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Weighting Distortion Boxes to Various Bones


John Bigboote

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After seeing how some other apps(ikinema within modo) are using distortion meshs for joint and full body rigging as opposed(or in conjunction with) features such as bone-weighting, smartskin, fan bones... I've been looking into the prospect of doing something similar in A:M. I am stuck early in the process and wonder if smarter riggers might know of a way... I will attempt to illustrate what I am trying to do here:

 

I have modeled an arm and gave it some simple bones. I could have started with an existing rigged model and used the arm bones as they are... I decided to keep it simple for the purpose of illustration.

distort_01.jpg

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Now I go into Muscle Mode, select the points of the distortion box that I want to be controlled by bone 2... but this is where I get stuck... it appears that bones do not appear in a distortion boxes Weight editor... that it is 'all or none'. If I 'could' apply bone 2 here as the bone that controls this part of the mesh- why- I would have myself a nifty little joint controlling solution... addable to any rig... which would smoothly 'distort' the joint into a bend... it would be GREAT for dense mesh models... complicated torsos... etc

 

Now the question IS... am I approaching this wrong... should this be a feature request... is it impossible... am I high on bus fumes?

distort_04.jpg

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  • Hash Fellow

I haven't examined your case entirely but... I believe D-box CPs can only be weighted to bones that are part of the D-box "model"

 

I added a bone ("Dbone") to the orignal D-box. It does appear in your Pose and it is possible to weight it to CPs in the Pose, even to weight some CPs 50%.

 

However, look at the brief animation I did in the choreography 2 with that bone. The interpolation of the splines in the DBox is quite odd, I'm not sure why.

 

distortojointBoneAdded.prj

 

Conceptually, I'm not sure that Dboxes CPs weighted to bones would get us joint bending much different from regular CPs weighted to bones since the spline math governing the transformation of shapes is the same.

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I added a bone ("Dbone") to the orignal D-box. It does appear in your Pose and it is possible to weight it to CPs in the Pose, even to weight some CPs 50%.

However, look at the brief animation I did in the choreography 2 with that bone. The interpolation of the splines in the DBox is quite odd, I'm not sure why.

 

AH! I think you have it, then. SO- I need to add my bones to the distort1 model... and I assume I can add multiple bones... and constrain those bones to my rig's bones? I will experiment more with this. Basically, I see this as a sort of 'Weight Mover' (remember that?) solution... or a way of feathering weights without using the 'Edit CP Weights' interface. Not really needed on most low-spline skinny (Thom, KeeKat) A:M models... but ever tried to get smooth transformations on a bulky, high density model? Maybe I can talk Will Sutton into trying this on his Tar character... altho knowing him he already has it bending and rigged perfectly. I think the result will be a little cartoony, but it should be SMOOTH-OLA! In your example (thanks btw) I think it is a matter of adjusting the distortion box resolution and placement. A lot of people were not impressed with the Wright Brothers initial flight either...

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  • Hash Fellow

Update... In my example the Dbox CPs at the base of "Dbone" were weighted 50% to Dbone and 50% to the original "Distort 1" bone.

 

If I add another bone to the Dbox so the CPs can be 50% weighted to something other than "Distort1" then the splines that go through them behave properly.

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