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Arm misalignment in basic character setup

by Rich Wilson · in Artist Corner · 03/12/2003 (1:51 pm) · 5 replies

I worked through the simple character modelling tutorial at [url] http://www.garagegames.com/articles/dhannah/tutorials/simplecharacter.html [/url] and everything worked fine except for one small problem. My characters arms are misaligned. The end effect is something like this:
[image] mywebpages.comcast.net/Rich_wilson/armswrong.jpg [/image]
The arms are pointing at odd angles up and behind the character. When he runs forward, they spread out, airplane style. Also, when I do a taunt animation, the arms switch places, like in this image:
[image] mywebpages.comcast.net/Rich_wilson/armswitch.jpg [/image]
I made sure to align the pivots on the upper arm pieces correctly, and they're linked to the Bip_upperarm nodes on the biped. I'm stumped, and was curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.

[edit] looks like the markup tags aren't working for some reason
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Torque Owner Mark Harmon
#1
03/14/2003 (11:48 am)
That happened to me when I exported my first player model. The problem is that the base pose for your model doesn't match what the animation/dsqs are expecting.

If you do all your own animations then it can be fixed by making sure that the base poses are all the same.

If you planning on using the animations in the torque demo then you should probably use the tutorial's model base pose. I think that pose has the player with it's arms in a position to hold a rifle.

The reason for this is that the transforms for the bones are relative to the start position.

Hope this helps a little.

Torque Owner Rich Wilson
#2
03/19/2003 (11:05 am)
Thanks a million. That helped a lot. I was unaware that the animations were relative offsets to the start position. I'm having one more problem now, however. The arm positions seem somehow linked to the cameras orbit, so when I orbit above the player, the shoulders rotate behind the body, and from below, the shoulders rotate in front of the body. This seems like a heirarchy thing or something, but I'm not sure.

3D Artisto
#3
09/02/2003 (3:40 am)
Hi, Rich!
Your last problem can be related to head turn animations check them in show tool.

Torque Owner Rex
BrokeAss Games
#4
09/05/2003 (2:41 pm)
...I experienced the same effect with my work this morning...thanks for explaning it...Does this mean that I have to get the limbs in the 'general' position and it will look much better? Mine didn't have the airplane look when running, it ran somewhat normally, and held a weapon just fine...just looked like he was firing from the hip...

Alex "IkoTikashi" Zappe
#5
09/05/2003 (7:40 pm)
@Rich: A little offtopic, but don't use spaces between after and before the markuptags: mywebpages.comcast.net/Rich_wilson/armswrong.jpg