Unit Making Tutorial by utahjazz7 (May 9, 2005)

make those bits invisible or the same colour as the cloth. invisibility works best for arms and the hip.
 
Make sure you open the Joints Window and zero both the PDM and the clothes too. With some of the clothes, you may have to select each body part in turn and ensure that the coordinates are all set to zero, too.
 
Iron Beagle said:
Why does changing an object's parent in mid-animation sometimes drastically change its position?
Click to expand...
Because the current position in relationship to the original position of the first parent and 2nd are quite different.

If the two objects moved exactly the same way and the same amount than changing parenting should not make any difference to the objects location.
 
Now what if I want the figure to reach down and retrieve an object that is parented to some part of him, such as a sword in a scabbard for example, and I want to re-parent that object to his hand in the middle of the animation. Is that possible without causing the object to go flying around everywhere in the preceding frames?
 
Yes, I do that a lot. Utah's tutorial explains it pretty well when he talks about the spear going from the hand to ROTATE BALL for the death.

Take a 10 frame fortify for a sword unit. Frames 1-5, hand goes to hilt (sword parented to the sheath, which is parented to the hip). Use the Key Frame editor to + in frames 1-5 for the sword. Go to frame 6 and change sword parent to whichever hand. Go to frame 10 and pose the arm with sword drawn. Go back to frames 6-9 and check the sword and hand to make sure it's not sticking through his side or anything and make small adjustments as needed. Look at me Sheriff fortify (drawing gun from holster) for an example. Hope this helps.
 
Iron Beagle said:
Now what if I want the figure to reach down and retrieve an object that is parented to some part of him, such as a sword in a scabbard for example, and I want to re-parent that object to his hand in the middle of the animation. Is that possible without causing the object to go flying around everywhere in the preceding frames?
Click to expand...

Like NavyDawg said, basically that is no problem to do. You can definitely have a sword parented to the hip/scabbard and change to parent it to the hand. You just need to make sure that all previous frames for the prop are keyframes. If the parenting change takes place in frame 40, then the sword prop's frames 1-39 all need to be keyframes.
 
Yeah, that's what I thought. But I make all the frames before the parent change key frames, and when I pose the figure at the end it STILL changes the position of the prop in the first frames wildly. It looks like poser is still "filling in" all the frames in spite of my making them key frames. I'm about to throw in the towel here.
 
You may find that you need to go through each of those early frames and parent the object to the "original" parent in each frame. I've found that sometimes this is inexplicably necessary. You're right, though, that this business is trickier than you might think it should be.
 
Even that doesn't work! Changing the parent in one frame seems to change it in EVERY frame! I have come up with a temporary solution of having 2 of the exact same props, one of which is always parented to the hand but scaled to zero until needed, but this problem is driving me insane.
 
I had this problem with Diomedes spear. I'll try to remember how I got around this.

EDIT: I remember, I when I wanted to return the spear to the origional hand, I used the "+" icon in the Key place, and then the NEXT frame, I re-parented it to the hand.
 
Alright, my unit's going pretty good. I've made two convincing punch attacks, a default, a fortify, and a victory. In each attack, the last frame is at the fortify pose, so it can cycle nicely. The victory ends at the default pose, and starts at the fortify. But now I need to make a death, and it has to start at the fortify pose. Now, I can do this manually, but that would be pretty painstaking and tedious. Is there any way to "save" the pose a figure is in at a certain frame, and start a new file with that as the first frame? (sorry if I was just kind of wordy, I'll explain better if need be, :crazyeye: )
 
Yes! Easy. Open up the keyframes editing window. Go to the top and you'll see "PDM". Click on the PDM box corresponding to the frame you want to export. The white box should surround all his body parts too. Now press CTRL-C. Now open up the file you want to export the pose to. Open the keyframes window again. Select the PDM box in the frame you want the pose to go to. Press CTRL-V.

Sometimes this has odd or unexpected effects, but in theory it should work. If it doesn't, try again.

Here's an alternative method. Click on "PDM" in the frame containing the desired pose, as before. But this time just drag that box to the first frame. Now save it as the new file.
 
Okay, new question: in my death animation, I want the unit to levitate in the air and hold his arms up to the sky while getting enveloped by a bright orb of white light. I got the first part done, and even the light effect on the unit's body, with a spot light. Is there any way I could do this using an effect or something preinstalled in Poser? Or would I have to dish out some dough to buy an effect pack?
 
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