Okay, so I just want to make sure I understand this correctly. When you attach the guitar to the actor and then give the actor a "Guitar Motion" (body, arms and hands moving all over the place), the guitar itself will not follow ANY of the animation except for basic X,Y,Z movement because it's parented to the actor?

If the actor raises his arm that's supposed to be on the neck of the guitar, the guitar neck will not follow the hand?

I've only just begun to really use iClone4 Pro (even though I've had it for awhile) and I wanted to make a rock video, editing it in Sony Vegas. But this guitar movement (or lack of) is a real obstacle.

Could anyone give me some suggestions for a work around. Even though I own Poser, Vue, Daz Studio, and a few others, animation is not my strong suit. So my question is can the guitar be edited manually in the timeline to follow the action of the actor?

Thanks for any suggestions,
Lee

Thanks for replying; I was kind of expecting it would need me to tweak the animations and positioning; and for the record I'm blown away by what all these products make available.

Since posting, I've found some more worrying problems with the pack; the bass player's hands are in completely wrong positions - the right arm juts through the instrument and the left hand is several virtual inches below the neck. Also, the drummer sit on seat animation completely hangs iClone. I've raised a support ticket on this as something is definitely going wrong here; I have a feeling it's because I installed some trial versions in Backstage a couple of days ago to test this pack out and wonder if there's a conflict of some sort going on.

Hopefully, this will get sorted as I have great plans for a video for our band and if I can choose which of the kids to sell, I'll be needing the Dream Girl and Stage Magician packs to really pull it off :D

OK, so here's the deal. We purchase iClone and several content packs for something in the rough ballpark of $500. At that point, we have in effect just hired a group of virtual programmers, character designers, background designers, FX designers, mocap studios, and, above all, animators to produce the guts of an animated short. That's roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars of professional animation horsepower, in a neat little box, accessible 24/7, 365.

But it's not perfect, and never will be. Specifically, there IS no collision detection in iClone 4. It's just a placeholder in the user-interface, waiting for the day when a bunch of math geniuses manage to debug it enough for it to be usable.

Until then, we can get just the tiniest taste of what has been traditionally the herculean demands of animation: we can set a very few keyframes to compensate for animation imperfections.

It's not a lot to ask, once you really appreciate the incredible bargain you've been granted. And I've been in this forum long enough to realize that precious few users do appreciate that.

And to top it off, consider this: setting a few keyframes to correct an animation wasn't even possible with iClone until version 4. As late as iClone 3, if you wanted to correct an animation, you had to manually set EVERY frame, as if you were doing stop-motion animation. The fact that it was quite tedious was the trivial part; what was much worse is that it was incredibly difficult to do it right. (And finally, that explains why I wanted to blow my stack when people said iClone 4 was a trivial improvement over iClone 3--those folks obviously didn't know what they were talking about.)

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

OK, I'm spending way too much money on all this :D

I just gave in to the voices in my head and bought Rock Band, I have plans for this in our band videos. Just doing a quick test with Evan and a guitar and I see the guitar sinking into his body on guitar solo animations

I'm still very much a newbie with iClone, so is this something I need to deal with through collision detection or just hands on timeline editing?

Thanks :)

Edit to add:

Weirder. If I reset animation and do a perform, then the guitar bounces all around for the animation while the actor stays stationery. If I then remove the accessory and re-add it, it either works again or iClone throws an exception performing the animation.