Making Bill Ride
In this post I will describe how I got Bill to ride his horse through the wood as can be seen on YouTube by clicking on the link in my previous post “Bill Rides”.
The first step is to bring our Smuggler Bill avatar and Dapple Grey Mare prop into the scene. As you can see above, they are merged into each other.
We highlight Bill and select Pick Parent in the Linkage section on the right of the screen. This gives us a + shaped cursor which we click on our horse, thereby linking Bill and the horse. We also click on the Link drop down just above the Pick Parent button. This causes a pop-up to appear. I selected Position and Human Placement. Bill now rises up into position, but he is still standing.
By selecting Animation / Motion / Horse we are offered some motions. Since I have the Horse & Tack pack, I am offered two motions menus. Horse & Horse_Pack. By selecting one of the motions under Horse where the thumb nail shows a picture of a person astride a horse, Bill spreads his legs like he is riding. But as you will see in the picture above, he is sitting rather far forward in his saddle.
By selecting Actor / Avatar we can adjust Bill’s position by adjusting the axis settings for Move in the Transform section on the right of the screen.
OK now that Bill is sitting comfortably we want to start doing some animating. We can select the horse and right click and a menu will pop up which has a number of options. We choose Perform and then an option that indicates what we want the horse to do. Unfortunately the pop up does not show in the screen capture. I selected Gallop. The horse gallops, but because we have no scenery while we can see the galloping motion we can’t see the movement. If you open the timeline by click the button highlighted by an arrow in the picture above and click on Props / Arabian Horse and then click on the black Animation button, you will see the motions you selected appearing as blocks on the time line.
I picked the Wood from the World of Wilderness Vol 1. However most scenes will be fine, so you don’t necessarily have to buy one. Now if you open the timeline and also click on the black Transform button you will see a track where key frames are recorded. There will probably be a dot on the track at the beginning. If you now move the red cursor to further along the transform track and then move the horse in scene using the + cursor highlighted in the picture below, then iClone will add another dot onto the transform track which represents the position the horse was moved to. In the picture below I dragged the horse from position 1 to position 2.
Now if you rewind your track and press play, not only should your horse start a galloping motion, but should move across the scene as well.
You might find the horse is moving through the scenery too slow or too fast. This can be adjusted by moving the dots on the transform track either closer together or further apart. In the screen shot above, I chose 3 Gallop animations followed by a walking and then stop animation. I moved the horse once to the point I wanted it to reach while galloping (this created the second dot on the Transform track on the timeline) and then again to the point where I wanted it to walk and then stop (this created the third point on the timeline). In fact it look unnatural because the horse moves too far while it is walking, so I need to move the third dot.
In the next post I will discuss the positioning of cameras for filming the clips.
Tony