Another one of those frustrating iClone anomalies that’s preventing me from moving ahead with my project.
I’ve got a scene where my avatar is facing a particular direction, has had a lot of manual key frame motions applied. I then turned the avatar to face to the right 90 deg ready to walk away.
But when I attempt to apply a walk motion using the motion puppet tool, the avatar spins 90deg back to the original orientation and then starts the walk motion.
I deleted the motion clip and tried all 3 ‘align motion’ options before reapplying the puppet motion and it makes no difference.
I was forced to add a transform rotate key right at the beginning of the puppet track and manually rotate the avatar as close I could back to the origin. Whilst it’s addressed the orientation of the avatar, the transition between the previous motion track and the puppet track is jerky. If I try to overlap the motion clips for a smoother transition, the avatar disappears AWOL in some random location on the screen.
I thought ‘align motion’ was supposed to rectify this ?
Did you try “align to” when right click on the motion that made that unwanted turn? Align to either right or left foot mostly works fine. You also can use motion direction (activate it by clicking the symbol that looks like multiple arrows in several directions… (ic8 only)…
Not in the studio yet to ad a screenshot…
Be sure to remove that transform (rotation) key you added before doing all this!
I used the ‘Align to’ from both the animation menu and then from the timeline before applying the puppet motion. However I didn’t see an option apply it to any specific body part?
I will have a look again and see if I can relate to what you are describing
ok I found the ‘align to’ option where you can choose specific body parts.
I tried aligning each foot - each time it just moved the avatar slightly to match the position, rather than correct the rotation orientation.
I tried align entire motion and the avatar just disappeared somewhere…
I did manage to manually rotate the avatar back to the correct orientation with transform, and worked ok, however there is a bit of a jump when the motion puppet clip joins to the puppet motion clip. I’ve tried to merge the two motion clips and the avatar just takes off somewhere again. If I try to overlap/transition the 2 clips to try and smooth the change, the avatar takes off in a random direction again.
I’ve done what I can to minimise the abrupt change by just manually rotating the avatar and it’s not too bad. Blink and you’ll miss it, but the little jump does bug me. I may just end up switching to another camera at that moment to mask it.
Do not use Transform to align character. You got plenty of other native options to handle rotations.
Before applying a motion, make sure “Align Position and Direction” is set (icon on the left).
If that does not help (motion clip has different root control), then after applying a clip, use Motion Direction Control (icon on the right) to set appropriate direction manually. Then align by appropriate foot and use auto-blend.
The align motion function had no effect unfortunately. I tried all 3 options.
I used transform only as a last resort. I had tried to rotate the avatar using the rotate body using motion layer, but that then randomly threw out the orientation and position of the avatar in some previous key motion clips. And yeah using the transform wasn’t ideal as it seemed to play havoc with the puppet motion transition, which meant I couldn’t use a transition between the previous motion and the puppet motion track to smooth things out.
But that motion direction control function you suggested was a lot more successful. Aligning the root caused the avatar to bend and move into some wild position. So ended up manual tweaking using the rotate gizmo to align things, and then set it, which then allowed me more scope to transition between the two motions. I still need to do some more tweaking, but it’s a lot better now.
Thanks heaps for the assistance, I never really knew what that motion direction button was.
I’ve spent days on this trying to correct this. Confused as to why the orientation thing happened in the first place, but now have some more options up my sleeve now to try and rectify it if it happens again in the future.
