Two heads are better than one

[strohbehn]

I've been playing with using lattices in distortion mode lately and found it an incredibly easy and fast way to morph one model into another. The really great thing about it is that all of my facial controls still work nearly perfectly on the new, morphed model.

 

The guy on the left is my original head model. And the fellow on the right is his new African buddy. This took me all of about 45 minutes to do. Neat, huh?

 

I love Animation Master!!!

[ChrisThom]

It's kind of like what they did for The Incredibles.

 

I was watching the comentary and they said that all the "extras" for teh movie (towns people, etc.) were all just one model they dubbed "Universal man" that tehy just distorted to create new characters.

 

In fact they said that Frozone and Bomb Voyage were the same model.

[KenH]

I think in The Incredibles, they made "pose sliders" for each attribute(big nose/big head/fat/ etc etc) and just played round with them to make hundreds of extras.

I seem to remember a certain Mr Freeman considering such a task.

[msfolly]

Very cool. Those are GREAT models.

[strohbehn]

Melissa, thanks for the kind comments.

 

Chris and Ken, After I did the morphing as a new model I thwacked myself on the head and thought, "I should have done this as pose so I could morph between the two". Colin's Cooper thread mentions this too. It's a fun idea to try in the future.

 

I was amazed, too, when the Incredibles commentary made mention of using one mesh for all of the different characters. It would be fun to know how much work went into each new variant.

[cfree68f]

The trick with the pose idea.. is that I did mine in Halves and copy/flip/attached it. That would work in a pose. But it made it much easier to edit the mesh. Perhaps there is a way or a plugin that could past a mesh with the same points into a keyframe of a Pose and allow you to edit the mesh external to the pose. this would allow you to deconstruct and reconstruct the mesh... as long as the cp names stayed the same.

 

C

[strohbehn]

Colin, are you saying that it was so much easier for you to only work with half the mesh that you wouldn't consider doing it with the full mesh in a pose?

 

Just for fun I tried creating a new pose with the altered mesh, copying a muscle keyframe, then pasting this into the original mesh's new pose window. It didn't work, though. Either I messed up, or it's not possible to do this. I thought since the 2 meshes have exactly the same CP's, just in slightly different locations that it maybe should have worked. If anyone knows how to do this I'd love to know how.

[cfree68f]

yes.. its much easier. Not that I couldnt do it in the other mode with mirror mode.. but I like to do as little work as possible.. and when you are using magnet mode and mesh cages.. it becomes hard to work in mirror mode.. the center splines.. don't work the same.. so your cages and magnets are slightly offset.. this makes the mesh move in different ways.. and ruins the way mirror mode can work as far as creating other poses.

 

I'm wondering if there was a way to just copy and paste points in a text editor to create the keyframes.

 

C