Reusing Models

[Johneva]

I was thinking about models and modeling and had a question for the group. Has anyone taken an old model and reworked the Cps to produce a new model. Not added or removed CPs, but just relocated the existing CPs to create a new character.

 

What I'm thinking is that it takes probably as much time to decal, bone, rig, smart skin, etc as it does to build the underlying mesh, so would it be reasonable to take an existing mesh, with all the decals, bones, rigs, etc already set up and reposition CPs to give the model a new appearance.

 

There is always the potential that the smart skin may not act correctly since the CP positions have changed, but most of the rest should (bones, rig, etc) ought to work about the same.

 

So my question is, has anyone tried this and if so were there other issues/considerations that I have overlooked.

 

Thanks,

 

John

[JoshB]

I have tried something similar. However, I would never take a fully rigged and decaled model and do it. Because if you reposition the cps your bones won't bend the same as they did in the original, nor will the smartskin work the same as it did. Further, the decals that you make may end up stretching in some place giving undesired results.

 

What I have done is made a general model and then worked in changes to create a different model. Hope that answered that question.

 

J

[luckbat]

Well, it does save time. The model on the left took me about three and a half months. The model on the right, which uses the same mesh (with a few minor changes), took about 48 hours.

 

Obviously, I'll need to scale the skeleton to match, but that's still a lot of time saved. Plus, I won't have to redo all the facial poses from scratch...

[Zaryin]

You can actually get the facial poses to cross over after that much change in the mesh? I find that impressive.

[luckbat]

But that's just the thing. Muscle motion is calculated relative to the CPs' default position in the model. So, if you have a pair of eyes that blink, and you scale them up and move them farther apart, the blink pose should still function pretty much as it did before. Even if you change the shape of the eye, the blink movement will still be preserved, although you'll probably have to shift some of the eyelid CPs.

 

There's always tweaking to be done, but like I said, it sure beats building everything from scratch.

[Zaryin]

I haven't tried anything like that since v8.5. I didn't work well for me then so I just assumed -- and you know what they say about assuming -- that it still didn't work that well. This is great news, thanks alot!