PDA

View Full Version : XSI nonlinear morphing?

michaelb
08-19-2004, 02:45 PM
Hi,
I've been watching the commotion over the deal Softimage is offering, and it made me curious about the benefits of using XSI. I've been doing some research on XSI 4's features and I noted it has some awesome nonlinear animation abilities, but I was wondering if it allowed built-in nonlinear morphing (shapes?). I currently use LightWave 8, and a new plugin called "SmartMorph" was just released that allows a nonlinear blend of morph targets. Does XSI do that by any sort of built-in process, or are all the morphs linear in nature? Thanks.
titaniumdave
08-19-2004, 02:52 PM
You can do shape blends in the animation mixer. You can create a bunch of different shapes (blendshapes) and create a shape keys. Then you can import the shape keys in the mixer, mix them around, blend them together, change the amount of time each shape takes, etc.
yog
08-19-2004, 03:00 PM
Yep, it allows linear and cardinel curve shape blending.

Also if you are thinking of using blend shapes (morphs) to do things like eyelids over a curved surface (the eye), then you might want to think of curve constraints for cluster groups. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this video tutorial :
http://www.thejaco.com/tempstuff/pur9e/1-rigging_an_eye.avi
ThE_JacO
08-19-2004, 03:41 PM
for the record that tutorial (haven't seen it yet) is by pur9e, I'm only hosting it.

and yes, XSI has a BRILLANT implementation of spacewise curved blending ( btw it obviously takes 3 shapes or more to define a curve properly)
michaelb
08-19-2004, 09:49 PM
Thanks, I'll check it out.
CGTalk Moderation
01-19-2006, 12:00 AM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.