Hey everyone!
I'm working on a project that requires me to rig a character for pretty much the first time. So this may or may not be a beginner/noob question
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. I'm currently at the end of the skinning phase of things and am running into a few problems.
My main issue right now is fixing some unsightly folding of typology when I bend certain limbs. I'm not sure if this is something I need to be handling exclusively through skin weights or the way I have been going about, using the Shape Editor and creating corrective blend shapes that I then key to the respective axes on their specified control.
Here is what I mean.
So here is a Z only rotation ~90 degrees with just skin weights.
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And it is with the corrective blend shape.
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This all works fine. But I see complications when adding multiple degrees of rotation at once.
For instance...
Here is the leg rotated on Y ~90 with a corrective blend shape.
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So when I then rotate the leg in Z 90 degrees with the leg already rotated in Y 90 degrees it looks like this...
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Both blend shapes triggering and causing a mess.
All of this is to ask what I'm missing here.
Is this something that I can only solve through skin weights, am I missing something when it comes to blend shapes, or do I have to do something else entirely?
Any help is much appreciated!
Replies
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-00699C13-8CA1-450C-937D-57C7B3DFD8C6-htm.html
BraveRabbits weightDriver has helped me deal with this issue on multiple occasions (http://www.braverabbit.com/weightdriver/).
@kaspersp - That looks like a super useful tool, thanks for the share! It seems like it comes close to solving my problem. But from what I understand, weightDriver is a position based solution which would work fine if I only needed one blendshape in that position but I think I would need two (possibly more?).
One with the foot facing facing up.
And one with the foot facing inward.
Have you seen them? It might help.
But, yeh, you have a very common issue. I usually get the same when I try to fix the wrist roll deformation on my character's forearm.
Anyway, the most simple trick I would do to solve this be to base my solution on a Translation/ Distance method over a Rotation based method. Eulerian rotation are always bound to mess up at one point.
Basically, place and constraint a Locator on your character's foot . Then make that locator the main driver of your blend shapes using set driven keys. Whenever the Locators reaches a certain height and distance form its origin (X, Y and Z value), activate the blend shapes.
I'm liking your Translation/Distance solution! I've been messing with using the rotations of locators to drive my shapes. However, I think what you are saying is the way to go seeing as I am already hitting some problems using rotation.
Thank you for the suggestion!