specific music research objectives and hundreds of saved poses slightly out of place

dga8787

--CONTEXT-- [skip ahead to 'THE GIST' if you prefer]

I came to Daz hoping to catalog a large collection of unconventional playing techniques for the violin, which I wish to define as short animations of one or both arms of a violinist attached to the stationary base and instrument parented to the head, one hand manipulating a bow. In a nutshell, I'm developing a way of "beatboxing" using all available sounds I can produce on my violin, which I have more or less cataloged in a notebook, and am trying to understand, in order to compose new sequences, which combinations of these I can string together in quick and precisely timed sequences to create imitations of the sounds of rhythmic/percussive musics, essentially what a beatboxer does but with violin sounds instead of mouth sounds. The objects of study are the physical actions required of the violinist to produce each individual sound and accomplishing the precise transitions from one to the next in rapid succession, which can be intricate and involved, quasi-dancelike and even theatrical at times, and almost always unfamiliar from a instrumentalist standpoint and requiring an approach to studying, practicing, and understanding what's involved. I'm using Daz as a way of visualizing the enormous web of potential body motions. My goal is to create a catalog of generic instrumental actions as the animated transition between sequences of static poses I've been saving (with extreme difficuly, more on this momentarily) which I can then use to construct and study the motions involved, substitute one technique for another, see what a "beat pattern" looks like sped up to find the point where it becomes absurd and superhuman to perform, etc. I know thats a lot of info and may sound crazy but check my ig @dga8787 if you're skeptical

--THE GIST--

I have been using a realistic violin model found on the Daz store for Genesis 8, making from the chest down invisible and locking all but the two arms from collar on and the bow. I have parented spheres to various parts of the hands, bow and violin as points of contact, which I'd initially assumed I'd find a way to snap together in a way that moved everything in-between in a coherent way, creating bowstrokes, fingermotions etc. Boy was I wrong, from what I can tell there is no simple way to get the right arm to follow the bow but have to define poses from the opposite direction, starting from the root-most node, which is somewhat counterintuitive. I've been spending tons of time tracking down good info, as the manual seems incomplete (no offense, free is great, I get it) and while I've found some useful scripts, certain persistent issues are making it hard to know if I'm getting anywhere. The hundreds of hand-grips of the bow I spent last week making are now all off and impaling the violin and violinist in horrible ways. I've discovered using Ctrl and changing the options to apply aspects of a predefines pose to another which has been very helpful, but the bow has been a particular challenge. Normal violin playing doesn't have many ways of holding the bow but in my case I need the bow to behave almost like an extension of the arm except instead of a stationary 'bone' as I understand it with limits and degrees of rotation, the point where it attaches can move in essentially all directions relative to the surface of the bow. Depending on the technique, the fingers involved and axes of rotation can change frequently. It is clearly a deep program with capabilities far beyond what I require, but was wondering if someone could help guide me toward what functions I actually need for the task and if I can somehow fix the work I've done, poses which I have been saving as uncompressed hierarchical pose presets of just the selected left or right arm nodes and their children. Yes, the bow is parented to the right hand (mid3 to be exact). I've been using a combination of locking and pinning which may be part of it, and at some point converted the bow from prop to figure and am not sure exactly if that was the best approach, it has one bone which would get out of line with the 'figure' origin so I keep the bone locked, I managed getting my green widget in the joint editor correctly oriented in the bone and figure after much struggling and haven't touched them since. I just finished defining a hundred or so left and right hand poses only to find the bow in the right hand shapes all slightly out of place. As I have for a few earlier poses, I can tweak and re-save them all, but there feels like there's got to be a better way. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Richard Haseltine

That's a lot to track, especially as the forum has eaten your paragraphs (I split the main sections down again). One thing to check is limits - had you had to turn imits off in setting up the psoes (Edit>Figure>Limits Off)?

dga8787

Yes, I figured out limits pretty early on, they are active and haven't had to touch them besides increasing the wriSt rotation for the left hand. Sorry I realize it's a lot of info, a result of not knowing what is pertinent and what isn't.

Richard Haseltine

Are the locked bones still locked? I suspect that may not be a proeprty that saves in a Hierarchical preset.

dga8787

I see a lot of "snapping" when I apply a heir pose, where it goes to one position but something confines it to another. Anytime I attempt to play with the timeline, or other features I'm unfamiliar with, poses seem to be unpredictable when they had just functioned properly. I am saving versions that work as I go and frequently reloading when something unexpected happens but sometimes versions that had worked no longer load poses correctly --- happy to attach the file if anyone is willing to look under the hood.

Richard Haseltine

Please do, ideally with an image showing how it should work - not that I can claim any great expertise in this area.

dga8787

The only locked bones are the single bone in the bow (but not the figure itself) and the rest of the figure besides the arms starting from the collar -- I'd used a combination of pinning and locking to get the poses defined but had cleared locks before saving, but it seems more like a global shift in some origin besides the one Ive been careful not to touch in the joint editor - I also stay away from morphs and enabling/disabling IK for the same reason, which I keep on. The picture I attached above is an example of a pose I applied, which should look like the thumbnail selected. File attached and associated poses available at https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1Vv5W5h72rbyDZ27p9yxX9CHnDC5w__4Q essentially all the poses should be of the hands or bow making contact with the instrument, with less impaling. [file removed in consideration of the artists involved in modeling the violin/bow, please PM for access]

Richard Haseltine

OK, I've downloaded them and will try to have a look in a bit.

dga8787

Thanks so much!

dga8787

I guess my question is, what could be causing this shift in orientation of the bow relative to the rest of the figure across many saved poses, and is there a way to correct this without re-saving each pose? I don't know if I will run into the same problem later, with even more to correct, so I'm hoping to identify the cause as well as a way to correct.

dga8787

Problem solved, I'd tried unlocking the nodes from right collar down but the unlock seems to have missed the collar node and was displacing everything. Richard thank you for your help. My other questions about how to best set up the bow (as a figure, as a prop or smart prop, is 'rigging' something I should look into, etc) still apply, if anyone has any suggestions.

Richard Haseltine

Sorry I hadn't managed to look at the poses.

It shouldn't matter whether it's a figure or a prop, use whichever suits the way you want to use it (assuming there iis a difference).