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Animating a character


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Hi everyone

 

I want to animate a character (probably a low poly human) in FormZ and would greatly appreciate any suggestions about how to do that. I was thinking of using the radial bend and twist tools to move the character's arms and legs in a similar fashion to that used in the old FormZ 6 penguin videos (eg https://youtu.be/2N_DVekCcRI).

 

The problem I think I will face is that I can't have the character as a single object or else I won't be able to control the bend/twist on just an arm or a leg. I could slice the character into different objects, and then I would have bend/twist control over each of those parts, but it might be hard to keep the parts together unless there is some way to set up parent/child relationships between objects. I'm not convinced this will work that well, so I thought I'd see if anyone else can offer some suggestions.

 

Of course, ideally, I'd be able to either rig a character in FormZ or bring a rigged, textured character directly into FormZ to animate. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Kind regards

 

Chris 

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Hi Chris,

 

formZ Animation is great for architectural or mechanical animations, but it is really not geared towards character animations.  You can easily use Animation Groups to combine multiple elements into an animated assembly, but as PAL suggests, you will probably want Inverse Kinematics and the ability to "rig" a skeleton for the shape if you are serious about character animations...

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If you have Poser, you can (for example) export a person walking in .bvh format. FormZ can then import the animation.

Then you can assign person parts to the animation by dropping the parts into the relevant animation groups (some are even named correctly for identification).

 

Haven't tried it in the latest versions (7 & 8) of FormZ, but I remember playing around with it in version6 and it worked.

 

 

Des

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Thanks everyone. I thought this would be the case. 

 

I would absolutely love if FormZ included a posing and rigging toolset, but I suspect this is not really the direction the software is moving in. I guess I'll stick with Blender for more advanced animation.

 

Cheers!

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