mirror animation with puppetshop?

Davision3D

I like to mirror a whole animation with puppetshop but i just cant get it working.

I can easily mirror animations from bodypart to the opposite bodypart, like left leg to right leg. But trying to mirror the animation of center bones like the neck just wont work, no matter what i do, i get additional keys and the animation looks all messed up.

I basicly have a animation where a dragon puts his head to the left and now i want that animation with the head to the right, so whole animation mirrored. Has anyone experience with something like that in puppetshop?

Mark Dygert

I haven't used puppetshop in a while, we gave up on it after we had some issues installing it with max 2011 and then having issues on our render farm and we hired a new animator that didn't know it so I wasn't going to waste the time training him (their documentation is pretty bad). When they included CAT we switched but still use Biped and our own custom rigs. It also doesn't help that since they released it for free its pretty much become a dead plug-in.

When we did use it, mirroring was an issues for us too, like you it only really worked on limbs and was clunky to work with. It would also not properly align the axis of the joints, the pivots in one leg would be opposite of the other and would mirror incorrectly. This didn't happen all the time and we never really figured out what caused it. The two step setup process made it hard to track down.

I don't currently have it installed but it wouldn't surprise me if its a bug that they just aren't going to fix. Still you might want to shoot Kees a PM on CGTalk or TechArtist.org (which appears to be down right now...) and see if he knows how to work around it or if he is even interested in fixing it.

Davision3D

Thats really a shame, for me as a non pro animator it is really a great tool because its so easy to create own rigs and quickly animate them. But that with the mirroring is then really a big flaw.

I made the mirrored animation i needed now basicly from scratch but first i made another version with exporting it to max bones, mirrored that whole dragon and then used that as reference. Still really tricky to make it exactly mirrored by hand, atleast i dont need a whole set of animations mirrored.

Mark Dygert

Yea I would have trouble not working with mirroring, so losing that would be a deal breaker.

If you wanted to switch what you have over to CAT it wouldn't be too hard.

CAT has pretty much the same kind of functionality as PuppetShop as far as flexibility of rig customization and it comes with a lot of presets, like dragons, apes, spiders, crabs.
Adding a limb to a node is as easy as right clicking and selecting "add arm, leg, spine..."

While its in setup mode you could snap each joint to that of your current puppetshop rig, then save out a .bvh motion file from puppetshop then apply that to the CAT rig.