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Home ? Characters ? How do I move a character then turn him?

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30/01/2012 06:07:50

Steven547
Steven547
Posts: 66 		Having a hard time with this action. What is the easiest way to have the character walk into the camera view from the side, then turn towards the camera? Whenever I try, my character never lines up correctly, or he keeps turning in circles...


Thanks.

Steven
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30/01/2012 06:31:52

ukBertyMuvizu mogulExperimental user
ukBerty
Posts: 975 		Steven - this kind of stuff is always hard. I would always do it sort of the other way round. Animate the character to that they walk and stop in roughly the right place then adjust the camera so that it looks as if they walked up to it.

Getting to character to turn at the end of a walk is not that possible. I do it two ways:-
  • A sort of sweeping arc to a stop using the mouse
  • A straight walk with a turn using the "movement wheel" under the character at the end. This can look quite unnatural (in fact just fighting with this now so I'm using an action over the gap between the walk and the turn to cover it up a bit).

I hope this makes sense - anyone any other ideas ?
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30/01/2012 06:48:08

Steven547
Steven547
Posts: 66 		Thanks. I actually thought about the camera angle soon as I shut the program down. Trying to think of a way to "smooth" his turn...right now it's kind of "turn...pause...turn" kind of movement. One idea is to have two cameras in front, and when he makes the final turn to the audience, cut to camera 2.

On his FIRST turn towards the front, switch the camera angle to camera 2. This way, I would miss the initial turn, and catch the 2nd turn (which would fool the audience into thinking it was a smooth transition turn.) Or maybe not? But something to experiment with tomorrow.

update: Might have figured it out. Each movement of his is an action. After performing BOTH actions, I deleted the FIRST movement. Now, he comes out and it appears he turns a full right angle to face the camera.

However, some actions in my timeline are now "RED"? What does that mean?
edited by Steven547 on 30/01/2012
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30/01/2012 11:03:58

ukBertyMuvizu mogulExperimental user
ukBerty
Posts: 975 		This turning movements RED is new in 0.19b and I didn't realise was there - thanks for pointing it out.

In 0.18 if you deleted a movement then all subsequent movements would also be deleted.

Had a little play and I think it works thus :-

When you record a movement it stores the absolute position at the start and end of the movement. So that means it stores the x and y coordinates and the direction they are facing at the start and end.
If you delete a movement which has movements after it then Muvizu knows that the start position of the subsequent movement does not match the end of the previous movement. To warn you of this it puts it in red. It will mean that at the start of the second movement the character will jump to the new coordinates rather than moving to them, which may look odd bit could be useful.

Try it - record three separate sections of walking then delete the middle one.

Maybe one of the Devs would like to comment on the thinking behind this development ??

Berty
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30/01/2012 11:28:34

CrazyDaveMuvizu staff
CrazyDave
Posts: 118 		ukBerty wrote:


Try it - record three separate sections of walking then delete the middle one.

Maybe one of the Devs would like to comment on the thinking behind this development ??

Berty


Yup, it's a new feature. The actual reason behind it is to allow non-movement animations to move "off the spot" e.g. a Moonwalk that doesn't have to return to where it started. The problem with allowing these animations is that you could record a string of movements near the end of a scene, then rewind and perform an "off-the-spot" action at the beginning of the scene which would mean that the character is then not in the correct starting position for performing the movements: there will be a teleport. It wouldn't be right to just delete the movements or to fix the path automatically so a system has been put in place that allows the user to leave the teleport as it is (a red block signifies a teleport) or to make the path continuous, which will in turn alter the start and end positions of the movement.

Dave
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30/01/2012 15:07:52

Steven547
Steven547
Posts: 66 		Thanks for the replies. Heading off to work so I can't post what it looks like when I delete the middle movement. But from the camera angle being in front, it actually looks pretty good when he turns. It appears as though he made one turn towards to camera instead of two separate turns.
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Home ? Characters ? How do I move a character then turn him?

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