Subject: Bones & Kinematics
Date: Fri, 20 May 94 09:21:00 PDT
From: Stethem Ted              5721 <TedS@ms70.nuwes.sea06.navy.mil>

  I have uploaded a short demo animation called GoldFist to the aminet.  I 
took the hand.bone demo object from Imagine V3.0, added a thumb, and used 
the new Metals texture (gold).  I put the hand on a checkered plane with a 
sky background and have it clenching into a fist.  It is a quarter-screen 
(160x100) HAM 70 frame animation which is about 280K in size.
  It is nothing really special but it was a great learning experience as 
well as giving me a chance to try out some new textures and check the 
reflection in scanline. I also found out why Impulse didn't include a thumb 
with the hand object.  Trying to move and rotate axes that are not on the 
normal plane, in a quasi-realistic motion, is a challenge (challenge, yeah, 
that's a nice word for it).
  This bones thing is going to open up a lot of things for me.  I have been 
experimenting with objects beyond the typical tube and it is nothing short 
of amazing.  There are a lot of static organic objects (like a certain cow 
that we have all come to know and love) that can be articulated with bones. 
 Not only that, bones provides the opportunity to "morph" new objects, so it 
can be used as a modeling tool.  The real key is understanding the setup of 
the subgroupings and I saw a very good post here going into detail about 
that.  I can't wait to get to work on that bones articulated shark that will 
put the Seaquest hammerhead shark to shame, hah!
  OK, now on to Kinematics.  Some people are talking about it but I must be 
missing something.  I have seen posts that say it is there but is not 
documented.  There is a single page provided in the docs textfile but it 
appears to say Kinematics in the title and not much more.  Is some kind soul 
going to blaze the trail and provide a tutorial here on the list about how 
to do Kinematics (or is it inverse Kinematics?).  Or will Impulse surprise 
us all and come out with some documentation about this and send it up here?

             
 
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