Bryce 7.1 pro weird object animation when time scrubbing (NEED HELP)

megachinimathugs

I'm basically trying to animation a train by moving it from point A to point B. The object is already grouped up. When I move the scrub time slider, something weird happens in the animation and I cannot find a way to prevent the objects from "dissembling" even though they are already grouped. I also deleted all keyframes. Just watch and see.

NEED HELP!!

EDIT: Here's a quick vid of my troubles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GiSfMG6ntA

Chohole

I am going to move this thread to the Bryce forum for you, as I think you are more likely to get an answer there.

Jamahoney

My limited experience with animation is that if something moves that shouldn’t move when the scrubber is shifted along its path, then most likely there is some ungrouping involved, or, previous scrubbing of separate objects from another file – worked in Bryce or otherwise). If, when you click on the apparent moved objects, say, midway in the scrub, do they have another, separate blue line attached (vertical, in this case, I would presume) to them?

Oroboros is your man for helping you here, but all I can suggest is to see if when you move the entire, grouped object (as you say), that no pieces are left behind. Another option, is the Selection Palette/Select Options (small arrow etc.,), and see if you can select all meshes – from start of scrubbing to end of scrubbing (mind, the ground plane,if any, will also be selected).

Sorry, that’s about all I can offer. Btw, you seem to have the Underground Option (Green Line across your Bryce screen) on - is that related to your issue, I wonder?
Jay

Dave Savage

Like Jay suggests, each individual component of your model has it's own timeline on which animations can be set.
If you only have the grouped object selected, you won't see the keyframes that have possibly been set for the components unless you enter the advanced motion lab.

Try selecting only the components that are moving incorrectly and see if their keyframes show up on the timeline.

Oroboros

Sup.

Jamahoney said:

My limited experience with animation is that if something moves that shouldn’t move when the scrubber is shifted along its path, then most likely there is some ungrouping involved, or, previous scrubbing of separate objects from another file – worked in Bryce or otherwise).

Yup, those are two of the key contenders.

Btw, you seem to have the Underground Option (Green Line across your Bryce screen) on - is that related to your issue, I wonder?

Nope, but you draw a tip out of me, Jama :)

The video shows the main difficulty with grouping: literally hundreds and HUNDREDS of excessive lines, boxing the groups together, all in default family grey. Complex scenes benefit for using Families. I no longer recommend using Families for selecting objects for the Mac: that feature is inconsistently crash-prone (it's fine for Windows Bryce). But Families are a very good way to make sense of the nested wireframes: select an object/group, click on the grey tab of the resulting floating menu, and choose a different color. Hey presto: you can discern a particular object's wireframe from the mess within.

There's 4 possible problems, but I want to get one fundamental thing out of the way first about modeling.

DO NOT ORGANISE MODELS WITH GROUPS. It's an easy thing to do: a carriage might need a few struts and extra detail parts, and just in case things get nudged out of alignment, you group objects into subgroups, subgroups into supergroups, supergroups into megastructures. The trouble with this approach: wireframe clutter. You can't see your way through the group lines to target what you want to edit.

USE GROUPING ONLY FOR BOOLEAN OPERATIONS. If you must sculpt or shape on object/group with another, that's what you use grouping for, and ONLY that. Hollowing out a cylinder with a cube? Group 'em. Want the resultant shape of intersecting a sphere with a torus? Group them. Want to cluster a bunch of pyramids together? DO NOT GROUP THEM. You're not making a Boolean shape, you're just organising a bit of your scene into one easily selectable bunch of objects.

Instead, use PARENTING. If you parent one object (or several objects) to a master object, you have exactly the same result, only ZERO wireframe overhead.

Parenting requires less effort. Elect one object to be the parent object, for instance, a cylinder that will be the main steam boiler for a locomotive. Now, when you add a pipe to it, a bell, a smoke stack, a cattle scoop, whatever, select this new object and from the fly-out menu, drag the Parent button to the steam boiler cylinder until that cylinder turns green. Then let go. Now when you move the steam boiler body, every object that is its 'child' will move with it.

And no additional wireframe. Clean, concise, workable.

You will have to break a certain habit in using this technique. Often you'll automatically select all the objects in a scene you want to move, and some of those items will be parented. If you select a parent, AND ITS CHILD, and move them together, the child will appear to move faster and further than the parent! That's because you're adding the movement of the parent to the child, as well as moving the child. So if you want to move a number of objects that are parented to something else, ensure you select EITHER the parent, OR its children, not both.

For this reason I label my parent objects/groups with leading ***, so they're promoted to the top of my selection tools.

Ok, with that rant over, to the problem, which is probably a result of two conditions.

1) What Jama said. An object was animated, and was then grouped with another object, also animated, and the resulting animations are being added together. Or, the reverse: an object/group was animated, then ungrouped, and one of the objects/subgroups inherited some animation properties.

The fix: Rebuild your scene, sorry. There's no easy fix. Use Families to help colorise your 'blocks' of work, use parenting to help cut down the lines.

2) Stacked Inheritance. An object is animated, another object is animated, you group or parent the objects together. Often, this is intentional. You might put wheels endlessly cycling through an animation, and then parent this mini-animation to a car, which is moving forward. So, the car moves forward, and the wheel moves in its own motion with it.

The fix: Select your objects, click Edit [A]ttributes > Animation > Show when Selected. You'll see all the trajectories in your scene, with the possible exception of objects rotating on the spot. Select the objects that have crazy animations on them. Shuttle the time until the object is in it's correct spot. Then enter the Advanced Motion Lab and delete its keyframes.

For more info about that, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xq-3yNP8rY

Good luck.

Jamahoney

Great info., Oroboros...will save that excellent advice, as sure to return back to it again and again when tackling complex models/objs etc., renders/works in the future. I've got lost so many times when working with large groups. One thing that drives me crazy when trying to seek out a particularly small part of a complex model/object is the zoom level in Bryce - you can only go in so far before it stops zooming anymore.

Megachinimathugs...given the advice above...was it helpful, as I'm sure we'd like to know what the eventual problem was, did you fix it...etc. It might be helpful to others in the near future.

Jay