Morphing a mesh depending on joint poses?

[damien]

Sorry if this has been on topic before. I'm about to skin a character and from my earlier experience I can never get decent deformation in all of the extreme poses. So I want to know how to be able to tweak the mesh in different poses making it morph into good deformation however I move the joints around. Im not very into the set driven key, especially not together with a skinned mesh (cant see how it can go along with the data from the skinning) so please help.

Sincearly

Damien

[warpcat]

Well, it dosen't sound like you're going to like this, but the best general way is blendshapes linked with set driven keys to your joint rotations. Set driven keys are awesom, how could you not like them?

[sookeyjane]

actually, you might consider not trying to make one mesh do everything. duplicate and weight them to do different extreme poses. there's no reason why you can't have more than one that fit certain ranges of motion.

i love blendshapes, but whether they are the way to go depends on just what motion you really need. i've used them most successfully with facial animation and hands.

[damien]

thanks for the reply guys. I played around with it a bit but in the set driven keys option box I couldnt find the option to set the joint rotation to the blendshape attribute because there wasnt any. even though I made one on the skinned object.

plz help.

thanks
/d

[damien]

Ok I solved that last problem. Now I just wanna say that it is a doable way just that the way you do it in animation master or max4 seems heck of a lot easier
oh well, its tons better than nothing tho!

[cinemafan1980]

How exactly did you go about modeling the blendshapes that were to be driven by the joint rotations? The only way I know of is to create the blendshape targets by duplicating the mesh when it is in the bind pose, then move the blendshape in the mesh's history to occur before the skinning. The problem though, is that to get the points to move the way you want as the joint bends, you have to
1) rotate the joint, then 2) move the desired points on the target object and watch how they move on the base object, which will be in a different direction because of the joint rotation. This is very counter intitive. Did you find a way around this, or is that how you did it?

[stevesayer]

I haven't tried this, but couldn't you just skin the target along with the base mesh after duplicating, and then work on it at the pose in question (so everything functioned intuitively)? --The skinning could be deleted after returning to the bind pose...

I dunno.

-Steve

[gaviez]

i have try that :
duplicate your skinned object with the base setting of duplicate option box, move it in order to see it . then launch the connection editor, left, load the shape of the skinned object, right, load the shape of the duplicated object, then connect the out mesh attribut of the skinned object to the in mesh attribut of the duplicated object so when you rotate the bones, the duplicated object is deformed like the skinned object, rotate the joint ,move the vertices on the duplicated object to modele the deformation, move back the joint to the original position and break the connection between the two object, and voila, you have done a new morph target for your skinned object. now you can use SDK to morph according to the rotation of you joint. don't forget to move the blendshape deformer before the skinCluster in the history list...

Gaviez

[stevesayer]

Hey, that's a much better workflow! Thanks, Gaviez!

-Steve

[ragtag]

Give me a week and I'll have a release one of bodyShapes.mel up. It's made to do exactly that (somewhat based on Smart Skin from AM). It works only on poly, and I probably won't have the time to change it to work on anything else. The beta is available at http://www.animagicnet.no/maya/bodyShape/

Modeling pose based deformations in Maya sucks, and AW should DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. My script works, but because of the way Maya handles tweak nodes and CP transformation in the history of objects it takes forever to apply those shapes.

AM has had it for ages, now Max has it, and as far as I know XSI let's you do this easily too (though they don't have a specific function for it).

Sigh....and AAARRRRGHHH....

As I said, give me a week and I'll have a release up.

Cheerz,

Ragnar

[joojaa]

Wouldn it be easier to make the tweaks as blend sapes and then drive the blend shapes based on the bone angle, hmm maybe not.

The problem with this approach is while all other apps use it maya was designed to use different methods for the same thing (since setting this up in complex cases is rather time consuming hovever good your tools are)

Have you tried the maya approach on this!