Do Bento bones provide for wrist rotations along foream axis?

[agentronin]

Using Bento bones is there a way to rotating the wrist along the forearm axis?

I understand this will require twisting the entire forearm just as it does in RL.

I am using Avastar in Blender

[Fionalein]

You can rotate any joint in 360 degrees in all 3 directions... all children of that joint will be rotated along. I see no reason why avastar should not be able to.

[agentronin]

How is this done? I am seeking to do something like turning the wrist while the forearm remains horizontal so that the palm changes from facing downward to upward. The only action I can manage to do is one that changes the angle between the forearm and upper arm.

[OptimoMaximo]

You have to change the manipulation axis when selecting the wrist controller, from Global to Normal. It's available on the lower tool bar, see this pic:

Also, it would be good for you to take the habit of reading the tooltips whenever they're available

Cheers

Edited June 18, 2018 by OptimoMaximo

[Fionalein]

in bvh you enter the tree and the rotation positions at the single timesteps, the avastar tool will do that for you, but i prefer raw file editing and free tools so no idea how avastar does it, in Qavimator there is a possibility to enter the rotational values at each timestep by hand  I am sure that is possible in blender/avastar too, but no idea where it is hidden.

here is an example how the data looks like:

https://pastebin.com/QgabYR1d

please notice the two long blocks of numbers at the bottom, one entry is for each value defined in the XML skeleton above (And in that order). Each block is one frame. This is an x rotation of mWristLeft to 180 degrees in just one frame (it just flips, no intermediary steps in this example)

 

Edited June 18, 2018 by Fionalein

[OptimoMaximo]

oh, one more tip: If you wish to rotate more bones at a time, you can do this by switching the pivot point mode here:

in conjunction with the previous tip, this will allow you to get a manipulator that is always aligned to the selected bone

[OptimoMaximo]

5 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

so no idea how avastar does it,

This is a quaternion rotation, which is best to avoid Gimbal Lock

You can change the rotation type to Euler XYZ if you prefer, but remember to do that BEFORE you set keyframes in place.

[agentronin]

Thanks for your reply. It has enabled me to numerically control the wrist rotation with ikWristLeft selected by the Y field in what your have boxed in red .

But I would also like to control the rotation by cursor. I am unable to find a way to do that. Is there? When I have the 3D Manipulator acitve with Rotate selected, I see the colored circles on the wrist just as they are shown in your screen shot. But I am unable to select the green arc and move it by cursor.

I am able to grab and drag by mouse the WristRight bone to position the hand, and the elbow and shoulder joints bend with the repositioning as it should.. But the yellow IK bone ikWristRight does not move with it. Should it?

 

 

[OptimoMaximo]

45 minutes ago, agentronin said:

I am able to grab and drag by mouse the WristRight bone to position the hand, and the elbow and shoulder joints bend with the repositioning as it should.. But the yellow IK bone ikWristRight does not move with it. Should it?

No, IK controllers are overriders to help animation. Avastar provides a 2 levels IK: a targetless IK (the one you were able to use, grabbing the wrist and moving it) and the one with a target(the yellow hand pad with the "pointer" behind the elbow). This latter type of control is used to establish permanently a location where the hand (and the upper chain of joints) should be adapting the IK chain to. This needs to be enabled using the IK controllers sliders, and they're used in animation to blend from no effect to full effect; for example you may want to use it in a backflip animation, so that you can nail down the hand positions for ground contact and take advantage of your IK chain to adjust the arm chain accordingly during the rest of the body's motion.

Here it is in action:

From standard TPose, i moved the controller away. Increasing/decreasing the slider's value transitions to/from the original pose to the IK dependent pose. If you want to have a maniulator to rotate, here is where you can set multiple manipulators to show together:

Hold down SHIFT while you left click on the marked manipulator selector in the image above, and you'll be able to move AND rotate via manipulator with both of them showing.

Hope this helps