Now you need some Bones to mark various places on the spline. Why?  You'll see why later.  Be patient, grasshopper.

Go into Bones mode in the Line of Body model window.  You've got to constrain five points (bottom of pelvis, bottom of torso, bottom of neck, bottom of head, top of head).  So create five bones.  Between creating each bone and starting the next, you must hit Enter to deselect your previous bone.  Otherwise the bones will become children of each other.  That wouldn't really disturb this tutorial, but it's a bad habit to acquire.

It really doesn't matter where you put them.  Just make sure that you'll be able to remember their names.  For this tutorial, the "Bone 1" through "Bone 5" names are about as descriptive as you need, but you can certainly think of better names if you want.



OK, that was all we needed to do in the Model window.  Close it again.  Go back to the Choreography window, select the Shortcut to Line of Body in the PWS, and click it over to Skeletal mode.  You'll see the bones added to the model.



Choose Bone 1 in the Choreography window.  You will immediately see a shortcut appear under the Choreography Action to represent this bone.  Right-click that Shortcut, and you should be presented with the option of creating New Constraints.  Make a new Path constraint.  In the property dialog for this constraint, click the Object drop-down and select 'Line of Body'.  Now click the little eyedropper button, and click on the Line of Body spline.  Your bone should jump to one or the other of the endpoints of the spline, pointing along the spline.  In the properties dialog for the constraint, click Translate only.  When you refresh the screen again, the bone should have its original orientation (making it easier to see the position).

Why one endpoint over another?  One of those endpoints is considered the start of the spline (at Ease zero) and the other one is considered the end of the spline (at Ease 100).  I'm not really sure how the program chooses... probably the first CP you laid out when you were adding points.

So, now you have a bone in a singularly useless position. You want to get it somewhere where it can be useful. Go into the property dialog for the Path constraint, and start modifying the Ease.  You want the base of your Bone1 to be at exactly the same point as the base of the Pelvis.  This will take some serious eyeballing.

How do you even know where the Pelvis bone is?  After all, you can't see the skeleton of the DojoBot model while you've got the Line of Body model selected.  Well, that's where Markers come in...

Select the DojoBot model (to see its bones).  Click in the left margin of the window, where the ruler is.  A horizontal line should appear across the window, with a little caret in the left margin.  Drag that caret until the line passes through the base of the pelvis.  Do the same for each juncture of bones, up to the top of the head.  Now, when you switch back to acting on the Line of the Body, you'll still know where the DojoBot bones are positioned.



Now go back to selecting the Line of Body model, select the Path constraint, and go through and change the numbers in the Ease channel until you line the bone up with the bottom marker.

Confused yet as to what we're doing?  Read on....



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