie-walk :blushing:

But as we want to go out in the afternoon and as it's already 5.40 am I have to get some sleep or I will fall asleep tomorrow regardless how load the crowd will be...

I am checking back as soon as possible and hope that we figure out a useful solution that makes everybody happy (I know how this sounds: Impossible...).

@odf: That's pretty much what I was proposing, before we moved to this new thread.  The Walk Designer poses do contain translation keyframes for the Hip actor, so it was hoped that this meant the Walk Designer wasn't hard-coded to apply translations to any actor named "Hip".

To test this, I ran your script on the set of Poser 4 walk cycle poses, re-naming Hip to Waist.  I pasted these into the Runtime:Libraries:Pose:Walk Designer folder.  I then tested using these on two versions of the GitHub Antonia 1.0.1 build, one with Hip translations forced to zero, the other with those limits removed.  In the former case, there were no undersirable Hip translations on Y, but the walk cycle was rigid and robotic, with the Waist actor not being translated on Y either.  In the latter case, the Hip actor was translated on Y, as seen previously.  These results were the same as those I could achieve using walk cycle poses which hadn't been converted for Antonia 1.0.1.

So it looks like the pasted-in walk cycle poses made no difference at all.  My tests, however, were not carefully applied, and I'm not experienced with the Walk Designer.

Loading poses into the Walk Designer pose folder should do just as you hoped, above, and as markschum suggests.  The new poses should allow for properly-calibrated results for a non-standard figure rig.  The poses need to be designed for the figure, however.  Unfortunately these poses don't seem to play any role in determining which actor is translated on Y during the walk animation.

Quote - Another solution would be to have a script that deals with clothes that come out of WW2 and rename their body-parts to work with Antonia "classic" (maybe this is more elegant?).

I'd have thought it more elegant, but PhilC really didn't seem to like the idea when it came up.  Which doesn't prevent us as individual users from following that approach.  The formal release of Antonia will be WW-compatible, but we could do other things, as well.  That might serve to confuse matters, however.  :unsure:

Quote - I made a walk blend with all the hip transforms all set to zero, to see if the WD added any. Unfortunately when I try to apply the blend in the WD, the slider keeps resetting to zoro. I have several other custom walk blends, and dontt have a problem with the slider resetting on any of those. I'm testing on the P4 man, so the figure is not the problem. No idea what's up with it.

This Walk Designer thingie may be one of the answers to the question, "Why do 3DCG professionals scoff at Poser?"  :lol:  We seem to be running out of possible solutions rather quickly....  :sad:

@Cage: Thanks for the explanation! It all makes a bit more sense to me now. I may do some experiments of my own, if I find the time.

Quote - So it looks like the pasted-in walk cycle poses made no difference at all.  My tests, however, were not carefully applied, and I'm not experienced with the Walk Designer.

You can tell when someone has a lot of experience in the Walk Designer. They have a gaunt haunted look in their faces, their eyelids tend to twich a lot, and they st-st-st-stam-am-am-mer.

Quote - You can tell when someone has a lot of experience in the Walk Designer. They have a gaunt haunted look in their faces, their eyelids tend to twich a lot, and they st-st-st-stam-am-am-mer.

I'm betting they walk kind of funny, too.  :lol:

:unsure:

Yeah, that's kind of mean. 

It looks like we're down to three options for the Hip translation problem with the Walk Designer.  We could use a proxy figure with the "classic" Antonia rigging with the WD, generating poses for the renaming conversion and final application to WW-Antonia.  We could run the WW-Antonia through the WD, then transfer the translations and rotations applied to Hip back to Waist, where we need them to be, using a script.  Or we could all start using the classic rig and just use the WW version for clothing conversion, as SaintFox suggests, up there.  :laugh:

But these ideas only address the problem of the unwanted Hip translations and don't touch upon the quality of the posing results with the WD.  With any of these, a set of Walk Designer animations which is specially tailored for Antonia will still help matters immensely.

Having the translations for the Hip actor locked as they are in the current GitHub build doesn't seem to help with the WD, and may actually create problems, depending on which of the above solutions is preferred.

