I’ll start out with the deformation rig and how I set that up. As you can see from the model, it’s pretty lowRes. (see part 1). I’ll use that model which I exported from silo to skin the model to the joints. That gives me a decent idea ow how the model will deform, without giving me too much of a headache that I would normally get from a high density model.
After I finished skinning the lowres model to the joints, there are a number of things you can do.
1 – copy the skinweights from the lowres to the highres, and build your higher level deformations from the highres.
2 – create a duplicate of the lowres, smooth the duplicate. then have the lowres drive the highres duplicate through a blendshape.
3 – create a duplicate of the lowres, then connect the .outMesh attribute of the lowres to the .inMesh attribute of the highres. when that’s done, smooth the duplicate.
I’m gonna go with the third method, as it has proven a worthy solution in the past.
After the skinning is done, I then build my blendshape fixes from the highRes model, Since blendshapes are fast anyway (they only calculate the points that have been moved). + this way allows me to do deformation on whichever model I want actually. If one deformer fits best on the lowres, I can just put it on the lowres and the highRes will deform automatically :).
But for now, back to the skinning.
As you can see in the screenshot, I chose to make an even simpler shirt for him. This is because I might want to do cloth simulation on his actual shirt instead of skinning it to joints. This simpler version of the shirt will make for a nice collision object.
Here’s a movie of how the initial binding looks,
as you can see, it’s pretty horrific. Especially the ribbons in the appendages look very bad, aswell as the stomic. I expected this kind of behaviour though. I might put an extra joint into his stomic to keep that mass intact while he bends forward, or I might just see where these initial joints take me. I can always add in extra joints later on.
It’s always good to do a range of motion test like I did with that video, You can actually use that animation to check how your weightpainting is affecting the mesh. While you’re working on the arm, just go to the part of the animation in which the arm moves, and you can see the results instantly.
Keep in mind that this part of the skinning is only for the main geometry. I’m not worrying about things like buttons, eyes, teeth, tongue or eyebrows yet. Those are things that are layered in later when I get the main geometry deforming like I want it to. Some stuff like buttons is actually going to be tacked onto the deforming geometry by using other higher-level deformers or constraints.