Irrational Orthopedics - New Bone Plugin

[SplineGod]

For those of you who were following the Setup Machine Thread. http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46039
The name of the new bone plugin Ive been testing is called Orthopedics by Irrational Number. Peter Jespersen is one of the programmers and has allowed me to post a litte info here and there. He gave me the go ahead to talk more about it. These are the functions in the first pack which they plan to release in about 2 weeks:
Joint Mover
Breaker
Fuser
Twister
Align Pitch
Delete
Connector
Clone/mirror
They are for LW 7.5 only
From here it only gets better.
Follow the link to:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46814

[PeterJ]

Here is a link to an AVI showing a few of the tools that will be available in the Irrational Orthoredics pack 1.
Ortho pack 1 (http://www.irrationalnumber.com/html/Movies/Ortho_1.avi)
The tools used in the AVI are:
Joint Mover (select 2 bones and move the joint)
Bone Breaker (split bone in colinear and spline interp)
Bone Delete (Delete bone without a train wreck)
Bone Connector (Snap child to parent, parent to child or create a new bone.)
The final pack will also have:
Bone Twister (Change a bones pitch angle)
Align Pitch ( Align the pitch of selected bone with parent, pressing enter will step down the chain.)
Delete Bone Hierarchy (Selected bone and all it's children deleted.)
Clone Hierarchy (Same as the LS in LW but leaves the copy off to one side)
Mirror Hierarchy (Selected bone and children copied and mirrored)

All tools check for frame 0 and automatically set rest and rotation.

[hrgiger]

Ahh, that's the way bones should work in Layout...

[Emmanuel]

Hi,

is that for 7.5 or 7.5*b* ?

[PeterJ]

Ortho works in both. Actually all of the tools except Joint Mover and Bone Twister work in 6.5b. But Mover and Twister use functions only available in 7.5 and up.
There will be some new movies up on the web site today and the first release will be very soon.

[private]

This looks like an excellent tool for Lightwave. I can't believe it's taken till 7.5 and a 3rd party source to implement this into the toolset. This is really an excellent addition. Bravo.

[PeterJ]

Thanks private!
It's nice finally having the first pack out.
It's been a lot of work over the past 3 months.
The second pack wont take that long at all and it will add a lot more to the rigging abilities of Lightwave.
I wish I could tell what they are but not yet.

[3D|Dave]

Lightwave could use a big dose of Calcium and then some.

Cool plugin!!:D

[jin choung]

someone correct me if i'm wrong,

but color me unimpressed....

isn't this functionality available entirely within skelegons if you care to do the edits in modeler?

is it not that this is simply a layout way to do such edits?

granted, lw should be flexible enough to do these edits in layout too but in a pinch, it seems like doing it in modeler would not be too much of a pain... no?

jin

[SplineGod]

Originally posted by jin choung
someone correct me if i'm wrong,

but color me unimpressed....

isn't this functionality available entirely within skelegons if you care to do the edits in modeler?

is it not that this is simply a layout way to do such edits?

granted, lw should be flexible enough to do these edits in layout too but in a pinch, it seems like doing it in modeler would not be too much of a pain... no?

jin
Yes you can do this in modeler which, IMO is NOT the place to be dealing with bones. After I add bones either in layout or as skelegons the next thing I do is to start testing deformations and make sure the pivot points of joints are in the correct spot to give proper deformations. Tweaking the joints at this point SHOULD be done where the deformations are taking place; in layout. What a pain it is to rotate a bone, see that its pivot is in the wrong place, clear all bones, go back into modeler, tweak the joint, go back into layout and covert skelegons to bones again. What a slow and tedious way to work. The nice thing about ortho is that if I have basic IK setup on a character I can disable it temporarily and quickly tweak or modify the bones for the same character or a completely new one. Suppose I have bones that have motions applied to them and I simply wish to swap bodies and reuse the same bones? Ortho allows you to do just that You cannot do that with skelegons without having to go back into layout and completely resetup the IK or save out baked motions or somehow use motion mixer etc etc... all of which take much more time. . The reality is that skelegons are a workaround for not being able to do this in layout. It only makes sense from a workflow standpoint to tweak bones in layout no matter where they are created.

[jin choung]

hey larry,

a very even handed, measured response! normally in threads like this, what i said would generally trigger a 'pile on'! :)

anyhoo, ok. then it's pretty much what i thought. and i agree that indeed, we should have the ability to alter bones and stuff in layout proper.... i know that i for one distrusted skelegons from the gitgo but have come to accept them.... but alas, what's lw without workarounds? part of the charm.

but one thing though, isn't there a dstorm plugin that will allow you to re-export bones back to skelegons for alteration?

anyhoo, it is unfortunate that this functionality (and generally, the ease of setting up and editing bones, iks, etc in lw) isn't inbuilt but luckily, the plugin is affordable....

jin

[SplineGod]

Originally posted by jin choung
hey larry,

a very even handed, measured response! normally in threads like this, what i said would generally trigger a 'pile on'! :)

anyhoo, ok. then it's pretty much what i thought. and i agree that indeed, we should have the ability to alter bones and stuff in layout proper.... i know that i for one distrusted skelegons from the gitgo but have come to accept them.... but alas, what's lw without workarounds? part of the charm.

but one thing though, isn't there a dstorm plugin that will allow you to re-export bones back to skelegons for alteration?

anyhoo, it is unfortunate that this functionality (and generally, the ease of setting up and editing bones, iks, etc in lw) isn't inbuilt but luckily, the plugin is affordable....

jin
Yes they do have such a plugin that will allow you to import bones into modeler as skelegons. The only problem is why bother when as you said, up until now its just been easier to create things as skelegons. The problem with this plugin is the same fundamental one; once you have imported bones as skelegons what do you do? Making changes to bones doesnt effect skelegons and changing skelegons doesnt effect bones. What you want is to be able to change a skelegon and have it automatically update in the the bones in layout. Even better, why even bother doing it in modeler? Why bother with worrying about which viewport you draw skelegons in because it screws up the bank handles? Why not draw bones in layout and not worry about the pitch. Why not have tools to allow you to easily tweak the pitch or have it automatically fix the pitch down a chain of bones? Why not have the ability to store bones in a character in layout? Why not have the ability to swap a body with another and retweak the bones to match the character? Why not be able to do this regardless if a characters bones contain motion data and/or IK data? Why even bother with skelegons if you dont have to? This is precisely what this plugin does and then some. For $65.00 its a bargain. :)

[3D|Dave]

I just picked this up last week.

Very cool plug-in and just in time for my Motion Builder work. Since I want to re-use my Lightwave setups and keep my Motion Builder compatibility, this plugin will make it very easy for me to do so.