Maya 'skin morph' equivalent?

SkullboX

So I recently had to switch to maya since that's what they're using in my school, which has been nothing but awesome so far, but I'm on a tight deadline for a lipsync animation and I've run into something I haven't been able to find yet.

In max there was a 'skin morph' modifier, basically it allowed you to create morph targets on top of skin deformation caused by bones allowing you to sculpt the deformation afte ryou had posed an elbow for example, which was dependant on the angle.

If there is nothing like this in maya, I was wondering if anybody knew what's the best or at least a solid method to edit deformation on top of skin deformation. The fingers and especially the elbows on my model are pretty poorly modeled (very simple) as I only have 1 week to design, model, rig and animate a 10 second lipsync (which requies blendshapes) in a program I've never animated a character in so I had to skip the fine tweaking process.

Any help on this is very appreciated!

tacit math

Mr Comet's Pose Deformer will do the trick
:

http://www.comet-cartoons.com/MELfiles/poseDeformer.html

http://www.comet-cartoons.com/MELfiles/poseDeformer.zip

SkullboX

Thanks a lot, that was fast!

I hope I can get plugins to work as easily, but I have no doubt it's as unexpectedly user friendly as the rest of maya's rigging system turns out to be.

Thanks again,

arshlevon

this is built into maya i am pretty sure, i remember seeing this functionality pointed out in the stop staring book by Jason Osipa. i just thought in my head " hmm i can just use skin morph for that... "

SkullboX

well skin morph is a max tool that can do that, posedeform should be able to do the same, but all it did was make maya unstable, it didn't work at all...

Thermidor

I used posedeformer a couple of years ago on version 6 ( i think ) of maya, and it worked a treat, it was a little slow maybe, but yes you could take an elbow, rotate it, sculpt then rotate some more and sculpt. then save, and it worked just like you want. What version of maya have you got at your school? because there very well might be inbuilt solutions in newer versions of maya.

Jay Evans

are you trying to drive blendshapes based on the angle of bones? Cause this can be done along with all sorts of other cool stuff with mayas "set driven key". I'm a max user that had to switch, and it was really one of the few things that I though was really cool and worked well in Maya. Its kinda like wiring stuff in max I guess. Anyway check it out in the help file im sure its a better explanation.

SkullboX

Yeah I've made extensive use of the set driven key (all of the facial control, the secondary animation on the hair and breasts, the 2nd and 3rd bones in each finger. The problem with sculpted deformations is that you can't simply pose with a skeleton, alter vertexes then store that as a blendshape... although you could possibly do that with an entire copy of the rigged arm...

Well in the end I managed to get the poseDeformer to work by deleting all the scripts and putting them back from the original zip, not sure why it failed on me the first time. Not extremely happy with the results but tons better than it was before. I have 2 days left for animation, should work, unless I fuck something up again. I hope the rig has no surprises for me waiting.

The rig still turned out to be pretty advanced compared to what I was used to in max, though it's much simpler to create something like this in maya than it was in max. I could have automated a lot more and really should have setup up some nicer controls for facial animation (they're mostly just custom attributes added to the head and mouth controller, no intuitive control rig you often see). There are some minor deformation mistakes on the back of her arms but it will eb a single shot in front, so I won't be spending more time fixing that...





Still very happy with the amount of control and detail for 6.5 days of work in a relatively unfamiliar tool. I have to have a lot of shit done for school next week, and I'll have moe time afte rthe holidays when school continues to make a better character/rig.

I wish I'd have made the switch to maya earlier. Thanks again for the help!

poopinmymouth

I know it has nothing to do with the question, but dang that character and posing are nice. I wish you would post more Skullbox, I miss your creative flair.

SkullboX

Thanks poop, yeah I actually was going to post it in pnp but she's not done yet, so when she's all lipsynced and rendered out (unfortunatly no textures for this one) I'll post it there. I've been extremely busy with school sicne I started in september, but most of what I've done has been traditional.


I had another question... I also posted this on CGtalk but nobody seems to come on the maya chraracter setup forum.

I've added driven keys to the eyelids so that they automatically correct the rotation of the eyes (this was easy), using two seperate blendshapes (look-up and look-down, it's centered in its default pose). I'm also animating these blendshapes manually using custum atributes for eye closing and opening wide.

Now the problem is when she's for example looking down, and I want to close her eyes, I can't simply drag the slider to the max to close her eyes, as the blendshapes are additive this causes the eyelid to go past its extreme (up to 2 instead of 1). I was wondering if I can hard limit the blendshape to 1, so even if I animate both attributes (the automated as wel las the manual one) I won't have to worry about manually closing the eye and can alter timing easily without having to re-coutner-animate the offset. of course this also goes for the look-up.


Also, ideally I'd also make it so that IF the eyes are wide open (the 'look-up' blendshape) and then animating the eyes to a closed position it would also make the look-up blendshape gradually go to 0 automatically (again, so it closes perfectly without having to counter-animate that).


I imagine the former would be prety easy to limit somewhere, I just haven't found my way through the hypergraph and attribute editors entirely.

Thanks in advance! If something is not clear please let me know.

Whargoul

Another way to do it is to add a couple attributes, one is the "driven" value, one is the "animated" value. Then the blendshape node uses an expression that is just the max of those two (or fancier, like driving down the driven value based on the animated value and then adding them together for a softer falloff).

SkullboX

Yes that would indeed be the nice way to solve that second issue, the problem is that I don't have any idea how to set up somethign like that.

DamienB

I am a bit buzzed (its why I am at a PC on my day off)

I would use set driven keys as corrective shapes to compensate. You could get "techie" like Whargoul said and write some limit expression, or you could bull it the DamienB way, by making a new delta at the right spot (corrective shapes)