scene 3

I have decided to use the ‘Animation – path constraints & dummy’ with some animation of the wings flapping.  I first had to replace the person (3^rd model) with the biped.  After a few trial and error of trying to get the correct size of biped, in order for it to realistically fit into the glider, I realised that the pedals needed to be longer like so:

I first moved the pedal down.  Then I selected hierarchy and ‘affect pivot only’.

Using the move tool I moved the pivot up to where i wanted it. 

Then I went back to the create tab and adjusted the ‘rope’ to make it longer.  I wish I had discovered this technique in the first 6 weeks when I was doing my modelling as it cuts out alot of the tedious work of moving things around to my liking.

Problems

Email threads between myself and my tutor:

ME:

i have some trouble with my animation, when i place the biped in position it goes back to the way it was e.g. when i place the legs and feet in position and i click on empty space it 'resets'.  also i'm trying to link the biped and glider to the dummy but because i have the biped in position to the glider, i cant group them IN ORDER to link them with the dummy.  i have thought about individually selecting the object but that would take a long time, and hope you can point me in the correct/quicker way.

TUTOR:

Hello Yama, do you remember what I said to you about the part of the biped called 'Bip001' this is the centre of mass and should be linked to the dummy. If this is linked then the whole biped will move with it. 

I can't really think what could be causing the 'reset' problem other than if you are working in and out of 'figure mode'

Hope this helps, let me know if you find out any more or if you need more advice on this.

ME:

thanks for the quick response.  i have had a look at the list of object and there is nothing called 'bip001'.  i think its time to cut my losses and  go with the original model.

TUTOR:

If you have a biped in the scene, It's very odd that 'bip001' doesn't show up in the list. During Tuesday's lesson we linked this to the dummy already and then rotated and moved the biped into position. Did you not save this progress? I had hoped that you might have documented this as proof of you implementing the biped into your work.

Yes you should add this email thread as it will be important for evaluating your work and appraising your models/animations.

As you can see from the picture below, the ‘bip001’ is not there:

Due to the fact that the biped was giving me alot of problems i.e. it was not rotating properly and when I was drawing it it would draw it far away from the glider so it was hard to get an accurate size, not to mention that it wouldn’t resize for some unknown reason. so I decided to open the ‘Animation – path constraints & dummy’ and ‘scene two’ files and delete everything from the ‘Animation – path constraints & dummy’ file apart from the line/path, then I saved it and imported/merged it with scene two, having deleted the other path that was already in scene two.  I did this as I felt it would take me a long time to draw another or similar path and I wouldn’t get frustrated in trying to get the correct sized biped and I don’t have to place the arms and legs in the correct position in respect to the glider.  I also deleted all the animation from the second scene as I wanted to start again.  I did this by selecting all the objects and deleting the animation from the timeframe.

After talking with my tutor he pointed, I realised that I had to click all the followings in red in order to get bip001:

The next problem I had was when I clicked on follow it seems to turn all of the objects (biped and glider) backwards. Like so: 

The way I fixed that is by rotating  the dummy like so:

In an attempt to make the animation easier I first moved the pivot point on both wings to the corner like so:

Then I tried to link the handle to the wings which worked. But in an attempt to link the arm to either the wings or more preferably the handle failed.

In order to get the movement of the rotation localised I had to change the view to localised like so:

Due to the fact that I animated the wings to move at 35 degrees the ‘flapping’ was not noticeable so I had to increase the degree of movement.

When I was happy enough I copied the animation by holding shift and dragging the frames along like so: