Do's & Dont's: Lowres character rigging to drive highres character

[M.E.L.]

Hmmm...I would say that nurbs are out in some instances...for alot of organic stuff it's hard to beat NURBS at times...we still use them sparingly here. As far as the techniques for going from the lowres to highres meshes...we just use a displacement map for the transfer currently...basically looks at the lowres values, swaps in the high-res, adds the displacement map and voila...all done at runtime for you.

Wrapping is a good alternative as well, although it can be quite heavy and tedious at times (hey, it works for alot of people regardless).

I guess typically for the muscle workflow muscles are a touch and go topic...it varies on application and workflow...I use a paintable muscle setup that stems from one of our inhouse tools here for deformation...bout as much as I can really get into :\ The muscle is added to the lowres though and the weights for the muscles blend/override the actual skin weights for the given joint.

-shawn

[fr3drik]

So you are not so much into animating a poly proxy which is driving a subd then? What are the pros/cons on working with displacement instead? Increase in render speed - still using polys, no subd?

With Maya 6, the poly smooth proxy command kind of makes me not want to use subd at all. In combination with normal mapping I think this is a great alternative to subd when creating characters. Any ideas on that?

[M.E.L.]

Not necessarily an increase in render speed specifically...it's more or less for the animators. Because the scenes can be a combination of things or just an anim or lowres...we don't need to weigh things down extremely heavily for them to yell at us about. The same goes for just using a single skeleton as well in a scene...if the rig is well planned and the character has been properly thought out then you should in MOST instances be able to maintain a single rig for the entire character. Keeping it simple is crucial.

Thus far the pros for us with displacement is simply that when you are done your anims, finished all your tweaks and fx is complete...the final output just gets streamed together to the highres setup...saves time in the rigging department as well as cutting time down with the animation department not weighing their scene down with a million different things.

I can't speak much on Maya 6 as I only saw it briefly at the release party...we're still using 5.0 and I'm quite content with it :)

-shawn

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