thx mate!

after some playing with blendshapes, keeping in mind the skeleton is ik-rigged, i came to this conclusion.

creating blendshapes with IK is really bad!

even if IKblend is off, all joints inherit funky rotation values in all axes. therefor there´s no clean way to link joint.rotation to a blendshape, for the very reason of the foot´s IK which is sticky and while bending the leg the foot stays on the ground which is resulting in geometry deformation - ergo it´s making no sense duplicating the geometry for using it as a blendshape.

long talk short sense -

would anybody agree to create blendshapes before setting up the IKs?

my very next thought on setting up IKs after binding the skin would be concerning one weighty thing. let´s take a simple 3-joint(leg) chain - the 2nd joint is the knee.

1) if drawn in 2 dimensions with a slight bend -> IK applied gives a predictable result -> nothing. the joints stay as they are.

2) if anatomically positioned in correct way which means, drawn in 2 dimensions (Y,Z) with a slight bend in Z, but then also bent slightly on the (-X) axis - from the hip inwards down to the knee and from the knee bent back again (+X) the result will be unpredictable. after applying IK, the joint chain gets straightened.

is there a way keep the exact form of the skeleton when applying IK?

see pic, shows frontside (Y,X) mirrored joints, side with IK got straightened.

'Right Click' over rotated joint before Ik is applied and select 'Set prefered angle', should do the trick

Jay

Why? The blend shape CAN be driven by a single rotational axis per shape, eg; arm up or down would rotate in z axis therefore rz would be the driver for the blend shape that is driven for that one area ie: shoulders, elbow etc.

I dont think you are thinking laterally about it.

The base mesh MUST be weighted BEST POSSIBLE before doing any of the shapes. Create duplicates of the model before bind, feed these into the the target then SDK as you need to. This is the easiest way.

If you have already skinned the model you may need to reorder the deformations. Or create Parallel blend shapes instead of default

I use this method every day and have NO problems. There is no fast route to getting a perfect model. It comes down to time and patience.

Jay

'Set prefered angle' doesn´t help here unfortunately. IK bends the joint in the right direction but it doesn´t help the straightening.

for the blendshapes. I found it to be tremendously unsatisfying moving verts in weird directions when tweaking blendshapes.
so I thought about first painting weights. after that I would bend all specific joints in specific angles as needed - duplicate those mesh parts and prepare them for blendshape use. (i have split up my base mesh into 9 body parts) after all poses duplicated I create blendshapes with those duped geometries. now it´s easy to tweak the blendshapes cause otherwise assigning a bind-posed geometry, Verts are now moving in the direction I push them, not like pushing it forward and it moves up, pushing it back and vert moves down.

would this be a silly complicated thing to do?

If its working then you are doing it right.

I have some theory/notes here, for you to look at which I will send to you maybe later or tomorrow via email

Cheers
Jay

thx jay. btw -> awesome work with your alien guy, texture is looking too cool!

Thanks Dude.
Am sending stuff across in the next few minutes


Jay

dang! thanks a lot.

_the dude

Did you get it then?

Jay

yep, I´m still reading..

had to have a break from this one for a while, but I´m on it again. due to bad deformation issues on her abdominal and breast areas I remodeled parts of the mesh - spaced out the edges more evenly and hopefully it will kind of work out now.

one major problem I was running into but didn´t recongnize before - allthough everybody is mentioning it once in a while - is the mesh issue. mesh has to be evenly spaced. no tinysmall faces next to very big ones. tris are bad most of the time. 5sided faces are ok if geometry isn´t going to be deformed too much. in my case the phrenic area deformed in a very crappy way never minding how I tried to compensate with rigging. that was cause I disobeyed those rules.

well, but first of all - a rendered pic. I´m trying to imagine how it´ll look like when the geometry is being animated.. if she ever will be.

der flyer is bombe .. aber was zum teufel is goa fuer ne musik richtung , dass des so "kindisch" is?ueberall hoert man nur von goa aber ka ,w as das tatsaechlich is ...

das is zipfelmützenmusik! ca 130 - 150 bpm, ein wenig ähnlich wie trance aber die leute sind lauter fraggles. 99% auf E oder speed und glauben sie sind buddha persönlich.

versuchs mal mit "feuerhacke", "infected mushrooms" oder sowas. also meins is es nicht.

cheers!