Subtitles of the Movie

To this point in this Section we've been concentrating on Bone Rigs, and working with Organic types of motion and Skeleton building, but there are some great ways to animate mechanical objects, whether they're giant mechs walking across the ground, or an assembly line or something like that, Carrara has some wonderful constraints to easily help you animate that type of action. Let's go ahead and take a look at that now. I'm going to create a sphere in my scene, and let me scale this down a little bit. I'll create a Parent-Child relationship of several spheres here that we're working with, and that seemed jumpy for some section. Let me change that to Software, I want to get a little better performance here while I've got all this stuff running for you. Let's duplicate this and I'll drag that down and then as we learned earlier you can just duplicate and the same transformation applies to all those along the line. I'll go ahead and drag the spheres into a Parent-Child relationship with each one of another, so we can see how the constraints affect everything down the line. It's a nice, fast, easy way to add some really complex motion without any overhead for you. It makes it real easy to animate these types of functions. So, to begin with let me explain. We'll come back to Motion. When we're working with characters, and especially imported content like DAZ characters or Poser characters, the Motion Constraint Setting is usually set Full. Full is a complete set of scale and rotation and translation limits that you set. It's all numeric; there's no slider input, but it's the most robust full featured version that you have out there. It also works well between Poser and DAZ Content. I'm going to collapse this now, actually let me just change it. Let's look first at 2D Plane, and before I select that let me come back up here and select another sphere since we've got that Parent-Child relationship. I'll set the Constraint now to 2D Plane. The 2D Plane is really small. It only allows you, and by small I mean your options up here in the Properties Palette. You can only select the Plane that the rotation goes on and there is no Slider Control but it makes it easy to lock Motion if you're using the Rotation Control to one plane. Even if I grab the Rotation Tool somewhere else it's not going to allow a motion along that axis, so it's a nice way to guarantee that you've got things locked in place. There's some related constraints to this. Let's look at the next one. The nearest one is right below it: Access. Now, this functions the same way except that now I've got a Slider control here, or I can come back in and use my Motion Control, same as before, but I have the luxury here of changing this axis of rotation. Right now it matches the World View with Z going up and then X and Y, but I can go ahead and slant the X-axis for instance to 30 degrees, or something a little more aggressive like 60 degrees, and now when I go ahead and use the Rotation Controls we see that it is changing that. So for ball and socket type of motion like that where you want to confine it, there's a great way to do that. Another one related to axis is all the way down here at the bottom called Shaft. That behaves the same way but its axises are locked into World View position, so right now I've got it on the Z-axis; if I switch to Y we'll see that move up and down, we get the same control here where we can go ahead and adjust that with a Slider, or you can use the regular controls. It's really easy to work with. We've got Ball Joint which we saw when we were working with the characters. That's my preferred way to set up Skeletons, as I mentioned the Poser and DAZ content always comes in with Full set, but this is so easy to use, and for me, very intuitive. The Custom one is really kind of however you want to set that up. It gives you Slider controls over everything, so that's a nice way. If you don't know what you need you can engage that. And then we've got a great one called Slider. Lock is just that. It locks down. Nothing moves. Let's come to Slider for a second. Slider lets you move things, or translate them, through your scene really easily. Currently it's all set to Lock with the exception of the Z one by default, and if I move that you see it slide it and all the items below it up. Now, I can go ahead and Stack Constraints upon one another, and that's kind of nice. For example, further down the line here if I happen to choose a constraint of, oh, let's go with Shaft, I can go ahead and animate these objects accordingly and get real precise control over what's going on. No guesswork involved. It's a little bit easier to use in the Rotation Tools, and this is all keyframable, very animatable as it were. I can come back to here, adjust this setting. If I wanted to slide it sideways I could turn off the Y Locked and simply have it to Limited or Free. The Limits are very small so you get a side-to-side action. If I go to Free, of course, I can send this to wherever I want. It's a nice way to create assembly lines, or reloaders for autobots or something like that, but you can get this type of motion easily into your scene and then keyframe in some of those little bumps, where you would just advance one or two frames, adjust this just slightly so you get that mechanical bounce motion going on at the end of a movement. Really nice tools to work with character animation in Carrara 7 Pro.