Simple Eyes and head?

[auan]

HEY troops.............OK. I have a very simple character that consists of a body and a head (it's a pawn if that helps) The head is a sphere and the eyes are as well. I was planning on using scaling in Y to do very simple blinking however I am running into a ton of problems. The body has an IK chain in it that ends at the neck. I wanted to use rotation to animate the head but I can't seem to save any key of the frames that I want. When I rotate the bone in the chest and then try to save rotations on the head it gets all screwy. When I go to the timline and move the slider the head flies around into a differnet postion.???????????? And the eyes can't scale in Y once the character is out of his "Neutral" pose..................is there is a really simple way to set this up because I thought I had picked the simplest way. I need a technicle director to build all my models for me. Please help..........

[pomme]

i think you did something wrong at the character set up. Can you discrpt to me that how do you do the setup? Do you have one chain or 2 chain? Does your eyes parented to the chain? or to the head. Are you moving nulls instead of end effector?

[auan]

Thanks for thr reply, I'll try to be a bit more specific.

The pawns body is a revolution, his head is a sphere, and he has two arms. I have a bone for the left and right foot. I use the effectors to animate them. He has a spine that consists of 3 bones that end at his neck. His head sits ontop of the torso but it does not have a skeleton of it's own. All of the joints are animated using rotation and so is his head. As for parenting,,,,,,,,the head is the master of his helmet and a null that lets me grab both eyes together. Everything moves perfectly when he is in his relaxed pose. But as soon as I bend his back everything is out of whack.???????????????

[fredc]

In reply to:
Thanks for thr reply, I'll try to be a bit more specific.

The pawns body is a revolution, his head is a sphere, and he has two arms. I have a bone for the left and right foot. I use the effectors to animate them. He has a spine that consists of 3 bones that end at his neck. His head sits ontop of the torso but it does not have a skeleton of it's own. All of the joints are animated using rotation and so is his head. As for parenting,,,,,,,,the head is the master of his helmet and a null that lets me grab both eyes together. Everything moves perfectly when he is in his relaxed pose. But as soon as I bend his back everything is out of whack.???????????????

It sounds to me like you have your head geometry included in a global envelope with the body. Even though you don't have a skeleton inside the head, by default the head geometry is still looking at the nearest skeleton joint for deformations.

I would suggest this.
1. Reset the actor back to the original positoin with Skeleton/Reset Actor.
2. Select the Head and use Cut to remove it from the hiearchy, Assuming it is not the top of the hiearchy. If so you will need to reattach the body envelope.
3. Select the nearest bone and make it the parent of the head. You will be prompted to include the head as part of your skeleton- say no to this.

That's it. You should be able to key frame your head without being effect by the body. The head should move with the bone parent and thus the character. There are other ways to accomplishe what you want, but this should work (assuming I understand you problem).

Hope this helps,
Urp

[auan]

Once again URP saves the day...........................

I got blinking characters all over the place. Thanks for the advise.

[fredc]

In reply to:
Once again URP saves the day...........................

I got blinking characters all over the place. Thanks for the advise.

Glad to help.
Urp