Smartskin nightmare(would V.10 really help?)

[paulb]

I'm mostly just trying out this message board for the first time, but here's a model I started in V.8.5 but I found it too time consuming to work out all the smartskin issues(eg.- how the heck do you get the cheek to deform properly when the shoulder is "shrugged" at the same time?)

 

Would the newest version of AM for Mac make it much easier?-but I mean in actual practice, not just in theory.

 

Does anybody know of a good example of this sort of pudgy biped that has been animated successfully in AM?

 

Please click here

 

Thanks. Paul

[paulb]

I mean't to say "when the head is turned and/or tilted and the shoulder is shrugged at the same time"

[ZachBG]

First of all, very nice model.

 

Second of all, no, the newest version would make it much harder--in the short run. 10.5 has a different feel than 8.5 and it can take some getting used to. In particular, smartskin is now three-dimensional, but you can use it to drive mesh, bones, almost anything.

 

In the long run, I think it _would_ be easier--or at least you'd have more options. For instance, you could use a distort box, smartskin, traditional fan bones, control point weights...

 

Hope this helps; I know it's kind of vague.

 

Zach

[raillard]

Hello. I've got two cents for you, here.

 

The joints of fat, pudgy characters are the hardest to do, I think. I think it'd be helpful to break the job into several phases. For starters, get a decent fan bone system into the shoulder. If you can spare 30 bucks, I would recommend getting Mike Fitzgerald's COG tutorial. Mike's system benefits from a careful placement of splines, which might be different from your present mesh. Fortunately AMv.10 & up have this new "stitch" tool, that makes altering mesh a lot easier then it was in v8.5. As a test I took a model by Joe Cosman that I've always admired, and added a COG joint to it. The splines were not laid out to work well with COG joints, so I just stitched in additional splines, and deleted the awkward ones. I was very pleased with the results -- I maintained the shape of Joe's model while gaining the smoothness of Mike's joint rig.

 

Once you got a fairly decent shoulder joint going, you can start worrying about how it interacts with other body parts. Again, v10 & up offers all sorts of options. The cheek problem might be handled in this way: Add a child of the arm at the shoulder joint (start = same as bicep) and have this bone point up, at the cheek. The end should rest on the cheek. At this point, on the cheek, there should be another bone, a child of the head, that will be used as a target. In your default constraints pose, apply an Aim At constraint onto this bone, and dab the eye-dropper onto the cheek target bone, and activate the Scale to Reach feature. Now what you've got is a little piston that shrinks and grows as the arm presses into the cheek area. You could then apply a Relationship onto the Z-scale driver of the piston bone -- essentially a smartskin that works with the bone's scale rather than it's rotation. When the bone shrinks by a certain amount, use muscle animation to deform the cheek, to make it smoosh.

 

Bottom Line: The job is still tough, but there are tools in v10.5 that will help you.

This is a well-crafted model, and it deserves further effort!

 

Sincerely,

 

Carl Raillard

[paulb]

Thanks alot for the input guys!

 

-Paul

[Iham Wrong]

What a ham.

And a very cute character, but now I see the areas of difficulty you are talking about.