Is Limbstick the IK tool Daz has been missing?
pds
Posts: 593
I'm surprised no one (including the vendor) has started a discussion thread about this product. Limbstick looks like an amazing tool that might even be helpful for static posing.
I wish the process for the more complicated animations (ark of the covenant carriers, girl riding the bicycle) had been demonstrated or at least summarized since they better represent more practical usage of the tool. Leaving that out makes me wonder if such animations end up being significantly harder to implement.
Any skillful Daz animators tried it out yet? If so, what's your impression?
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Watching the video, I'm not sure it would be useful for static since you have to redo every time you change something, but for animation it looks like it would be useful.
it looks like tracking, a feature DAZ studio has been sadly lacking
The video didn't impress me. It just looks like a paid version of mcjAutolimb2015, which is difficult to use because it's not realtime and thus requires a lot of tedious fidgeting and re-running the script when limbs need to be bent at a specific angle. Plus, mcjAutolimb2015 at least has pole targets, but I didn't see anything about those in LimbStick.
Also, in the bicycle video, you can clearly see the girl's hands bobbing and sliding along the handlebars, so it doesn't look completely effective either.
I was thinking along the lines of how using a single point in time in a dforce simulation can sometimes give a more realistic static pose. With Limbstick, I wondered if a single animation frame might look better or at least be faster to obtain a good pose because of the more holistic response of a figure to the movement. I'm not an animator so it's all speculation on my part.
Poet and didn't even know it!
OT: I just bought it, I haven't rendered any of my animations for the exact reason why this product now exists, as Daz's IK is horrifically useless!
Unfortunate. I guess the vendor is hampered by the underlying IK issues baked into Daz Studio.
I would appreciate seeing whatever results you experience as you test it out.
As far as I know it has no dependency of the Daz Studio IK system.
Depends, for some it will be yes, others no, and still others: maybe.
I've bought it, not sure if I need it but going to see how useful it is; i tend to do the few animations I tackle in Blender.
Well, I'll have to describe it as my animations while non-pornographic is not suited for Daz's PG13-rated forum...
I will wishlist it
It works fine, the only catch is that for the entire animation the feet have to be touching the plane for the entire animation, as once it lifts off of the plane, you'll get an error and the legs will screw up...
Can you partial/custom range for that or does that not work?
No problem, it's a surprisingly quick and easy script!
I must admit that I'm mostly a puppeteer animator and have yet to do a deep dive into the intricacies of the timeline/graphs... just think of this script as gluing the feet/hands to the plane/object and animating it as well as a proper IK system would.
We we're waiting for the product to be released before creating a how-to thread. We've made LimbStick really easy to use but let me Walk you through the two example scenes you mentioned...
For the Ark of the Covernant scene, we applied a slightly offset walk animation to all four figures. The Ark model was put in place on frame one, and each of the relevant arms were posed to be holding the ark. The Ark itself was then animated across the scene to move around in place. Finally the hands that needed to remain in place were all selected with the Ark being the final selection and LimbStick was run once to result in the final animation.
For the girl on the bicycle, we patented her to the bike model and animated the bike pedals, wheels and steering across the animation. On frame one, we posed her in place with feet on pedals and hands on handle bars. LimbStick needed to be run a few times for this example - once with both hands and the handle bar selected, once with her left foot and the left pedal selected and finally with her right foot and the right pedal selected.
During the week, we'll go through some other fun examples and give pointers on any specific animations people wish to create.
Steve
That is the exact scenario where you would use a custom range.
We have seen AutoLimb which is pretty difficult to get good results. LimbStick uses a different approach and various mathematical techniques to make it's calculations and creates better, more accurate results. will happily render out a closeup of the girl on bicycle examples hands. The only sliding you would even get with this script is if the object the limb is attached to moves out of the range of the maximum limb length.
We do not rely on or use DAZ Studio's IK methods at all in this script.
I've just bought LimbStick but not yet tried it. Could you please explain what you mean by a custom range? Perhaps with an example?
[EDIT] Oh ok, nvm ... I shudda RTFM - it is explained in the manual.
One further question though. I'm wondering whether it is possible to have, say, a hand slide along a surface but not leave the surface? Something like wiping a window or spreading sun lotion on a leg?
My suggestion would be to have a small plane as a hand target and then animate that over the window. Although I am in doubt how that would look good for spreading sun lotion.
I wishlisted it, though I haven't done anything with animations yet. I just figured, that if I ever wanted to do animations, this might be a very useful tool. ^_^
Bought this product today. It works simply and stably.I like that if the feet don't reach the target, the character extends the toes. It works better than autolimb for me.
Especially in a situation where the legs are completely straight and you need to animate small pelvic movements. With Autolimb you always have to make sure your legs are slightly bent at the knees.
Here are some of the little things I noticed:
If you copy the key from frame 0 to frame 30. In frame 15, lower the hip. After running the script.The values in frame 0 and frame 30 will be slightly different for thighs, shins and feet. It's not critical, but it may interfere with getting a perfect loop.
There is no way to control the pole for the thighs. When squatting, the knees tend to keep their orientation.
What if I'm animating a dance where the model has to spread her legs wide when squatting?
After running the script for the first time, I tried turning legs outward in frame 15, hoping to help the script calculate the second time the way I want, but alas.
It reset my 15 keyframe and calculated the thighs turns the same way it did the first time. Autolimb has an advantage in this regard.
I like this script, I hope it will sell enough copies so that the author will have more motivation to improve the product
I'm glad you don't. Thank you for this long-awaited product. Purchased it right away.
what version of Daz will this work with? I use 4.12.0.86 for animation and also a beta. 4.15.0.13 for some plugins that don't work with that. If I have to install 4.16 I won't be able to buy this.
Appreciate so much all your contributions to DAZ ecosystem animations! Thanks!
Own now Limbstick, glue to floor and spring dynamics.
Wonder out loud if you have any plans to make a product to manipulate the hip? This product seems limited to hands/feet manipulation which is a fantastic asset, but some of us hope for more :)
DAZ IK chain's work cool in some ways, but over a longer animation the IK solver can cause very hard to quash issues with the following appendages when limits are off.
PS. Limbstick tuts were very helpful to quickly see the utility of this product. Having it adjust by script the timeline is so awesome, without having to manually do anything in timeline for this. Custom range is awesome too.
Would be nice to have the script also be adapted to allow toggling of some kind of random movemnent, like Marble's apply suncreen example for say a smaller wearable invisible cloth parts broken down to anatomy sections which act like the thing to follow.
Just wanted to add my thanks.
DazStudio offers an incredible alot, but they need help like most of us do.
Did test in 4.12.0.86. Sadly it popped up an error, and log wasn't helpful other than to say error. Even when I renamed .dse which often works. Whereas 4.16.0.2 worked flawlesly.
Ran a couple of pose tests ... I like the error reporting feature => gives suggestions on what to do to fix it lol ...
Okay, From "T" pose to sitting and back again. Using Limb Stick, I then saved a pose preset which I applied to another figure. It could be I missed something in the selection process but the saved pose had the figure moving up SO I pinned the feet to the floor. Made a couple shorts of the same scene for your amusement.
Initial impressions, YES! This is useful :-)
Very cool! I'd totally buy and addon that works for head and hip and whatnot.
Alright, so I was pretty darn hesitant to pick up Limbstick, given we can pin limbs and what not as is, but after playing with it for an hour I can definitely see myself using this on a regular basis. It's incredibly easy to use and a huge time saver, I highly recommend grabbing this to anyone with an interest in animating within Daz Studio. Keep it up 3D Universe!