Legitimate question about G3F bending

SnowSultan

Could someone explain what the reasons are for allowing Genesis 3 to be able to significantly bend at the chest level without the abdomen or shoulders moving as well? Normally the major regions of the human torso alternate in what is static and what can move. Shoulders = moves, chest = static, abdomen = moves, pelvis = static. I'm afraid this is going to result in poses being created and sold with impossible upper body bending and twisting even with Limits On.

I'm also curious as to why the heels can individually be bent, rotated, and twisted when - at least for me and two other people I asked - it is also impossible to move only the heel and not have the frontal area of the foot move as well.

It's not that I doubt DAZ when it comes to human movement limits, I'd just like to know why these new changes were made.

mjc1016

I ask why weren't they done when Genesis was introduced?

One of the reasons, maybe the biggest one...the new bones are more in line with 'standard' skeletons/rigging in other apps.

The heel bones being the way they are come into play, a lot, with a full blown, completely implemented IK system (hmmm...DS5 feature? one that works the way it's supposed to?) and other animation features...should, according to what MallenLane said in another thread, overall, help with all other posing. The same with the other bones/ joints...

Also, with the current skeleton, I'm pretty sure that there will be a way to add 'muscles'...other apps with DQ skinning and similar skeletal set ups can have an 'auxiliary' skeleton that behaves like muscles (muscle simulators)...which, really ups the 'look' when it comes to bends/poses.

j cade

In the real world all those parts don't move individually, but they do move, for instance I can make gen3's back perfectly straight from the shoulders through the tailbone, which is super easy to do in real life (mainly by lying down), but impossible to do on gen2 (I tried it a lot)

I find the extra bones useful for contact with the ground or an object, the heel is a good example here: keep your foot mostly planted, particularly in the front, and drag your heel along the ground, keeping the front of your foot steady. your heel is now doing pretty much what the heel in gen3 does

Of course, if someone bends just the upper chest and nothing else in the torso it will look weird, but the extra bones also enable us to get more realistic poses provided we treat them well.

But while we're speaking of weird bending, I swear all the daz ladies have sclerosis, or at least very bad posture. All the listed heights for the figures are wrong, because they're generally a half an inch taller they just aren't standing up straight.

ZarconDeeGrissom

Kamion99 said:

In the real world all those parts don't move individually, but they do move, for instance I can make gen3's back perfectly straight from the shoulders through the tailbone, which is super easy to do in real life (mainly by lying down), but impossible to do on gen2 (I tried it a lot)

I find the extra bones useful for contact with the ground or an object, the heel is a good example here: keep your foot mostly planted, particularly in the front, and drag your heel along the ground, keeping the front of your foot steady. your heel is now doing pretty much what the heel in gen3 does

Of course, if someone bends just the upper chest and nothing else in the torso it will look weird, but the extra bones also enable us to get more realistic poses provided we treat them well.

But while we're speaking of weird bending, I swear all the daz ladies have sclerosis, or at least very bad posture. All the listed heights for the figures are wrong, because they're generally a half an inch taller they just aren't standing up straight.

That last thought I agree with. There is that 'Growing up' dial 'Youth Posture' that has worked incredibly well to mend that with G2F figures. I'm realy hoping that set dose make it to G3F. The blank-slate G3F dose feel incomplete without all the morph sets I had become accustomed to having.

NoName99

They help make poses and animations look much more like movements IRL, especially extreme rotations.

See if you can find a photo of a ballet dancer in mid-pirouette, or similar move which requires the head, neck, chest, abs, & Hips to rotate 360 fluidly.

In dance & athletic moves that require a spin of the body, you usually lead with the eyes as the head follows, and, like a row of dominoes falling down, each joint follows the previous joint a split second behind one another.

That's the human body in real life.

Now with V4, G1, G2, that literally was not possible. Rotating the head, then neck, then chest and abs created distortion at the joints and no matter how you few key frames you used, it wasn't fluid in the slightest, and the movements look stiff, like one of those cardboard box robots from a 1950s movie.

A3 is the worst, she can't even bend 90 degrees at the hip without distortion.

M4 on the other hand seems to animate and pose slightly better than the others.

Now a lot of times your character is wearing clothing or armour that may cover some of these things, but sometimes it could make it worse, and in my cases specifically I'm often animating creature characters that have there upper bodies exposed, leaving the torso, kneck, and head looking strange in certain situations.

That's not a knock on any of those models, I'm just using this as an example, and specifically more extreme poses or animations, regular everyday movements and poses are generally not a problem.

There are work arounds for the distortion, motion blur probably the most common, but as for grace and elegance.......that buttons missing from my keyboard, lol.

I hope that made some sense, it's a hard thing to explain in words for some reason.

ZarconDeeGrissom

dinopt, I know exactly where your coming from with that, even tho, I can't dance, lol. Outfits also have a bit of an issue as well with such dance moves, not just the figure.
(frame-caps from a Front Aerial gif, wikipedia)

NoName99

zarcondeegrissom said:

dinopt, I know exactly where your coming from with that, even tho, I can't dance, lol. Outfits also have a bit of an issue as well with such dance moves, not just the figure.
(frame-caps from a Front Aerial gif, wikipedia)

Thank you for those pictures, perfect example of what I was trying to get at.

