Re: Tech/w.shop & Life Forms

Claire French (clfrench@sfu.ca)
Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:07:10 -0700

Hi to everyone

I am an MFA student at Simon Fraser University, specializing in choreography and performance. I will be graduating in April 1999 and my final performance includes Life forms animations and live dance.

Mary Lou mentioned the Life Forms figure and I have a few short cuts!!!!
Mary Lou wrote:

>-When creating an animation, how do you return the figure in the figure editer window back to its original position? Say from lying down to a
neutral standing position. Is there a short cut?>

YES!- Select all the joints in the Figure Editor window by double clicking on one joint, once the whole figure is highlighted, go to Edit menu and select the SET TO DEFAULT command. The figure will resume a neutral position.

"If students wanted to create their own costumes for the figures, is
>that possible? What program, plug-in do you need? Or is something like
>.... Poser, more appropriate for such a task?"

I am also currently exploring this. It can be done. At present I have only manaaged to get as far as importing textures and photographs into the animation.

">-Also can you create a wheelchair dance using Life Forms? Has anyone
>done this? I am finding that new technologies often seem to be usefull
>for young people with physical disabilities."

This must be possible. If there are dogs and tables and chairs in the Life Forms program, there must be a way to create a wheelchair. I have not tried this but perhaps you could try to create one and then save it as a wireframe rendered image, so that whenever you import it in to a file it will not suddenly convert itself to a human figure!!!! Does that make sense?

">-Sometimes the select... body part, drag action is difficult to
>control...especially rotation of the limbs, do others have this
>problem... or do people use other options, such as the near and far
>hemispheres?"

I use near and far quite often. Also check that the boxes in the users left hand corner are not crossed ( drag root etc.) The legs do tend to go a bit crazy on me sometimes. They just keep twisting.

Hope this helps, Good Luck.

Claire French