Are there other possibilities which don't occur to me? 

Let me say from the start, I am not keen on this idea. It seems a bit clunky and complex. But you asked if there were other possibilities, and this may be possible.

An extra set of transform channels in the hip. Take ytran as an example. We make it so we have this:

actor hip:1
    {
    channels
        {
        translateY ytran
            {
            name ytranHID
            hidden 1
            #etc
            }
        translateY ytran2
            {
            name ytran
            hidden 0
            #etc
            valueOpDeltaAdd
                Figure
                BODY
                HIP_ytran_Kludge
            deltaAddDelta -1.000000
            }
        }
    }

We have a valueParm in the BODY named "HIP_ytran_Kludge", it is slaved to ytran in the hip. Then ytran in the waist is slaved to the valueParm, so it inherits the translation of the hip. Meanwhile back in the hip, ytran2 is also slaved to the valueParm, but with a negative deltaAddDelta, so that it cancels out the pose applied to the hip.

The waist has now adopted the pose applied the the hip, and the hip has not changed. If the user wants to ytran the hip they use ytran2 (display name "ytran").

Poses made from other figures, and those used as walk blends in the WD will be posing the waist, when they "think" they are posing the hip. Transforms applied manually get applied to ytran2 (and yrot2, etc), and pose the hip as intended, without affecting the waist. Poses saved from this figure will save data from both sets of transform channels, and so restore what ever state the figure was in when the pose was saved.

Forign poses and the Walk Designer will be unaware of the extra channels and slaving, and apply the data to the hip. Antonia will surreptitiously cancel the data in the hip and move the values to her waist.

That's the theory, any rate. I'm not saying that we should do it, or that it would work. But you asked for other possibilities, and this may be possible.

@lesbentley: That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it's worth incorporating into the base figure, but I for one would like to see if it works.

In general, I think I agree with SaintFox. We need to find workarounds for these problems, but we don't need them to be extremely simple and user-friendly. Creating a special CR2 for use with Walk Designer and then having to post-process anything WD spits out - just to name one of the options that have been discussed - would not seem too terrible a solution in my eyes.

Les, that sounds rather elegant and smart, maybe because I don't understand the down side.

Edit: oopsie.  Cross-posted.

@Les: That doesn't sound so bad to me, but I do tend to make things kind of complicated at times.  :lol:  Will a pose save the ERC-imposed dial settings?  I thought poses ignored any ERC. 

It's a solution which wouldn't require scripting and/or alternate figures.  That seems like a plus.  Of the ideas I mentioned, the first one seems likely to generate Y translation errors, as I think you noted in the other thread.  Which makes the second one look best, but perhaps a bit tacky.  So far, I like your idea best.  It's better than setting the limits on the Hip translation dials, IMO.

Quote - Les, that sounds rather elegant and smart, maybe because I don't understand the down side.

It's a booby trap for anyone who tries to modify the rig in the future.

odf,

Quote - @lesbentley: That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it's worth incorporating into the base figure, but I for one would like to see if it works.

OK, I will rig a test figure and post it on the developers site. I'm a bit busy, we have visitors, so it may take me a couple of days.

GeneralNutt,

Quote - Les, that sounds rather elegant and smart, maybe because I don't understand the down side.

I feel the same. It is one thing to have an Idea. It is a totally different thing trying to persuade Poser to agree with that idea, and without a down side! Poser always seems to have a down side to spoil the best laid plans...

Cage,

Quote - Will a pose save the ERC-imposed dial settings?  I thought poses ignored any ERC.

The pose does not need to save ERC settings. The pose saves the transform values. When the pose is applied the ERC is still in the figure, and does the same thing it did before the pose was saved, it reads the values from the transform channels and does its job.

One down side is this. Any poses fixed to work with the current WW version, will not work with this new version in respect to the hip. They will refer to ytran, when they should be refering to ytran2. It would be simple to fix them, but I think after fixing them once, people might hunt me down with pitchforks, if I asked them to fix the poses again for a new, new version.  :scared:

But the poses made for 1.0.0 would still work right?

