secondary motion

madtooner1968 · Post by **madtooner1968** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 11:38 am

what is the easiest way to do secondary motion, i.e. ears or hair moving during a jump or walk, clothing, etc. i thought of adding bones to hair clumps, but think that may be too limiting. perhaps adding each clump to a layer and transitioning points?

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:08 pm

Bones work for me. It depends on the kind of motion you like to get. For a long strand of hair an equally long chain of small bones does the trick.

madtooner1968 · Post by **madtooner1968** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:45 pm

thanks

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:52 pm

Dynamic bones works like a charm when they have the correct values.
I mostly work with them, but when I want specific secondary movement (like in a jump or in a fixed walk cycle) I animate them by hand. Generally I use bones for tight stuff like hats or antennas. For soft stuff like clothes I prefer to move the points.

PD: I have been a time working on some simple simple techniques for fluid movement, maybe you would want to check:
viewtopic.php?t=15647
viewtopic.php?p=94094
viewtopic.php?t=18031

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:29 pm

My advice is to just do them by hand. If you use bones, I think animating those bones by hand is the best way. You can use bone dynamics if you want, but generally I tend to achieve better results, as selgin says, doing it by hand. For the time it takes to fiddle with bone dynamics, I could have done it by hand anyway, sometimes bone dynamics give weird effects and can be distracting if things keep moving too much, or the bones can move in weird ways ... its a fun tool but I think doing as much as you can by hand is probably best.

The computer will take you some of the way, but then you may want to tweak the bone dynamics, and afterwards you may think 'man, I maybe should've just animated this buddy's ears by hand in the first place' or whatever else your secondary motion is.

madtooner1968 · Post by **madtooner1968** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 2:24 pm

that's kind of how i'm leaning too. by the time i get the bones set up and all, i would have it done manually. thanx

sbtamu · Post by **sbtamu** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 2:59 pm

If you are going to use the character for other animation you might want to go with the bone so you can quickly animate it later on.

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 4:26 am

Bone dynamics do work but it does take time to set values.
I use them often, would like to see improvements and the ability to save presets, but the new library does offer some hope there, work up some effective chains then save them to the library for future use.

There is a lot of dynamic chain use on this old experiment .