I’ve spent a lot of time reading the docs and watching the videos but I’m still having a really hard time using Live Mode.
It seemed pretty straight forward in the videos. Activate Live Mode; pose your markers; and stamp your pose back to your animated controls or joints.
But in practice nothing seems to behave how it does in the tutorials.
First, whenever I activate Live Mode everything simulates forward by around 5 frames. So Whatever pose I was hoping to alter has now sagged or moved from the pose I intended to ‘sculpt’.
Next, I’ll Shift-drag on a marker to parent-mask-move it, expecting to isolate the modification to ONLY my selected marker and it’s children like what’s demoed in the masking tutorials. But I’m seeing wobbling, waving movement on a bunch of seemingly unrelated markers, which makes posing considerably more difficult than just working with standard rig controls would be.
The exception to this is if I’m on the first frame of the animation, and ONLY the first frame of the animation, then posing in Live Mode more-or-less behaves how I’d expect.
I’m sure I’m just not doing it right, but the problem is that the right way isn’t all that obvious or intuitive, even after spending time reading the docs and searching the forum. It doesn’t help that the UI no longer matches the documentation, either.
In general Ragdoll has been exceptionally easy to use and figure out, more so in my opinion than most native Maya tools. I wasn’t expecting to struggle so much getting up and running with Live Mode but can’t wait to understand it better because it looks so powerful.
Here’s a video example of the way the markers sag when I turn on Live Mode, and also how masking doesn’t seem to isolate marker movement.
Thanks for any help.