Sine the last post, I have been spending a lot of time adding the finishing touches to the artefact. I have continued the work of using envelopes for the initial skin weighting. These were then 'baked' into the surface. Once this has been done, The envelopes have no additional contribution and so can be hidden. Vertices were then weight painted for more accuracy and I was able to fix most of the deformation issues (mesh crashing). It was at this point that I added some additional stretchy bones for helping the deformation of the skin (e.g. muscle bones). These were constrained to various influential parts of the torso and leg areas in order to create a smooth muscle like deformation. For example, for the chest muscle, this was position and orientation constrained to both the clavicle bone, as well as the top of the spine. These were then enveloped and weight painted. This allowed for muscles to be simulated and reduced some of the joint deformation as it gave a transitional, middle ground for joints.
Envelopes are very limited in what they can do, however the pipeline of work suggests that using envelopes is merely a stepping stone and a tool for roughing out (this would explain the early, ropey attempts at skinning the Biped rig). Once baked into the mesh, individual points can be weighted more, less or even blended with other verts within the vicinity. With added tools such as mirror envelopes and mirror verts, the process so far has been extremely intuitive and achievable.
However, with much of the rig itself, this process has taken a very long time and effort in order to accomplish a high quality finished product. Many occasions it was a case of adding and subtracting weight influence in the same area many times over. A quick way around having to manipulate the rig in order to see the effect is by keying in some animations. This gives a must quicker and controlled way of testing any skin tweaks. With time, this process would in theory become more intuitive, but right now, this seems to be the best way of skinning effectively and has a high range of possibilities (only limited by bones).
Demo Clip - LINK
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