Question About Posing

nox

Is there a way to lock sections of a model so that they don't move when you shift other parts?

For example, say you stage a character throwing a punch and it looks to stiff. Could you lock the feet and hands then move around the torso to get a more organic look? That way when you are done the fist is still hitting the enemy and the feet are still touching the ground.

gederix

Yes. My anecdotal 2¢:

Theres two types of pins you can use to pose, the first is the universal tool. This is the clunkier of the two but it can do some things the second tool -  active pose tool - cannot.

The universal tool uses purple pins that will help pin body parts, with the option to lock translation, rotation or both. When using the universl tool, click on a body part and you will see the tools gizmo, right click on that and you will see the pinning options (also available top left in the viewport gizmo, not sure what its called, green red blue circles with little stick figure). I mainly use this tool when I want to pin feet and rotate the pelvis. The universal tool pins are also acknowledged by the translation and rotation tools. So for ex use the universal tool to pin the feet, then click on the pelvis and use the rotation guides to adjust.

The other tool - active pose - is the one i use most. It has its own pins, separate from the universal pins. For best use of the active pose tool you need to open the tool settings pane and ideally dock it somewhere so you can access it easily. With the active pose tool selected, click on a body part then go to the tool settings pane, you will see a bunch of options. The main ones youll use is 'toggle pins' which activates and deactivates the active pose pins for that body part. Then theres the 'pin at origin', 'pin at end' and 'pin both'. These are for setting basically the rigidity of the pinning, with pin at both being the stiffest, the other two set which end of the body part is stiffest to move.

The caveat is that the active pose pins are ONLY acknowledged by the active pose tool so if you switch to a different tool, like rotate, the pins will not work. The other handy thing about the active pose pins is they persist through closing and reopening a file, so if you are posing say your fight and you have active pose pins in your figures pelvis, feet, chest upper and hands (for example, but also my typical posing methodology), when you reopen the file to pose another 'frame' the pins will all still be there, no need to redo them.

And you can easily move a pinned body part directly, grabbing it with the active pose tool allows you to move it freely as if it is not pinned, no need to toggle. So in the ex above if you did want to move your figures feet you can easily do so even though they have been pinned by just grabbing them directly and moving them. Lastly, the active pose tool also has a gizmo to help with posing that you can toggle visible/not visible from teh tool setting spane (or holding down shift while clicking on a bidy part). I hope that makes sense.

In your ex I would, using active pose tool 'pin at both', pin just the feet, then still with the active pose tool start grabbing and pulling body parts (pelvis, fists, etc) and then adding in more pins as i get parts where I want them, so once I get the punching fist where I need it, pin that, the pelvis where I need it, pin that, move the other fist, adjust the head position... etc til done.

IMHO the active pose pins/tool are really really useful and work quite well. The universal is more fiddly but it can do some poses that are tough or impossible with active pose because its hard to rotate with it, especially embedded body parts like the hips/pelvis.

Note with either you can fairly easily pull pinned body parts out of place if you move too far or too quickly. Also, if you find your figure jerking about awkwardly when posing, select the figure go to parameters, unlock limits. Can help smooth things out.

Also, just to be clear, the tools do not acknowledge each others pins so the active pose will not see universal pins and vice-versa.

nox

Thanks for the info.

Edit: I've had a chance to work with these now, they really make posing sooo much easier. On top of that the results appear much more natural. Thanks again for the detailed info.