Quote - But the poses made for 1.0.0 would still work right?

They should do if I have thought this out correctly.

So perhaps I won't be hunted with pichforks, if people have kept their old version of the poses!

:biggrin:

It's always possible to offer alternate versions of the CR2s for people with particular requirements who know what they're doing. That's the beauty of having an open source figure.

There could be a WD-optimised Antonia that comes with her tweaked CR2s and a script for adjusting pose files and such, if you think that's the most elegant solution. We could have multiple solutions for WD support and see which one ends up the most popular or the most compatible with other software.

I really hope I find some time to play with WD over the next few days. I'd like to understand what's going on with the missing hip swings.

Walk Designer normal em PoserPro 2010 

Pose V4 norma

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2171365

Hey guys, I'm starting to get the feeling that we're hunting a problem that doesn't exist. I just tried the P8 "Sexy" walk on Antonia, and the hip is swinging just fine. I'm not particular liking the cycle, but it doesn't look any weirder on Antonia than Alyson. The hip swings, and the abdomen swings in the opposite direction to compensate. The upper torso is bent back too much and the arms could be straighter, but I'm pretty sure that's just due to the natural differences between the figures.

Maybe the WD default walk is simply a zombie walk, and there's nothing wrong with Antonia at all?

Note that Alyson has a waist and hip like Antonia, only the hip is at the root of the hierarchy, not the waist.

Quote - Forign poses and the Walk Designer will be unaware of the extra channels and slaving, and apply the data to the hip. Antonia will surreptitiously cancel the data in the hip and move the values to her waist.

And shortly thereafter she will succeed in taking over the world.....bwhahahaha.... sorry. I just had images of Antonia gaining sentience in my head and ruling over us all!

Back to your regularly schedualed tech talk.

Oh. PS - Puppet Master Bi-Ped and Puppet Master Quadruped weren't written by PhilC. They were hosted by him but written by Kamiliche who then sold them to eFrontier who then killed them both after stealing what they could from them to create Universal Poses....

Here is my animation :

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/rrfilelock/download.php?fileid=43164&key=2449

Quote - Hey guys, I'm starting to get the feeling that we're hunting a problem that doesn't exist. I just tried the P8 "Sexy" walk on Antonia, and the hip is swinging just fine. I'm not particular liking the cycle, but it doesn't look any weirder on Antonia than Alyson. The hip swings, and the abdomen swings in the opposite direction to compensate. The upper torso is bent back too much and the arms could be straighter, but I'm pretty sure that's just due to the natural differences between the figures. Maybe the WD default walk is simply a zombie walk, and there's nothing wrong with Antonia at all?

The current GitHub build, with the translations locked in the Hip, produced fairly decent-looking results for me.  But the Walk Designer seems to apply vertical motion to the walk using an internal process which forces translation on the actor named Hip.  We're blocking that part of the results, with the set translation limits.  Which just means Antonia can't get fully "correct" results from the WD, not that the results necessarily look horrible.

So far all of the animations I see have hip swing in place, which is good, but they all stay level on Y, which looks kind of weird to me.  :lol:

Quote - ... they all [hip and above] stay level on Y [tran], which looks kind of weird to me.

I think a real hip would move up and down as you walk. I'd also be surprised (pleasantly) if the legs did not bend too much or too little at the knees with the hip translations forced, but from what odf says, it sounds like that is not the case.

Ah, now I understand what all this is about. I guess I'm being a bit dense this weekend.

Excellent illustrations of the problem, Les!  :thumbupboth:

Quote - Ah, now I understand what all this is about. I guess I'm being a bit dense this weekend.

I've been affected that way this weekend, as well.  :lol:

If we use Antonia 1.0 as a proxy figure for the Walk Designer, everything we need is already in place.  The walk cycle would need to be saved as an animated pose, then converted like other poses, using the existing script.  We'd just have to keep version 1.0 in circulation for this purpose.  And Puppet Master, if I understand that part of the discussion.  :unsure: