Maya: Rigid paper-like deformations?

inanimate

Is it possible to deform vertices or faces in a way that is similar to folded origami paper? I.e. the size of the mesh remains constant when moving points, deforming along the polygon edges but not actually changing size (only orientation and position)?

Denny

Select your mesh that has a skinCluster (bound to a skeleton). In your Channel Box, under Inputs, you should see your skinCluster. Change its Skinning Method to Dual Quaternion. Dual Quaternion should do what you're looking for.

If you want to blend between Linear Skinning and Dual Quaternion, change Skinning Method to Weight Blended. For it to work fully, you need to paint its blend weights on top of the skin weights.

inanimate

Thanks for the suggestion, I tried Dual Quaternions on the cluster but I'm still getting physically impossible deformations. I've included an attachment with an example in which the paper is stretching when I only want it to be folding (i.e. preserving its surface area/volume). Any other ideas?

throttlekitty

Is this to be an animated or static piece?

I did a 'poke faces' on a plane and had marginal success for the first few folds just using the rotate tool- Ese the tilde ~ key to use the cursors location as the pivot point, and MMB to rotate based on view.

If you wanted full control, you could get crazy with some nested skeleton with constraints and IK solvers. My brain hurts trying to piece that together.

inanimate

animated, unfortunately. I'm trying the crazy nested skeleton approach now. It definitely gets exponentially harder after 2-3 folds.

throttlekitty

There's this script, but it's not quite origami.

http://frankrause.com/2013/07/origami-mel-script-for-maya/