Animating eyes with Character Studio

[azozel]

You might have to switch to a dummy object in place of bones and link that into your rig. This has worked great for me in the past especialy with the new look at constraint.

[Joel Huenink]

Ok, I tried a dummy, and it does the same thing. I move it, eyeball vertices go right with it. I rotate the dummy, and the eyeball vertices do nothing!

[Joel Huenink]

Ok I think I've found a solution for the eyes, but still face the same problem with the jaw. I just detached the eyeball polygons as new objects, linked them to the biped head, assigned physique to the rest of the mesh, and I can rotate them just fine. However I still need to be able to rotate the jaw bone to open the mouth, so I'm still stuck.

[azozel]

you can ither creat morph targets or try making geomatry for a bone and re-apply physique. and reweight your model. you can ignore the private message I just sent you.

[azozel]

it looks like I'm going to have to buy some plugins, Biped.dlc
and DMFPlugin.dlu. ;) it wont let me open it without these files I'm crashing.

[Joel Huenink]

I tried creating some geometry for the jaw, and it still doesn't rotate the jaw on the character. Is there some settings in physique or in character studio that ignore rotation values of additional bones?

[azozel]

ok make a short bone and keep the the little nub at the end deleate everything else. Clone these around the mesh jaw bone and link the nubs to the geomatry bone and reapply physique. I just did a test on a sphere and this works. it's a bit crude but it works.

[Joel Huenink]

I tried it, my jaw moves around with the bone, but rotations have no affect on my mesh.

[Joel Huenink]

Oh and out of curiosity, I tried what you did, and that works fine. Somehow though when using a biped, the bones do not work with rotations.

[azozel]

Hummmmm. The test I'm running it's working. Try link the mesh jaw to a bone nub linked to the head then link the mesh jaw to the bone nub and then all the other little nubs to that. Also look at your Envelope strength and scale.

[Joel Huenink]

I've linked the jaw/eye bones to the biped head, then applied physique to the mesh. Everything works fine for me until I involve a biped. I can set up bones and such on the face, and it works fine, until I involve a biped. Are you using a biped and linking the bones to the biped, then applying physique and getting rotations to work?

[azozel]

yeah I'm using a biped character studio 2. whatever 5 I think . .... I've got to go home to the wife but I'll be on later tonight. probobaly in 2 to 3 hours play around with difrent settings and I'll touch base back with you then.

[Joel Huenink]

I've never had any trouble with using CSX and Max 1,2 or 3. Now I'm trying to use 5.1 and rotations on added bones linked to the biped don't work. The bone rotates, but the mesh does NOTHING. I can move it around, and movements work fine, but for animating eyeballs, jaws, etc, rotations work best.

[azozel]

Can you make morphtargets? or is that out of the question for your needs?

[Joel Huenink]

I'm not real familiar with them, I haven't used them since uv unwrap tools were improved. I only used them to reassemble models that were broke apart for mapping purposes, back when there were no good un unwrap tools. I'd rather not go down that road. There has to be something broken with CS or Max 5.1, my old method should work. AS I said, I found a work around for the eyes, just attach them to the biped head directly, and not have them part of my physiqued mesh. And for the jaw, I think I can live with jaw movement, rather than rotation, and get on with my project. But I still would like to know how to make rotating bones influence the mesh with bipeds. I think I'm using CS 3.4 and not 4.0, perhaps its a bug there, but our engine plugin didn't work with 4.0. How do you know what version of CS you are running?

[azozel]

Go to help then aditional help and highlight the character studio topic
it will tell you what ver you are running. I'm in 3 also.
Humm that is strange. I dont know what to tell you . I guess fake it as best you can. I'd love to see the finnished product. You have my e-mail if you need more help. I'm glad to be of service. :) Good luck.

[Joel Huenink]

Well I'm to the hair pulling out stage. I thought I could get around my problems by just moving the bones for the jaw and eyebrow. A bit more work than rotations, and not as flexible, but I figured it would be ok until I figured out what was the problem. After articulating for a few hours, getting close, I exported my basic animation, and none of the custom bones animation data passed through. Then something happend and half the face vertices are detached, and running down a mile off the screen. Not sure what is going on here, but its quite frustrating. Then, I decided to open an old character from Gore (our first game) which was built with Max 3 and whatever version of CS there was back then. The eyebrow and jaw rotations work fine (in MAX 5), everything looked great. I remove physique from the stack, and reapply the one that comes with max 51, and boom, rotations on the custom joints are broken again. I'm about to install max3 and articulate my character in there, then reopen it in 5 and export it. Except that won't work down the road, because I will need to make LOD's, might need to remove physique from the stack to fix animation problems in the model, etc. So I'm at a dead end, and about to drop facial animation from my project all together. Is there a patch for CS? Do older version work with Max 5.1? This is pure pain trying to get this going.

[Joel Huenink]

Well I solved the problem. I was linking the bone line stemming right off the physique, rather than the link between the added bone and the terminator. Hope this helps someone down the road, it was a 2 day nightmare for me :)

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