Parenting Prob!?

[VladThePainter]

I created a horse animation.  Used Duik.  Kept it basic.  Horse animation works fine, hooves, legs, body, rider, all moving and holding together etc, except for one thing:  I made a rider cloth on the horse to cover a back leg and parented that to the body, yet it won't stay parented evenly against the body and shifts side to side as the horse body moves without the cloth moving with the body.  Everything is parented correctly.  CLOTH parented to BODY.

I did try the expression mode by using the pick whip and expression the cloth position to the body position as it moves - and all it does is just make the cloth disappear as soon as i move a frame forward. 

Its like I want to crawl into the screen and simply staple that damn cloth to hold its position on the body!  How can I do this?  I'm hoping my question is simple enough to answer.  Not sure what more details I can share other than I'm seeking an answer to the above...

[Mylenium]

Provide a screenshot with the anchor points and any expressions nad parenting stuff reveealed.

Mylenium

[Kyle Hamrick · Accepted solution]

Short answer: Yeah, parenting can get complicated.

When you parent layers, all of the child's transform properties become relative to the parent. If you've got any expressions (what DUIK is doing) on that child, they may go right out the window when you parent, unless you've intentionally written your expressions to allow for that, because they're now calculating based on that parent's layer space vs comp space.

You might check out the "toComp" function - may be helpful here, particularly if you're parenting/linking via expression to something that may already be a child of a child of a child...

[davidarbor]

Could you be parenting it to the wrong layer? Are you using the Puppet Pin workflow with DUIK or do you have individual layers for each part of the horse's body? If you're using pins then you could be parenting it to the wrong layer. Perhaps you need to parent to one of the body pins' bones (that's a mouthful). You might also need to show hidden layers and parent it to the proper Zero. Basically, find whatever layer makes your body move side-to-side without any crazy mesh warping and parent your cloth to that layer.

DUIK is amazing and frustrating at the same time...so kinda like After Effects.

[VladThePainter]

Yes... it is crazy work.  Double and triple checked parenting - even tried parenting to other layers - and then to Master Controllers just to see what would give - and all have the same results.I tried using DUIK's Horse AutoRig, but there's just no video tuts on the subject, at least in English that I can follow.  The book is helpful, but still tough to follow.  I just added the Master Controllers as I would for human legs times two more... then just followed a horse video and moved the legs and body accordingly.  I have my guy holding a sword too so that complicates things even more, so as mentioned, I kept the movement as simple as I could. 

I did see that my one anchor point upon the cloth did indeed get moved, so that helped a wee bit when I replaced it.  I also added a pin on the cloth and then another pin on the body directly under that cloth pin.  After I did the expression whip positioning - that seemed to help greatly.  It still shifts, but not as much - and even sort of helped the realism of the horse's hips movement improve.  So... a challenge indeed and all your advice helped.  Thank you.  I didn't want to post it as I feel it somehow resolved itself, but if you want to see a pic of the result, I can.  Again - thank you all!

[davidarbor]

I'd love to see it. I've mostly rigged bipeds, but this weekend I rigged my first dog with pretty great success!

[Kyle Hamrick]

Agreed. Would love to see it!

[VladThePainter]

Here's a shot of the Horse precomp using Duik Controllers - and a shot where I am using the horse cross across screen in the story itself.  I use a bit of misdirection, using lighting, etc at the moment when the horse cloth shifts the most, so that also seems to help using a bit of eye manipulation. 

[Kyle Hamrick]

Whoa!

[davidarbor]

Very cool!