Friday, June 13, 2014

Corrective Sculpter beta

Hi, folks

    Since we all know linear skinning has been the backbone of rigging for quite some time then the fancy dual-quaternion has came out, but hasn't really play very well in practice and also setting up muscle system is quite heavy and can sometime be an overkill for such mid-end project. The only solution left was to setup driven key, or connections using joint's rotation to drive a blendShape or joint. As for elbows and knees, they're fine because they only rotate on 1 axis. But, for the shoulders and upper legs, this method will eventually FLIP at some point due to the euler angle calcualtion.

    I'd like to introduce my new tool for sculpting corrective shapes - 'Corrective Sculpter'. The tool was written in PyMel, again I'm too lazy not to use it. The idea is "when bad deformation happens, sculpt it!".

This is how it's designed to use.
- Provide the skin mesh, the buffer mesh(the blendShape target for the skin mesh)
- Select a body part to do shape correcting. In the clip is the upper-arm. Load joints.
- Pose to where the deformation looks bad, hit create target.
- Hit sculpt. Modify the shape as you like, then hit apply.





    Yeah, people have done it before, Michel Comet's PSD has a very great reputation for this kind of work. But,...I really  don't wanna have any custom node in my rig.

    Thanks to THIS TUTORIAL by Macro Giordano, I have recently learned how to set up a 'cone pose reader' using just Maya's standard nodes. The good thing is IT WILL NOT FLIP! Yeah, that's what I was looking for.

   And...thanks to Chad Vernon's cvShapeInverter link. Some part of the code in my script was taken from his code. The plugin does extract the modification from a deformed mesh. IE. You bend the arm, duplicate it, sculpt the duplicate, select original mesh select sculpted mesh, hit the script, BAM. It gives you the new mesh that can be use as front-of-chain corrective blendshape.

    That's it. Not really my work, isn't it. Just pieces of other people's work put together. Again BIG THANKS TO THOSE PEOPLE! *respect*

PS. The tool is still under development. I'm thinking of adding more functionality to it.