John Bigboote Posted December 23, 2004 Posted December 23, 2004 I recently used WM on my 'Stones' characters AFTER all rigging, animation, lip-synch,and choreography was 'in-the-can'... it was a pure afterthought to see if I could improve the 'bendability' of my main character... RESULT: It worked incredibly well. I will never skip using WM again, it is 'invaluable'! I will be going back and 'post' weight moving some of my older characters. I used an EXACT DUPLICATE of my model for the lo-res proxy...it worked excellently except for (see next paragraph) WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT DOING IT 'LATE': 1) I copied and pasted my geometry to get the 2 groups I needed...in doing so I lost ALL of my v11 hair styling on the character (apparently that info does not transfer in a copy/paste tho the material does...) 2) I lost ALL of my pose slider's lip-synch data. 3) It's NEVER too late to use Wieght-Mover... I was warned by Morgan the correct way to do it, and I 'glossed-over' hers and Frank Silas's advice...live and learn. I take setbacks like that as opportunities to do things over BETTER than done before, applying whats been learned...so I re-posed all my lip-synch mouth targets using bones in the mouth, like I've read so much about here in the Forum from Victor Navone and others...that too, worked great and thus I will always use THAT technique from this day ever... PLUS! I got my A:M in Live Action in the mail...I am about 1/2 way thru, it is, in typical Anzovin fashion, very well produced and chock-full-O-tips and tricks. I'll give more accurate review when I finish watching. QUESTION TO THE ANZOVINS: Have you ever considered making TSM and WM 1 product? I know some versatilty would be lost, just wondering... THANKS for making me a better animator, Raf, Steve, Morgan and all the little 'elves' in the Anzovin workshop. MERRY CHRISTMAS! Quote
wwoelbel Posted December 23, 2004 Posted December 23, 2004 Hey John; A question on how your implementation worked: The original model had smartskins? Do those smartskins contribute anything to the model after the weighting by WM? The original geometry is either hidden or deleted so the smartskin should not contribute anything. Am I understanding how this works? Bill Quote
John Bigboote Posted December 23, 2004 Author Posted December 23, 2004 Bill----No, I had no smartskins. I find them difficult and temperamental, only for 'last-ditch' efforts...I did have a handfull of intermediary bones in the elbows,wrists, knees, neck, ankles... I think they had a positive influence in the Weight Moving process. I am quite pleased with the way my character bends and the extremes I can bend him to, I've never had such a versatile/animatable quality model of my own creation before...thats why I praise the Anzovins for 'empowering' me... I FEEL THE POWER!!! PS- This WAS a skinny little-armed 'Mick Jagger' character...next I plan to try this to my beefy 'CrimeBomb' character and I hope for similar success... Quote
wwoelbel Posted December 23, 2004 Posted December 23, 2004 Well... I just checked my stocking which is hanging by the industrial wood fired furnace and found that Santa left me 5 days of uninterupted time to tinker with AM and WM next week.!! That guy sleighs me! He knew exactly what I wanted. I'm hoping to get some major work done investigation the utility of WM to implement interchangable clothing sets over the next week or two. Bill Quote
anzovin Posted December 23, 2004 Posted December 23, 2004 QUESTION TO THE ANZOVINS: Have you ever considered making TSM and WM 1 product? I know some versatilty would be lost, just wondering... THANKS for making me a better animator, Raf, Steve, Morgan and all the little 'elves' in the Anzovin workshop. MERRY CHRISTMAS! When we do the WM to plug-in conversion, we may ship it as part of TSM2; that has not yet been decided yet. But the two codebases will be combined for The Face Machine, which we really hope to bring out in 2005. There are still some tough problems to solve for that product--it will be an industry first, as far as we can tell--so we're being cautious about a release time. And thanks for the nice comments! Have a happy and safe holiday! Steve Anzovin Studio Quote
John Bigboote Posted December 29, 2004 Author Posted December 29, 2004 HEY! Got a chance today to run both 'Crimebomb' and 'MsD' thru this same 'late WM rigamarole' and am happy to report that both came out the other end quite highly animatable! I remembered to 'remove the head' from the hi-res paste, and then reattached the lo-res head after WM, thus saving all my lip-synch phonemes AND the hair styling. It also helped to watch the 'talk tech' on CP weights, as there is a little tweeking after WM...like in the fingers, they are located so close to each other that they weight into one another. I expected the MsD character to come out fine (shes small and gurly) but was very pleased with the quality I got in the CrimeBomb results (he's big and burly) This is a great way to rig! HAPPY NEW YEAR! Quote
Morgan Posted January 4, 2005 Posted January 4, 2005 John, I'm glad to hear that WeightMover is working well for you. With regards to the fingers weighting into each other, you can set up exclusion groups to keep them apart. Depending on how much cross-weighting you have, that might be faster than tweaking the weights afterwards, for future models. Happy animating! -Morgan Quote
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