“The End of…” – Note 1
In my previous two posts related to the “End of Bill & Gill” I mentioned that I would post some notes on lessons I learned during the process.
This is the first of those notes.
The dun horse is supposed to have smoking nostrils. You can’t really see it in the movie because it is too dark, but I assure you they really are smoking!
Several posts ago “The Making of Exciseman Gill”, I explained how I inserted particle generators (Small Smoke) into the dun horse’s nostrils and how I controlled the direction of the smoke using the Gravity settings.
The smoke was gushing forth nice and evenly from both left and right nostril, even when the horse was galloping. However when I then positioned the horse to run across my terrain along the path I wanted, the direction of the smoke coming from the left nostril became very different to that coming from the right nostril.
In the image above, the red arrow “1” represents the path I wanted the horse to run along, but when the horse galloped the smoke was all over the place.
It seems that in the current release of iClone (5.5) the gravity settings are related to the orientation of the terrain (see the thin green and red lines marked with “2” in the image above). This would be very useful in many circumstances, but was a pain for me.
To make my horse gallop and make the direction of smoke predictable (without having to perform external maths), I found I needed to make my horse gallop either along path “3” or “4“, ie. aligned with the orientation of the terrain.
Thanks to Reallusion Forum member sw00000p for advising me that to achieve what I wanted in a simple way requires “Parent Space Orientation”, which is not in the current release.
So my workaround was to rework my terrain (greater distance from edge of terrain to the pit and positioning of trees) so that I could make my movie with the horses running along a path that was aligned with the terrain axes.
Tony