I have a project where I need to rotate a rig by 360 degrees (Snowboarding, 360 rotation).
The whole rig needs to be the child of a bone as I am importing into unity3d and it does not seem to work properly if you do not use pose mode for the animation - object mode will not work.
However, if I try and animate a rotation on an armature, going past 180 seems to be hard. You cant do the object mode IPO trick of setting it to a smaller rotation then dragging the curve up.
I have a sample file here with just one armature and a cube parented to it.
I managed to get a 270 rotation by doing 180, then repeating a 90 on top of that. However, trying to do the last 90 fails.
Looks like I was on the right track, thanks for the help.
Still not totally sure what the hell is going on in that mode though, I guess I need to go read up or something.
Great link, thankyou.
That video seemed to hint that some apps have a tool to help you do quat rotations. Does blender have anything like that or am I stuck with IPO curves?
I was reading up on this subject - eulers vs quaternions - maybe 6 weeks ago… and if I remember that video, then no, you don’t have to fight quaternions in blender. You upgrade to 2.5 where you have 8 choices how rotations are recorded. Quaternions, Axis Angle, and 6 different orders of XYZ, I assume the different orders are the orders they are evaluated in.
At least, that’s as far as I understand it, I’ve not used 2.52 for animation much. I have software/hardware conflicts prevent me from using it and I think I’m the only person on the planet with this problem…
Problem is, I am importing into Unity3D and Unity3D does not seem to properly import 2.5 files.
You have to associate .blend files with 2.5 to get it to do anything, but even when I do that it does not import the anims from my 2.5 files.
I guess I could maybe animate in 2.5, load it into 2.4 and save as a 2.4 file, then import to Unity3D, or try exporting as the common format used by Unity3D ?DXF? but it is so nice to be able to natively open a .blend file in Unity3D whilst it is still open in blender, and have it auto update as you save the blender file, that I would like to try and keep this workflow.
I have about another week to sort this out, but I have some other stuff to do until monday.
I have a thread about what I am trying to acheive here. There is maybe an easier way to do what I am trying to do, so if anyone has any input on that, it would be much appreciated.
Taking animation from 2.5 to 2.4x won’t work, the animation system was totally re-worked for 2.5 and not backwards compatible. I think you are stuck with quaternions in the IPO editor. I know nothing about unity3d or any game engine, but I did look at the thread you posted. I didn’t install unity in my browser, so I didn’t check out your work on your website.
Are you animating this character? I did look at the rig. You do know you can use the action editor instead of IPO curves? And the transform properties panel in the 3d view gives you rotations in xyz? Quaternions are used to record rotations of bones IPO curves, but when animating I don’t deal with the IPO curves.
I have various extra constraints as I am working with Unity.
I eventually found a solution I think - make an empty or cube and then add a “child of” constraint to the root bone.
Actual parenting does not work, you get two copies of the mesh in unity.
Then, animate overall movement and rotation with the cube (object keyframes), and once done, select the root bone and go through the timeline inserting pose keyframes. The rots you did on the cube will be translated into quats for you then.