Problem animating a ball between the hands

fm7 · Post by **fm7** » Thu May 08, 2008 8:19 am

Hello AS-User,
I've created a character with bones and the arms and legs are organized in several sublayers. Now the character should hold a ball between his hands in a sideview. So I created an vector layer containing a simple 4 point ball and put it in the character layer just between the 2 switch layers of the arms. It looks good so far and animating the ball is no problem as long as you move the entire ball layer. But when you try to deform the individual 4 points of the ball there were very strange results, the points move out of control. Maybe the points are under control of the skeleton of the character or something. Does anybody know a good workaround for this task?

Regards,
SVen

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Thu May 08, 2008 8:35 am

If the layer of the ball is under a flexible binding skeleton influence you would obtain strange results if you move the layer and make points animation at the same time. It is due to that the bones influence for the points of the ball is changing meanwhile you translate the layer. See this tutorial to understand it.
viewtopic.php?t=1443&highlight=warp
To solve that you should Release all the points of the ball (to avoid any bone influence or Bind them all to a single bone (and move the bone instead of the layer). Then the localized point animation would be correct.

-G

fm7 · Post by **fm7** » Fri May 09, 2008 10:32 am

Thanks for the link and the hint with the bone!

I tried it and it works really fine. You only should note, that you create your moving object far away from the rest of the scene, then push it in the skeleton layer and bone it.

Regards,
Sven

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:20 am

fm7 wrote:You only should note, that you create your moving object far away from the rest of the scene, then push it in the skeleton layer and bone it.

Not necessarily, Sven. You could also bind the points of the ball to the bone. In that case, bone strength of other bones have no influence on the ball shape. However, you still need to reduce the bone strength of the ball-bone to zero, otherwise it will possibly still influence other shapes than the ball.

fm7 · Post by **fm7** » Mon May 19, 2008 9:49 am

Thanks Rasheed for showing another way to get around the strange deformations. But I found out there is a deformation again when I set up the object in my scene with your method - this time near the other character elements! After that I just moved the points of the moving object to the right postion and everything is ok.

Regards,
Sven