When a rigged mesh is animated I notice that its X,Y and Z co-ordinates don't seem to change, (either when I look at part of the mesh or the skeleton). This is annoying when I want a camera or light to track the animated object. Is there a way to combat this?
mmm not sure if I follow but maybe use a contraint on the camera to track on the rig?
When a rigged mesh is animated I notice that its X,Y and Z co-ordinates don't seem to change, (either when I look at part of the mesh or the skeleton). This is annoying when I want a camera or light to track the animated object. Is there a way to combat this?
I think it might be to do with the animation being made in Miximo. The skeleton and mesh move together in the desired direction, but the origin stays put. I don't think I've noticed that with animations I've made before. No idea why the origin stays put.
Weirder still. At frame 1 the origin at 0,0,0 and the skeleton + mesh is 3 metres in front on the Y axis, (even though its co-ordinates say 0,0,0). If I use 'set origin' to 'geometry' , 'centre of mass' (surface or volume), the origin stubbornly stays at 0,0,0. Very frustrating! I've tried changing transformation orientations, but nothing works. It's as if some command has been given that prevents the origin being anywhere other than 0.0.0. Alt+G doesn't help. No individual bones change co-ordinates. Other objects or empties parented to mesh or armature don't change co-ordinates, (even though they've obviously shifted). I'm at a loss as to how you can get anything to track to a moving animation. Not a big deal with a jog in a straight line, but if an animation is complex it'll be a real pain to manually follow something.
If you want the animation to be centered or aligned with world then select the armature, tab into edit mode, shift+s->cursor to world origin, shift+a to add a bone. Select the bone either rotate x by -90 or go to right side view(numpad 3) and rotate 90 degrees.(R, 90, enter). Then select the root/hip bone of the Maximo rig, shift+select the new bone you added, and press Ctrl+p->keep offset to parent the rig to the new bone. Then you can use the new bone to move your rig around and it will be aligned to the world coordinates.
Thanks Wayne. Tracking to the hips does work. There seems to be plenty else going wrong between Mixamo and Blender, but at least that's one issue out of the way. I'm hoping that issues with the Mixamo add-on will be solved in 5.0
An important PS to all this. Re: issues with Mixamo and Blender. It seems that an add-on I used from GitHub was defective. I hadn't noticed this previously as I'd always imported Mixamo animations set to 'in place' up to now. However those with actual movement did not work properly in terms of editing or retargeting. Fortunately I've found a better add-on, described in this video, that seems to work well:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN5qgcWwSuc