ZarconDeeGrissom

And the gifs.

j cade

Actually pretty much directly after typing that up, I went about making a fix. It was surprisingly easy: I edited the default pose to have better posture, created a blank morph, and then used erc freeze. I have dubbed it unbreak spine. Its really fun going through pose sets and swinging it back and forth.

I want to tweak the neck a bit more to keep it closer to the original, but if you want it I can stick it up at sharecg.

SnowSultan

Thanks...I'm still not fond of the idea that people are going to be grabbing body parts that should not bend, moving them in ways that should not move and then selling them as poses (which I know happens, I don't buy poses all that often any more because I always have to end up resetting the neck and torso and using the Posing dials anyway), but if used responsibly, it sounds like they can be useful.

Has anyone tried using a BVH animation on Genesis 3? I wonder if they work better now or if we'll still get the crazy legs. :)

Havos

Regarding impossible for humans bending, remember the Genesis line is for humanoid creatures, rather than just human. When talking about aliens, fantasy creatures etc, we can just use the human body to say what bend is, or is not possible.

Navi

SnowSultan said:

Could someone explain what the reasons are for allowing Genesis 3 to be able to significantly bend at the chest level without the abdomen or shoulders moving as well? Normally the major regions of the human torso alternate in what is static and what can move. Shoulders = moves, chest = static, abdomen = moves, pelvis = static. I'm afraid this is going to result in poses being created and sold with impossible upper body bending and twisting even with Limits On.

I'm also curious as to why the heels can individually be bent, rotated, and twisted when - at least for me and two other people I asked - it is also impossible to move only the heel and not have the frontal area of the foot move as well.

It's not that I doubt DAZ when it comes to human movement limits, I'd just like to know why these new changes were made.

Chest and pelvis static... Sorry to disagree, but hopefully these parts are not static. The 2 new bones in the upper body are a welcome change, to make more smooth/natural/realistic upper body bends.

As for the heel/metacarpal bones in the feet, it's a most welcome change in term of realism, finally we can have feet bending without looking like "toony flat things". I put an old test render to illustrate the difference (G2 vs G3) :

Oso3D

Like a lot of tools, in the hands of people who don't know what they are doing, it will look terrible. That's the danger of more freedom. ;)

There are also a lot of situations where unusual motions would be useful -- nonhuman beings, actions/dancing (as mentioned), and also damage. I mean, if you are trying to render someone about to get pulled apart by two ogres, you are going to want some non-standard rotations...

(still not going with G3 anytime soon, but I can see the logic)

RawArt

SnowSultan said:

Thanks...I'm still not fond of the idea that people are going to be grabbing body parts that should not bend, moving them in ways that should not move and then selling them as poses (which I know happens, I don't buy poses all that often any more because I always have to end up resetting the neck and torso and using the Posing dials anyway), but if used responsibly, it sounds like they can be useful.

Has anyone tried using a BVH animation on Genesis 3? I wonder if they work better now or if we'll still get the crazy legs. :)

I can understand being a purist in that way, but you also have to realize that this is cg and not the real world. ANY movement of the fiure is merely an approximation of real world movement. CG rigging wont work exactly like human movements. I know even an old guy like me is more flexible in some ways than alot of the rigged figures allow.
So having the options to make up for the cg shortcomings goes along way to making the end result look more natural, even if things do not seem to functionally work that way in nature.

SnowSultan

That's a good example with the heel, thanks for that. Still sticking to this flexible-rigid-flexible-rigid guide though, but I won't disagree with the explanations you've all given for the changes. Much appreciated.

http://drawabox.com/images/lesson8/lesson_rigidflexible.jpg

mjc1016

It's for 2D work...sketching/drawing/painting...sculpting would be a closer match and with sculpting body areas tend to be more fluid and the rigid/flexible areas are less defined.

SnowSultan

Let's not go round and round on this, the ribcage and pelvis do not bend unless you're being broken in half.

My question was why these bends were added and the answer is primarily to help simulate fluid motion in 3D animations. Thanks for that and I hope that we'll all put it to good use. :)

Navi

Well, legs that would move without a slight pelvis movement would be like arms moving without any collar movement :) . I do not understand why you would like it to stay motionless ? Unless your character is in a "straight" standing pose, it has to go along strong legs movements.

Let me put that small gif in the post, as a visual witticism :) and illustration of pelvis move (I didn't pick a gif with real people for obvious reasons).

SnowSultan

Haha, nice GIF. :)

I don't have any issues with the pelvis because it's not bending (and it's the muscles around it and the leg/abdominal regions that would cause the appearance of movement). I wasn't understanding why the chest has two bending regions because the ribcage doesn't bend.

I kinda wish Richard would close this thread because the question has been answered. We do not bend at the chest, but the 3D figure does in order to create more fluid animations. Just try to use the Pose controls to bend the torso (the Waist Bend, Twist, etc ones) for realism.