Smartskins and material questions

[createo]

Hello,

After a year of resumption of AM I start to resume modeling and rigging reflexes. How nice to use this software!
But I still have a lot of questions

1 - I am rigging a humanoid and I use a lot of smartskins which allow to assign positions to the vertices according to the angle of rotation of a bone. This allows me to have stages of intermediate object shapes. But if I don't like a step anymore or if this position is an error and I want to modify or "free" the vertices, how can I find the angle of the bone to which I assigned these vertices?

2 - What is the difference between the properties of bump in the attributes of materials (cheveux in picture ) and of the FractalSum. Since I activated the "cheveux" material bump, I have no more color on my model ??

3 - Is it possible to animate an FFD in the choreography?
4 - is it possible that the FFD is static and the vertices of the object are assigned to a bone?

Handling AM correctly remains complicated because I lack a lot of technical references but it is starting to become a real pleasure!

Thanks

[Fuchur]

1.) That is a little tricky and one of the biggest problems with Smartskins.
The easiest I know about is to only use "default" rotation angles like 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, etc. That will help you a lot.
But if you did not do that till now, the way I found is this:
a) Open your smartkin so there is the temporarily open in which you can switch to muscle mode (F7).
b) Select the CP that is behaving badly.
c) Find its number. Easiest thing to find it is by just activating "Show manipulator properties". It will give you an overlay which tells you anything about the CP.
Be aware: You have to click on the CP, not do a rectangle selection or something)
d.) In the PWS you navigate to your model and than to "Relationships" till you see your Smartskind. Open "Splines" and search for the CP in there it is called "CP #20" or something like that. Below that you will find "Translate" and than different keys, which will tell you at which rotation degree the CP has a keyframe set in the smartskin.

Yes I know, it is annoying but the best I could find till now.
That is the reason why you should just go with default angles and the fewer the better ;).

2.) That is normal.
Just save the material to a file (RMB > Save as), embed it again then (click on the small arrow next to the material in the PWS > File Info > Embedded = On).
Now I would rename it to for instance "cheveux_color" and after that reimport the file and do the same with it but rename it to "cheveux_bump".

That should give you a copy of the material. Use one as color an one as bump and it should work.
In the end it makes sense, since you can like that use all the different options of the material (combiners, noise, gradients, etc.) to create a bump map (which is a greyscale map) and do something different for color and so on too. Switching on Bump or Displacement will just tell A:M: Do no longer use this as a color material but as a bump material.

Can you increase the size of the material window? I am not aware of a possibility but I'll ask Steffen if that is possible to integrate... I often run into that but never came around to ask for it... in the end it does not make much sense that you can zoom in but not increase the visible view size there.

3.) Yes you can animate close to all properties of any material in the chor.
For that you have to activate "Show more than drivers" on the Shortcut to the model in the chor.
It is the outer left icon on the right side which is by default inactive / crossed through in red.

4.) Yes, that should be the default behaviour. Otherwise you would have to use a projection map material. That one would stay the same relative to the viewport / camera and the arm would slide over it so that the same part of the arm would be colored differently on a different place in space.

Best regards
*Fuchur*

[robcat2075]

3 hours ago, createo said:

1 - I am rigging a humanoid and I use a lot of smartskins which allow to assign positions to the vertices according to the angle of rotation of a bone. This allows me to have stages of intermediate object shapes. But if I don't like a step anymore or if this position is an error and I want to modify or "free" the vertices, how can I find the angle of the bone to which I assigned these vertices?

When you are in a Smartskin window and in Muscle Mode you can use the |<< (Previous Keyframe) and >>| (Next Keyframe) buttons to jump between Smartskin keyframes.

They don't always sequence in a logical order, you may need to press the buttons several times to access all of them

This will work if the bone you made the smartskin for has no constraint controlling its movement. If it does, you will need to open the Pose with that constraint and temporarily Edit the constraint's  Enforcement to 0%. Do this before you open the SmartSkin window and remember to set it back after you edit your SmartSkin.

Never save over old work. If you make a mistake you can't undo , you want to be able to reload your previous version to try again.

[robcat2075]

What is an FFD?

[robcat2075]

For better previews of Materials, I prefer to put the material on my model and Use Progressive render (Shift Q) to see it rendered

The window will up date as you make changes to the material.

[createo]

FFD = free form déformation. Box of déformation ?

[Fuchur]

Oh then I missunderstood that. It is called Distrotion Mode or Box in A:M.
There is a modifier in Actions which is called "Distort" which should do that, but I never used it before...
It has to be added to the action and you will have to have a bone in your model with attached CPs to define what is manipulated I think, but I am not very deep into that topic currently.

I am pretty sure Robert can tell you more about it.

Best regards
*Fuchur*

 

[robcat2075]

FFD must be the name of the feature in the Brand X software.

 

Distortion boxes can be created and animated as "Action Objects" in the Chor. The Box can be animated directly in Muscle mode or it can be rigged with bones adn those bones can even be SmartSkinned.

That doesn't explain HOW to do it but it CAN be done. It's not simple or obvious.

This PRJ show a model being distorted in the Chor by a Distortion Box that is animated with one bone with smartskin.

DBTest006.prj

 

 

[createo]

40 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:

Excellent !

 

[robcat2075]

We talked more about this Distortion Box thing at Live Answer Time today. If i get the video up I'll let you know.

[createo]

thanks

 

[robcat2075]

@createo

The Live Answer Time discussion of Distortion Boxes is up.

November 20, 2021

Ce n'est pas en français, mais c'est peut-être utile!

https://forums.hash.com/topic/48801-live-answer-time-less-live-archived-versions/

 

[createo]

13 hours ago, robcat2075 said:

@createo

Génial !!
Je parcours cela dans la semaine.
merci beaucoup
Salutations