Bone Re-Parenting in Carrara
tersta
Posts: 11
Is it possible to re-parent bones and generally change the bone hierarchy in Carrara? It's obvious enough in DAZ Studio, but I'm not having any success even finding a bone hierarchy editing feature in Carrara. I see the bone hierarchy in the Instances panel, but I can't move the bones around.
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You should be able to move the bones around in the hierarchy. If you click on the line, it turns yellow, this is just selecting it. If you click on the actual name you can drag it up and down the hierarchy. This works on a line of bones I just drew quickly, maybe it does not work on bones stuck to a mesh or if it is a bought item maybe it is somehow locked.
( I retired from bones'n'stuff years ago,but your prob rang a tiny bell at the back of my mind)
Thanks Stu...for restoring a little hope.
I can drag the whole bone hierarchy out to the scene from under a group, but I can't move individual bones. I get the crossed-out-circle telling me 'NO!' when a segment of bones is selected.
Can you move segments of bones around, or just the whole bone hierarchy? If you can do that, then there's something set to prohibit that in my scene. Maybe motion constraints or something.
I dont recall ever seeing a crossed out circle ...ever?
Try a new scene and just draw out several bones in a line and see if you can move them about. Thats all I did as a quick test.
I dont possess any pre-boned items to test.
It sounds like yours is somehow locked.
OK, I opened an early version back up, with no constraints, weight mapping or IK chain. I could move segments of the bone hierarchy around.
I also tested to see if removing constraints would eliminate the barrier. It didn't. So, maybe the weight painting sort of locks things down. I don't know.
Anyhow, it looks like I'll have to revert to an unconstrained, un-weight painted backup if I want to re-jig my rig.
Thanks again Stu. You got me going in the right direction!
Hi Tersta :)
I'm not sure why you're moving the bones around,. but if you want to change bone positions within the model or bone lengths etc,.. you should "detach skeleton" from the model.. then the bones can be freely moved,
then you can "Attach" the skeleton again,
Detaching busts the weight mapping, but may also create better weight mapping to begin with since you've moved the bones to affect different parts of the mesh
Hope that makes sense
Hi Stu :)
Great, now I can hand over the baton,now a brainbox has joined in.....
you can in FBX imports but you only get one go then it locks
I imported Skyrim figures, nif files extracted from my game converted to FBX in UUW3D which had all the bones coming off the root
I could drag the bones to form hierarchies but only once for each so had to get it right first go ie children thigh shin foot toe etc
after that was locked
I imagine this applies to any weighted FBX import
Hi 3DAGE
The 'Detach Skeleton' option isn't available. It's in the Animation menu, but dimmed out.
I'm rigging a 6-legged Inch Worm and I put the root bone at the tip of the tail. That doesn't work so well, so I reparented and renamed the bones, so it wouldn't be confusing. You live...you learn. :-)
You may need to select the model and the root bone together to use the detach skeleton command.
Hi tersta :)
Make sure you select the "Model" that's rigged, rather than the bones themselves, then the "Detach" option should be available, since it's the object that has the bones attached.
The worm sounds interesting,. I've been working on some stuff recently and I used morphs to generate some of the animation in sea anemone's rather than rigging them and key-framing. i just used the Morphs, and the oscillate tweener to animate them.
I think It's important to remember that you can use both rigging and morphs to animate the model.
HI Wendy :)
I've not used FBX for a while so, I'm not sure why it would lock up after editing the skeleton... strange, maybe it's protecting something,
HI Stu :)
More like dunderhead these days :) I'm still struggling with 3D-coat, but I also jumped into Z-brush, which has a plethora of new tools and options to learn.
I'm also finding some new stuff in Carrara, or, improvements in what's possible with DS, like making figures and conforming clothes in Carrara. and rigging them in DS using the transfer utility. which makes Carrara a content creation tool.
Edited to add ....Evil beat me to it :)
Wendy,
I think your tip solves the mystery. I had exported to FBX and then imported that to stage, so I posed it. Then I went back to the original and wanted to use the same pose, but couldn't figure out how to save just the pose, so I started working with the FBX...then realized I didn't like the rig.
It didn't even occur to me that Carrara would care if I used a native or imported rig. Well, now I know. LOL!
Here's a render of the exported/imported FBX. I can see that the constraints didn't import and there's some weird weight mapping on the front that I'll have to fix before I add a swank texture.
Thanks to everyone trying to help.
You will get there in the end, most people do stuff wrong before they figure it out. At least the people here try and help.
Do you intend to animate your worm? I gave up on bones years ago ,now I just do stills and make the model in a posed position.
3dage, Ive been twiddling with zbrush recently,slowly figuring stuff out.I tried out the Keyshot demo last week. But maybe I will wait until its on offer again.
Not sure my brain can cope with Carrara 3dcoat and zbrush all at the same time. At least with Keyshot you dont actually need a brain to work it.
Nice worm... children's illustration?
I do what Stu does as well. I did rig a mammoth in Carrara which wasn't too bad, and I rigged a long hair braid. But I do stills as well so the smoothness (tweening?) for animation is not important for me.
Stu, On sale? When, by how much was it marked down last time?
I am a student but trying to find an academic outlet here in the UK, yikes. A couple of their links were not working last time I looked around the site. Then I found one vendor's price at £610... inc VAT, £510 without VAT. Not much of a savings for individual students.
