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Will you please give some scenarios in which a buffer would be of good use? I understand some of it, but I want to make sure that I understand the big picture here and I have yet to get a good explanation on this.
When would you need to use a buffer? What benefit does it give? Give me a scenario, please!
Finally! I 100% understand the buffer solution. Actually, I was recently doing some animation so I'm definitely familiar with this problem and I'll make sure to setup my new rigs this way. Thanks for the extremely clear answer to this post. You are awesome!
Hi Jed, thanks for the review of Good Parenting! It's nice to know that it's helping other people to rig. Depending on how broad a definition you use for buffer, it can be useful in quite a number of situations. But narrowing it down, it's primarily helpful for two things:
1. Keeping the object rotations of an object while zeroing out the channels.
2. Constraining an object without the child moving and without using maintain offset.
Here's an example of when to use a buffer in the first situation, and why it's important:
Let's start with two chains of cube's. Nothing special here. I'm going to pretend they are two sets of arm controls.
Let's bend the arm at the elbow. Notice now the rotation manipulator is pointed down the chain? I like that, it's sexy. Let's say that the arm you want to rig was modeled at a 45 degree angle like this. Now you want the controls for your animator to be at 0. Can't have them guessing that tz should be -2 and ry should be -45.
So we want all our controls zeroed out. Well, there are two ways to do this. Use a buffer, or use freeze transformations (sometimes we even do both, but that's a different example..). So I'll go ahead and freeze transformations on the elbow in the first chain.
Ack! Well, we have zeroed the control out, but now the rotation manipulator is pointing the same as the control above it! We don't want that, and a buffer will prevent it.
Much better. But what's so great about having that manipulator point towards the end of the chain anyway? Who cares? Well, animators care. A lot. Look, I'll bend the elbow here. Obviously not something a real elbow would do, but this is animation. We can do whatever we want.
See how the rx value is a nice 45 degrees? Take a gander at what happens when I try to put the other chain in the same pose.
Dear God! :P Look at those values! The big problem here isn't that the values are crazy. Most animators probably wouldn't care that the values aren't nice round numbers. The problem is that there are three of them. That means that an animator has to animate three times as many curves for the same action. And the way that the control has to move is unintuitive. If the animator was animating this scene in gimbal mode, then they would have to adjust the control three times just to get a value the other could do with one.
Hope that helps to clear things up a bit!
Jed Hunsaker
Replies to this question:
Jed Hunsaker said about 14 years ago:
jordan hueckstaedt said about 14 years ago: