I was just about to give up on Inspire altogether, when I started looking into Maya some more and read that it probably wouldn’t work very well with my iMac. I sighed a deep sigh and delved back into Inspire. That’s when I discovered how to move the bones where you want them to go and attach the correct vertices to them. The pose/animation process is also strange, but I’m starting to get it, after a lot of trial and error.
Below I wrote about my Inspire discoveries and workarounds, but it’s not quite a tutorial; I was just trying to answer some of my own questions about how Inspire works. There are probably easier ways to do the things I describe here. If you try them out and have questions, you can post them here, and I’ll try to answer them. Or if anyone knows better ways to skin and animate using Inspire, please post also! By the time any of us learn the intricacies of Inspire, the Blender Collada .fbx exporter will probably be finished…
dim3 Inspire “Workarounds”:
Inspire 3D Download, Manual and Tutorial:
http://www.littlegenerals.com/inspire
http://www.littlegenerals.com/inspire/tutorials/abg/index.php
file:///Dim3/Documentation/Manuals/Animator%20Manual.htm
Here’s how you navigate in the 3D View:
- To rotate the view, hold down the command (apple) key while dragging the LMB
- To zoom, hold down the option key while dragging
- To pan, hold down the space bar while dragging
- To select vertices, hold down the shift key
- To erase vertices, hold down the control key
Workaround #1: Object Reorientation:
When importing an object (.obj) from Blender into Inspire, the orientation will be different from what you see in the Blender 3D view. That’s easily correctible in Blender: After modeling in the front view, flip the object backwards 90 degrees so that the front is now on top. Then pack the data and export it as an .obj. You could also model the object in the top view without having to flip it, especially if you’re using a background image as a guide.
Workaround #2: How to Add Bones:
Do you “add” bones or “generate” them? It seems easier and more efficient to “add” the bones (using “Add Bones…”) one by one and moving them both manually (by dragging the pink cube at the center of the coordinate cursor) and through typing in the coordinates, until you have the full skeleton set up within the object. Then you can attach the vertices using the “Add Vertexes to Bones” command. (First select a bone, then select the vertices you want to attach to it.) There’s more about moving the bones and selecting vertices below.
Workaround #3: Generating Bones:
You can also “Generate Bones…” by selecting a group of vertices in an arm or leg, torso or head, etc., and typing in how many bones you want generated. The problem with this is that the bones seem to choose their own vertices in a haphazard way. To get around this, select each individual generated bone (which also highlights the vertices attached to it) and then select “Remove Vertexes from Bone.” Then move the end of each bone where you want it, and select and attach the correct vertices.
Workaround #4: Moving the Bones:
At this writing, I haven’t yet figured out a way to move whole (connected) bones as you can in Blender (though I haven’t tried to click-shift both ends of a bone–that might work). (It doesn’t–I just tried it.) Instead, you can type in the location coordinates and experiment with the numbers a little bit. You would frequently change views to do this, as you would in Blender. To resize and move the ends of bones, you have to first click the end of some other bone to get the coordinate pivot out of the way. Then click and drag the end of the bone you want to move.
Poses and Animations:
Creating poses and using them in animations is described in the second tutorial mentioned earlier in this Workaround Manual. Two important things to remember are: 1) After selecting “New Pose…” and setting the bone coordinates and locations the way you want them, selecting “New Pose…” again automatically saves the old pose before you start working on the new one. 2) To insert each pose in the timeline, you select “Insert Pose…” and position it with the timeline slider. You can also double-click each pose and type in the frame position. It takes some tweaking to get it right.