So when I put it into my cart for the regular single licence user at the Pixelogic site... it goes in at $795 which translates at today's xchg rate as £523 for me as I have access to a US bank/credit card! And it did not add VAT. So no saving to go academic at all.
What price did you see? And if lower... I'd be ready for it. Been saving up!
Cheers, SileneUK x
Hi Silene,
Maybe I confused you?
I dont think Zbrush is ever on sale! The sale/offer I was talking about was for Keyshot.....but as I didnt go into it much, the basic deal was
" Keyshot for Zbrush" bundled with a "bridging" software that sends zbrush models straight to keyshot for render. So basically its a fully specced version of Keyshot that only works with zbrush....but its a hell of a lot cheaper than normal keyshot.
Are you confused yet?
Anyway when they released ZB 4.7 they offered KS for ZB AND the Bridge software for $250 or something like that for a month. Currently the price is $350.
Now if it was all $150, I would blow the dust of my credit card.
( I used my uk CCard for ZB and didnt pay any VAT by the way.)
Apologies to Tersta for wandering off topic!;-)
Oh bugger.
And my apologies, too. Just got over-excited. :red:
:coolsmile: SileneUK
Hi Andy,
It's not really the topic of this thread but, to animate something, there are the bones, the morphing, but we can add the soft body physic engine.
You speak about anemones (underwater), I'm just working on a sequence for my film in progress, with mutant anemones.:ohh:
With the physical engine of Carrara, one can obtain some interesting results sometimes (sorry for the low resolution):
http://www.bond3d.byethost18.com/index.php?topic=241.msg1405;topicseen#new
Hi Dudu :)
I agree, Physics should be used in animations wherever possible, and soft-body can be fun.
Nice use of soft-body on a collision, I hadn't thought of using soft-body that way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUW-is0rLw
hope that link works,.
it's the first thing I've posted in a while.
The main focus of this scene, was the fish animation,.. after I built and rigged the fish, I animated it and made that into a couple of NLA clips, then I added the fish to a replicator and animated that moving around.
The anemone's attached to the rocks were just a distraction from the badly animated fish.
:)
No need to apologize, Stu and SileneUK. I actually see benefits in being a fly on the wall. Keyshot, huh??? Actually, I used to do a lot of rendering in Vue. I moved away from stills, because I don't like the render quality of any app I was using. I do like Carrara's render engine. Nice, crisp renders. I decided to try modeling and while I still prefer Silo for hard surface modeling, initial UV mapping and/or photo-texturing...and 3D Coat for painting and displacement mapping...I will try out Carrara for modeling. But for starters, I wanted to see how it rigs. Honestly, I find it easier than Maya for rigging non-standard models. Mind you, I still haven't tried doing a control rig for the skeleton. Later...Maybe...I'm more inclined to build for UE4 users and control rigs aren't even needed. UE4 renders nice!!!
Thanks for the complement, SilentUK. Nah, it was just a test model. I bought Carrara last Friday night and set this worm as the test subject.
I've learned quite a lot about Carrara's capabilities and my own limitations. LOL! Do you think I would have learned NOT to work from FBX files? I tried every which way to get an NLA clip saved out...then I remembered what Wendy said and realized that the missing keyframe data is probably due to using an FBX. I did get NLA clips saved though. There's just no animation in them. The venture wasn't a complete failure. Now I know that rigs and animation clips can be transferred to between models.
So, the test is done. The video clip of the Whistling Inch Worm is here: http://youtu.be/54G5-A7FlQs
And the models in FBX and DAE format were uploaded as freebies to CG Trader. They can be downloaded here:
http://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/animals/insect/toon-inchworm-rigged
If you like, you can download the worm for testing and give me any feedback if it has rigging or weight mapping issues. I found some quirks in the weight mapping and decided to use the sliders to eliminate all, but the bones that should be influencing the given geometry. And STILL when I saved, closed and returned later, Carrara reassigned areas. I went all the way to HD rendering and video composition before I noticed vertices poking out on the right back leg. I fixed that...starting over with the whole animation, because I couldn't create an NLA clip. LOL!
Next...maybe some rigged cutlery or fruit characters. I want to see how metallic materials save out and also get familiar with modeling and photo-texturing in Carrara.
Thanks for all your advice and support, guys and girls. I think it will be awhile before I catch up, but I sure appreciate having the guidance of pros.
DUDU, 3DAge, Nice animations and I will take your advice about physics and morphing. That's something to really look forward to.
OK, I think I'm looking forward to hard. My head is swimming with the anemones now. LOL!
Cheers!
Try the spline modeler to make a squid that can be animated without a rig, but rather by translating points and adjusting bezier curves within the modeler- It's something the VM can't do. I may post a tutorial about how to do it soon.
Try the spline modeler to make a squid that can be animated without a rig, but rather by translating points and adjusting bezier curves within the modeler- It's something the VM can't do. I may post a tutorial about how to do it soon.
That would be good... I have things that may not always work well with bones so I'd like to see how you do this.
:-) SileneUK
Evilproducer,
I'll just have to wait for your tutorial. I've used spines in Vue for things like garden walls, roads and paths and I use them in Silo for creating extrusion paths, but I'm totally clueless how they work in Carrara. I tinkered with them a little and got lost fast with the grid planes popping up and the vertices so tiny I couldn't find them. LOL! So much to learn.
Thanks for the tip. :-)
Here's a link to a rather crappy little tutorial I did last night about making a squid thing that I animated, which in hindsight reminds me more of a Jellyfish. ;-)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56121/
I shall be doing another, better animation shortly.