New Steven Stahlberg rigging tut and example from me
 

Hi all,

See the tut section for link to great tut re blendshapes for deformation with blendshapes and skeletons.

Here is a little example of the technique that I did today.
The file is zipped and in DivX 5.02.


re Jim

Looks good Jim :) Under the arms maybe needs a little weighting work but apart from that pretty darn realistic.

The shoulder muscle looks great, nice work!

jim: im having problems with my character....can u please tell me how u did that? i am also following stahlberg's tut btw....can u show me the file?

re rigging tut.......
 

Hi Pitbull,

I have uploaded the file. You can download it here at this post.


As for the technique, I found the process works fine with simple characters but becomes really slow interaction wise with larger (higher density meshes). I can't remember why Stahlberg uses the 'Wrap' deformer, as this is the main reason (that I'm aware of) that makes the interaction really slow. Maybe try it without the wrap deformer and compare the results.

I basically followed the tut. I already had thought about this process but never actually tried it for myself. Now transferring technique over to softimage.

I hope this helps. A thing to remember is to create the blendshape deformer before you bind the mesh to the skeleton.

Select the base mesh(blendshape deformer/base for binding in hypergraph>up/downstream connections (if you are using the poly proxy method of binding. This will help select the right node 'sub history node'

re Jim

thanks for the extra effort m8!!!! actually...my problem is of "double morphing"...i solved that already since i assigned the blendshape to only affect certain vertexes :-)..the system is slow alright...but i is more flexible...for me :)

btw.....how can i move and delete things in the channel box??? and why should i do the blends first before skinning? sorry...i just ported from max so im still new to mayas workflow....

muscle deformation
 

Hi pitbull,

Not sure what the question is re moving things in the channel box?????/

as for 'order of operations' (similar to max's stack) the blendshape node works best if it is running before the skinning node. You can change it's order afterwards by right clicking on mesh and (from dropdown menu) picking complete list. This is similar to max's stack>use middle mouse button to shift the order of things. Can sometimes be a bit tricky at first, but is simple enough.

Double morphing, happens in every program (that i'm aware of). be mindful of which blendshapes are being driven by which bones rotation. eg. elbow morph>elbow z rotate>shoulder morph>shoulder x rotate, clavicle morph> clavicle y rotate.

I found that each (fully extended muslce postition) ie. arm up>arm down is enough to get decent deformation, and since each joint usually only has 2 extremes on each rotation this should work fine.

Any way hope this helps

re Jim

i like the way max organizes and puts all the morphs in one modifier(skin mod)...its so convenient....thanks for the tip jim,will implement them :-)