Bone Pinning -Am I doing something wrong?
scorer
Posts: 37
Is there some secret to bone pinning that some of us don't know about?
It seems like when the feet are pinned and the hip has been rotated the pins get buggy (first the feet slip and then re-pin themselves in a different location as you translate the hip around) I have seem a few people raise this issue before but never seen any response.
Is this a known limitation?
Comments
Yes, it is a known , and as you note much complained about,issue with the current IK system.
Thanks.
I hope it gets fixed, but in any case it is very nice to know its not just me!
It's been known for years but for some reason they refuse to do anything about it. I don't think daz takes animation seriously enough to be honest - we've only recently been able to buy a decent graph/keyframe editor, which comes standard in many other 3d programs. Poser is still light years ahead of daz in terms of being animator friendly.
A ghetto-IK system is sort of possible with the Active-pose tool & Powerpose tab. However it is tedious and far from ideal, for some stupid reason you are only allowed to translate bones with this method and not rotate - why? I don't know - Daz seems ridden with half-baked ideas that never get the tweaking and polish they deserve. You also need to goto the Tool Settings tab (with the Activepose selected) and make sure the "Transform Gizmo" is set to on. Then you can lock the feet by Ctrl-left clicking on them in the Powerpose tab. Select the hips and you should be able to translate them around and the feet will stay locked and not slip around, however because this system appears half-finished you can't actually rotate the hips you have to mess around and lock other bones (Left thigh/Right thigh) and then jiggle about with the translation some more. Incredibly tedious I know, not sure why Daz has never bothered putting in a decent IK system - its for this reason that I still don't consider Daz a legitimate tool for animators. But I was lucky I guess and had a few years with Autodesk products at uni so I was kinda spoiled.
I've had several failed attempts now at pinning the feet and trying to move the hips. I also thought it was just me - little did I know of this limitation. Just decided to look on the forum and what do you know, many complaints about basically the same thing. Very frustrating. Thanks for the suggestion, drybonez, I will give it a try.
And I'm not trying to gripe here, I'm mostly happy w/DS. Just hoping Daz notices and will address this one.
Yeah, its actually funny because the basics for simple 3D IK were pretty well figured out in the 1990's (before DAZ studio was even a twinkle in Zygote's eye). Its almost like some one doesn't want DAZ studio to animate well. I am just hoping the Scripting SDK is good because I suspect this one could be fixed by a half decent programmer over a long weekend or two (there's plenty of open source code floating around the web for this already).
EDIT: ACTUALLY it's probably not even that hard because the manual IK posing seems to work fine. All DS has to do is "remember" the target feet start positions and rotations and then drag the feet back towards those after the hip has been moved. Probably the only reason the pinning doesn't work is because DS is allowing some stray method to reset the initial feet position variables before the IK has been fully resolved.
A script would just have to 1) remember the actual feet targets 2) compare DAZs solution to the real targets then 3) iteratively drag the feet back towards the real targets just like you could with your cursor.
Not a perfect solution but with some tweaking it could be a big improvement.