Complex Endomorphs

[SplineGod]

Yes. You can link several endomorphs using cycler, expressions or blend with normal displacement. I have a video tutorial that shows how to use normal displacement along with a couple of morphs to blend them. You can find the video tutorial in my Free Section on my site. Its the eyelid tutorial. :)

[gerardo]

Very good idea SimianLogic !!!:thumbsup:

BTW, seems that the link for your script is broken


Gerardo

[SplineGod]

I think its pretty easy to manually create the nonlinear endomorphs by hand using morph mixer. Once you have the behavior the way you want all you have to do is simply tie it all to a single controller (could be the pitch of a bone) using cycler.
Lernie also has a nonlinear morph script on his site here:
http://thespread.ghostoutpost.com/
Might be worth looking at as well. So far I havent had too many problems mixing morphs using the methods Ive described. :)

[adrencg]

Originally posted by SimianLogic
I couldn't think of anything better to call them. I don't know if this has been done before or not, but here's my method. The basic premise is to fake an endomorph that deforms along a curve.

----LINK---- (http://arches.uga.edu/~simian/ComplexMorph/cm.html)

I do this all the time at work for complex animations like layers of arteries or nerves peeling back -- but I don't see the need for plugins.

I model the first morph which is the initial part of the movement. Then, when I make the next morph, I add the previous morph to it and deform it some more -- so on and so on until I get the the final shape.

In layout, I'll pick a nice even number to use as morph to morph. Let's say 5 frames. I open morph mixer and holding down Shift+crtl(makes a keyframe for all morphs), I slide the first morph to 100%.

Then I go to frame 10 -- I slide the second morph to 100% and the first morph back to 0. They must criss cross to make a perfect x in graph editor. 50% mark for each morph has to line up.

I do this for each morph down the line -- when one is at 100%, the previous one needs to simultaneously slide back to 0%. Then, I go into graph editor and set all the morph keyframes to linear. The graph editor window(with all morphs selected) should look like a bunch of x's lined up one after the other.

I've done really complex medical animation with this technique -- things growing from other objects, transformations, peeling, collision deformation -- even some character animation, all done with morphs in modeler.

Mike

[SimianLogic]

gerardo - sorry about the link, forgot you couldn't upload an ls directly. it's back up as a zip.

SplineGod - I hadn't seen your displacement map technique before. It's very cool, but I don't think I'd be familiar enough with them to get precision results. How would you use cycler to drive morph channels? I played with it a little while but didn't get any results. Lernie's script looks cool, but you can only use it if the object is in layer one. That seems like more of a drawback than it's worth in the long run.

I spent a few minutes working up a more complex example this morning. It's kind of choppy, but you get the idea.

Lip Curl -- 61K AVI (http://arches.uga.edu/~simian/ComplexMorph/pout.avi)

I figure the script could also be used as a morph editing tool. I find myself sometimes needing to modify geometry that's really dense and hard to get to. I'll make a morph, smooth it out so I can spin quads more easily, and then test to see what the changes look like on the base morph. Now I can do the same thing on endomorphs...make a "smooth" morph and apply it to the morph i'm modifying. Spin quads or whatever, then delete the "smooth" morph back out.

andrencg - there's definitely nothing wrong with that method. I just had this idea and thought it would be a good way to get into learning to lscript. I also wanted to be able to tie the whole chain of morphs to one controller. I didn't know that you could use cycler to achieve this, so I figured I'd play around until I could do it on my own.

edit: grammar fix

[SplineGod]

Similan,
The cycler method gives the best control over multiple morph blending that has to be repeatable in a particular way such as muscle flexing, eyelids etc. Heres a good thread about it:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=92415

[SimianLogic]

I'll have to try that out later. Even if my lscript doesn't prove useful, I don't regret it. The more I play around with what endomorphs can do, the better an understanding I will have of them--plus, now I'm not afraid of slogging through the LScript manual and roughing out an LScript if I want to do something weird.

[SimianLogic]

I was playing around in modeler some more and realized my LScript is completely useless. You can just hit Apply Morph and set the value to -100% to subtract a morph. C'est la vie. It was fun scripting anyway.

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