Adding Animated Parts to Hard Surface Prop

harold_withers

Hi there guys, I'm looking at developing some hard surface model props for Daz3D and wanted to know the best way to handle adding animated parts to a hard surface prop. So for example I'm looking at developing a spacecraft, but want to include working landing gear, opening cockpit canopy and variable vector wings. Am I going to have to go the route of developing bones for this? I've noted that morphing has been mentioned, but don't feel that is suitable for this, and bones would be unnecesarily complicated for what is required. Essentially I want to be able to rotate around an appropriately placed pivot point to get the results I want. Having a workable hierachy in there wouldn't hurt either. Are these functions available within Daz3D?

 

Thanks in advance for any help on this matter.

Cris Palomino

Rigging will allow you to create the types of motions you are talking about.  If you're deforming mesh, morphs may work.  If you're moving, rotating, sliding pieces, then rigging will assist you.  Some will be a combination of the two.

 

DarkEdgeDesign has what looks like what you want https://www.daz3d.com/creating-content-for-daz-studio

 

harold_withers

Cheers for that, should prove really useful.

harold_withers

Hi there, as a follow up question, I've been sorting out my rigging of animated parts for my prop well enough with the assistance of Dark Edge's video above. However I am now running into an issue with the node parameters for certain parts/bones. I'm able to apply rotational values easily enough, but when it comes to translating up or down an axis I don't seem to have access to those sliders. I have Rotation and Scale sliders, but the Translation ones are nowhere to be found. Now on the Parent object I do have access to the Translation sliders, just not on any of the children.

 

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

harold_withers

As a continuation of the question above, I have found the solution to be the 'Show Hidden Properties' option from the menu to the left of the 'Parameters' window. So that is that problem solved.

However I still seem to be running into problems with the rigging process within Daz3D. I'm able to get my bones set up and everything, but when it comes to using Pose Controls I'm running into all sorts of problems. I'm following the excellent set of tutorial videos from Dark Edge as suggested above, to get me up to speed with rigging props and vehicles. Has been all good so far, but when it comes to Pose Controls things seem to be going somewhat awry. The first part I added Pose Controls to worked fine without a hitch. This was an opening canopy to gain access to the vehicle cockpit. But when I attempted to add movable wings it all went a little wrong.

First up, when using ERC Freeze, in the tutorial video only the selected objects appeared in the resultant  Freeze Properties window. However when I did it, all the objects in the scene appear in there rather than just the ones selected for the ERC Freeze, so I had to deselect all but the nodes/objects I wanted. This worked for the Canopy, but with the wings, they appeared in there at first, but then for some reason they disapeared from the list, so that I was now seeing every object in the scene listed in there except the ones I wanted which had been selected for use with ERC Freeze. Eventually after a few restarts and closing and opening of the file the objects eventually inexplicably appeared on the properties list and I was able to add them and proceed as per the tutorial. Is this a common bug? Or is something weird going on here? Now I've got the wings to work I'm moving on to other components in need of adding Pose Controls to, but lo and behold, I'm running into the same problems again. Which means a job that should take a few minutes has taken me days. If anyone has run into this problem before and knows the solution I'd be etrernally grateful.

 

Oh, and my posts don't seem to be registering on the forums properly for some reason meaning that my thread is still languishing on the 2nd page rather than getting bumped to the 1st, which is making getting responses to my questions difficult to say yhe least.

Richard Haseltine

The ERC Freeze dialogues will show non-zero proerpties, so you need to make sure that only the changes you wish to capture are in a non-zero state.

Collective3d

Wish I could help.  Rigging and such has always been over my head.

harold_withers

Thanks Richard, I think that might have been it. When I was positioning some of the components for animation I might have set them to zero on occasion which will be why ERC Freeze didn't pick them up seemingly randomly sometimes.

Thanks for your assistance, I think that has cleared up that mystery.

 

And thanks for bumping my thread Jay. Appreciate it.

harold_withers

Okay one more question and then I'll call it a night, I promise.

Is there an easy way to tweak the timing of movement of sub components within a Pose Control entity? Or failing that, to adjust the timing or bias of a sub element Transforms slider before it becomes part of a Pose Control entity?

The issue I have is that I have a multi-part landing gear that folds away, and due to all the movement happening in one go this has resulted in the gear clipping through the landing gear door when being deployed. Wheras in its native software I have some elements of the gear's movement off set slightly to avoid the clipping issue. So I'm looking for some way of tweaking the parameters to give this effect and slighty delay the timing of deployment of one of the components of the landing gear.

Once again thanks in advance for any assistance

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