Morpher in 3ds max problem

tadpole3159

Hey guys, I'm having some trouble with the morpher in 3ds max, specifically the morpher material. When one morph target blends from another the whole material darkens, It only happens during the transition, after the morph has happened the colour is correct. it even happens in the material preview window. I have a video below demonstrating this whole weirdness
https://youtu.be/5Bq69urQnF8
Anyone have any idea why this is happening? I'm just using a standard material with a normal map and a diffuse colour of 128 in every single material. In the example above I copied the first blend shape material and simply swapped the normal map. everything is exactly the same.

While typing this I thought it could just be doubling up the normal map but I just did a test with all normal maps off and it's still darkening. now that's just two identical materials :P

Please help, it's driving me nuts

Eric Chadwick

Beena long time since I checked out morphing materials in Max but I remember it being wonky. How exactly are you animating the targets in the Morpher? You might try adding a base target under the others.

tadpole3159

Just dragging the slider for the first target to 100 and keying it The material blend does work, the normal map is totally on, it's just darkening the whole material during the transition. If you look at the video again it even darkens the specular which is very odd.

I managed to find a work around by copying the animation keys from the morpher to a blend material which is currently doing a much better job. got the idea from a morpher plug in website and it's no longer darkening the material. This all seems rather hacky though. Is there is a newer way to making blend shape faces in max that I'm oblivious to? Maya can do the damn thing in real-time, normal maps and everything.

Marmoset 3 supports blend shape animation but can't blend textures which means I get no wrinkles with suuuuuuuck's. I was wondering if I could export the blending normal map out of max as a video and then import that into marmoset but marmoset doesnt support video textures. So now I'm thinking i'm going to have to export the marmoset scene to unreal 4 and set the whole thing up in there. I've never really used unreal before though so I'm going to do some research first.

It does look rather cool in marmoset though, check this out

Shive

tadpole3159 said:

I managed to find a work around by copying the animation keys from the morpher to a blend material which is currently doing a much better job. got the idea from a morpher plug in website and it's no longer darkening the material.

Instead of copy-pasting keys from the morpher to the blendmat, you could wire the values. This way the material would be always up-to-date and you don't have to copy stuff around all the time.

tadpole3159

Shive said:

tadpole3159 said:

I managed to find a work around by copying the animation keys from the morpher to a blend material which is currently doing a much better job. got the idea from a morpher plug in website and it's no longer darkening the material.

Instead of copy-pasting keys from the morpher to the blendmat, you could wire the values. This way the material would be always up-to-date and you don't have to copy stuff around all the time.

Great idea! Would that also allow me to modify the numbers a bit as well for each texture blend? some textures need to fade on quicker than others and I can't do that right now. For example the eyes closing. When the eyes are fully closed the normal map and texture change to the "Eyes_Closed" material. Currently it's 1-1 and the material is only ever fully on when the eye is fuly closed. but that leaves a bit old ugly fold in the middle of my eye lid (example below) I would like the texture to be 100% faded on when the eye is mesh blend is only 50%. Could I add some sort of multiplier to the wire parameter to make this happen? maybe some sort of curve?

Here's what I have so far, just eye's, eye brows and a really rubbish set of materials but it's looking promising so far
https://youtu.be/89kkqjU9g5A

Shive

Adding a multiplier is not a problem, you can just say for example myblendvalue = mymorphvalue*2

A curve could also work, but kind of a pain to set up.
If you're down to experimenting you can also try to use the Reaction manager, wich does exactly that. You set up a master (your morpher) and a slave (your mat). Then you create 2 states, one on zero morph and one on fully morphed. There is a curve then that you can change to your liking.

Be aware though, i tried to use the reaction manager in a few occassions and it bugged on me quite alot. Also, you would have a lot of states in the end, depending how many morphtargets you have. Besides that if it does not bug/crash, it could be a nice way to control the blending.

edit: quick example

tadpole3159

When you say buggy your not kidding, It refuses to select the blend I'm clicking on and randomly chooses just about anything and then when I said fuck it and tried to carry on regardless with it's random selection it crashed max I think to save my self the grief I'm going to have to use wire parameters