Smooth Skinning

[flashawd]

Hello - The character I am creating for a client is a fan (burning fan) that is going to fly around with a jet pack on it's base. and I am having trouble w/ the Smooth Skinning. I want him to be able to bend left, right, back, forward, side to side, etc and have the shaft of the fan look the exact same throughout the movement. As you can see from the 15 second test animation of all the movement I did at the link below the smooth skinning attempt I did was pretty bad.

 

http://www.flashanimationwebsitedesign.com...burningFan.html

 

When you click on a bone and choose new SmartSkin it bends the bone at a 90 degree angle are you supposed to then fix the mesh at that 90 degree angle and then it should be smooth all the way up? Or do you do it 15 degrees at a time? It seems sometimes when I fix it at lets say 45 degrees then the angle I just fixed at 30 degrees is interfered with.

 

Anyway, a little frustrated here - any suggestions or techniques you use that work well would be greatly appreciate.

 

Thanks again - Eric

[robcat2075]

Hello - The character I am creating for a client is a fan (burning fan) that is going to fly around with a jet pack on it's base. and I am having trouble w/ the Smooth Skinning. I want him to be able to bend left, right, back, forward, side to side, etc and have the shaft of the fan look the exact same throughout the movement. As you can see from the 15 second test animation of all the movement I did at the link below the smooth skinning attempt I did was pretty bad.

 

It doesn't look VERY bad, but a shaded wireframe would help to diagnose CP motion

 

 

 

When you click on a bone and choose new SmartSkin it bends the bone at a 90 degree angle are you supposed to then fix the mesh at that 90 degree angle and then it should be smooth all the way up?

No. Move it to whatever angle you wanted to correct the mesh at.

 

 

 

Or do you do it 15 degrees at a time? It seems sometimes when I fix it at lets say 45 degrees then the angle I just fixed at 30 degrees is interfered with.

smartskin can be done at any interval. Usually the fewer the better.

 

Anyway, a little frustrated here - any suggestions or techniques you use that work well would be greatly appreciate.

For what you are doing, CP weighting and fan bones (topics covered elsewhere on this forum) may result better than smartskinning. Smartskinning works but requires much skill.

[flashawd]

Thanks for your reply Robert. I am a little lacking on the "much skill" at this point, so I'll check out the CP weighting.

[zandoriastudios]

I agree, CP weights would probably be enough for this character.

Here is a tutorial you may wish to consider (tooting my own horn...):

available here

[flashawd]

Hey William - big admirer of your work, thanks for the link. And thanks again Robert for your advice I used the CP Weighting for the 3 bones in the fan shaft which made it much nicer to work with when smooth skinning - it came out 100% better - Can't say as much for the lip sync - that needs some serious work

 

http://www.flashanimationwebsitedesign.com...urningFan2.html