Sweenie wrote:How will the kinematic controller for the body be handled? Do you have to calculate the position for the body controller based on the midpoint for each leg? Or will the the body controller only handle the vertical position of the body and be pulled along when the legs starts to move?
I suppose you calculate a midpoint based on all feet positions and then allow some limited linear movement to make the body move up/down , back/forth and sideways.
Thats what I though for a while, but the thing is that provided that the system is working fine (which is not yet) you can place the body anywhere, the effector simple tell the physics "this is what I want to do?" and if the joints have the power to generate the necessary torques or forces then they will do that, if they do not have enought friction, then they do what they could and reach some dynamics equilibrium.
it is these places when a joint can't meet the desired target that the output can be used to signal the controller to active some new state.
I know it sounds like magic, but it really is not, this is a is a new stage on physic simulation, it is using the laws of physics to do things that seem physics impossible or extremely difficult.
for example it is really easy to make a character that can fly and make really interesting posed like these:
https://www.google.com/search?q=iron+man+pose&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi4zOjwu5PYAhUS3GMKHadIDjkQsAQIKw&biw=1920&bih=949you will see that after we get two or three demos, that will seen very natural and intuitive which of those poses are fixable and which aren't.
for example we can see that a horizontal fly pose is impossible to sustain because the center of mass can not be supported, however a vertical is quite possible.
It is amazing, I always thought that in an alternate universal where superheroes were real, that Superman was more natural than Iron man, and it turns out that it is Iron Man who is the more realistic since the large majority of his poses are with the body upright and supported by thrusters.
even when he flies horizontal you could say he is gliding with his fins in the suit.
Superman on the other hand has a stupid cape that can only generate drags.
And that's by the laws of physics, who knew?
anyway I see if I can make more progress today. I found some memory overrun in the solver.