When I set up joint controlled joints. The slaves always needs to be bumped before it moves with the master. EXAMPLE: Turn steering wheel. But wheels don't move until I nudge them with their dials. Although using ECM with morphs does seem to work in real time without nudging them. Does anyone have real time working JCJ without needing to nudge them? ScottA

Hello ScottA, This could be a hierarchy problem: When you modify a dial in body part "steeringWheel", Poser updates all children, and the immediate parent of "steeringWheel". But the parents of the parent body part aren't automatically updated. You need to nudge a dial in the parent body part, to force an update event. If body part "frontWheel" is neighter the immediate parent nor a child of "steeringWheel", then "frontWheel" won't be updated, when you move a dial in "steeringWheel". Therefore, if the master and slave channels are placed in different body parts, then the slave channel should be placed - either in a child body part, - or in the immediate parent body part. You find a more detailed description of this effect in my ERC-tutorial (Part 1). There is also a steering wheel example code in Part 3 or so. You can download the tutorial here http://64.38.105.73/erc_download.html

Thanks for the reply VK, Something isn't working right on my end. My children won't budge unless I give them a push so to speak. Is there any chance you have that race car example available for download someplace so I can look through the .cr2 file? ScottA

Now this is strange. You maybe found a Poser bug? The steering wheel example comes from the old batmobile model. You can download it (870 KB) here http://64.38.105.73/bmexample.zip The "Steer" master is in "Body". The slaves are in body parts "steering", "fwheell" and "fwheelr". You couldn't, for example, place the master in the steering wheel or in one of the front wheels, because there is no parent-child relationship among these parts. If you can't fix your problem, you can send me the cr2 (no geometry if possible) for my Poser mysteries collection :)

I'm the Bug VK. ;-) I guess didn't understand how the basic concept of JCJ worked until you just said that. I didn't realize that you couldn't manipulate the child object by moving the master object. And HAVE to set them both up as one dial under the BODY. I had too many duplicate addDelta's and whatnot throughout my .cr2 causing problems. That batmobile file is perfect for using as a refrence. It's prety cool too. Love those fold out wings and pop up head lights. :-) Thanks for the help. ScottA

You're welcome :)

Oops. Hang on a sec VK. You CAN move the child by directly poseing the Master body part. I just didn't have it set up right. All it took was removing some un-needed additions I had placed in the master's channels. Why do you prefer to add the VP stuff to the BODY section? It's actually more work that way. I do see one benefit to it. But I'd like to know why you prefer to do it that way. ScottA

heyas; you did what, scott? and you fixed it? i was gonna say, you should try putting the parts in an ik chain. an ik chain you never use, but still. that's how ajax gets easy pose controls to go up and down the hierarchy. it only works backwards if the parts are in an ik chain.

One advantage to putting the controls in BODY is that you can be sure the hierarchy is always master-down-to-slave. Another is that it turns the BODY into a sort of "control panel" for the user; no need to click on various parts, some of which may be hard to reach by the menu list.

ockham: I'm personally much more comfortable selecting the real world master. Rather than using the BODY section. When I say "Real World". I mean in the real world you go to the steering wheel in a car to turn the tires. To do this in Poser. The code is all handled by the Tires channels. Just a personal prefrence. That's all. But I also see somthing else as a benefit for using the BODY section to host all this ERC stuff. By doing that. You can use the regular poseing dials and the ERC will not take effect. I'm not sure if this would be needed much. But I do see a rare case where if you wanted to make an animation where a car crashes because the man inside turned the steering wheel. But the tires didn't turn. So he crashes. You could do that if all the ERC stuff was isolated under the BODY section. Bloodsong: I was putting the five new lines in both the Master and Slave. That's why it wasn't working. Here's an example animation that shows the by spinning the steering wheel. The left tire both rotates and translates in relation to the movement of the steering wheel. Done with the Y rotate dial in the steering wheel. I've never really played with this stuff much before. ScottA

The batmobile uses the extra valueParm master in BODY because of the figure hierarchy. Bloodsong's right, if you really want to use the zrot of "steering" as master channel in this case, you can maybe include an IK chain in the cr2, to force an update of the front wheels. I usually prefer an extra master in BODY, so that I can easily access all master dials, and don't need to find out and select the proper body parts. This is a personal preference, not a technical issue. And you're right, the extra master sometimes makes the model more versatile: You can set the master dial, to move all slaves. And you can set one of the slave dials, to move only one body part. For example, when the batmobile is flying, you can use the zrot of "steering", to turn only the steering wheel without turning the front wheels. When you're using "tran" channels and MTs (targetGeom channels), you need an extra valueParm master, to adjust the "Sensitivity" (trackingScale). Poser ignores custom trackingScale for "tran" dials, and doesn't save the trackingScale setting for MTs. But you can always customize the trackingScale with an extra valueParm master.

heyas; another concern is saving the master dial settings in poses. nothing in the BODY is saved to a pose file, so there go all your master dial settings when you save one. very cool, scott :)

Good Point Bloodsong. Never even thought about that. It's interesting that you can accomplish the same thing as I did in message#10 only with a prop file(.pp2) using the "NO_FIG" in place of "Figure" to refrence mutliple .obj files. The only drawback is it has that nudging problem. But the thing that I find interesting about that is if you play it in an animation. It works great. So if you play back the animation you can check it to see if it needs adjusting. I wonder if people tried this and stopped because the prop didn't update in real time thinking it didn't work? That's what happened to me the first time I tried it. If you have to create an animation with props. It's not that annoying to run the sequence to check it. And it saves the trouble of converting the thing into a figure with a .cr2 file. ScottA

oh yeah? no, i never knew that. that's interesting, scott. never thought about it. the only time i ever ran across erc in a prop was when i put my shoes on my heavy horse and did the cloven hooves prop. i noticed the fbm did the shoe morphs as well as the hooves. that was cool :)

what about using null channels slave/mastered in order to force a chain reaction up the pipe, with the dials hidden to they do the job without showing up in the dials?

Re dial in body vs. dial in part - easy enough to have both - a body dial that controls a master channel in the most appropriate body part.