Beaks, bones and C4DCafe

[3DKiwi]

Hi Matt

Registration should be instant. Try this page and our site should send you an activation email:

http://www.c4dcafe.com/portal/register.asp?actkey=1

3dCrew should be awake in couple of hours so he can help if this doesn't work. Me, I'm off to bed.

~3DKiwi

[malthus]

Thanks 3dKiwi, that worked! Nice tutorial, thanks. I watched the tutorial, but unfortunately I'm still at a loss as regards my bendy mesh/rigid beak problem. Is the only solution to include the beak/eyes in the mesh and make sure every appropriate vertex is 100% affected? (at least as I understand it that should prevent distortion). I'm hoping there's a better solution - I'd have thought there must be, if only to deal with eyeballs which are a nightmare if they're combined with the bendy mesh!Matt

[3DKiwi]

Hi Matt

Glad you're signed up now and you're able to get to the tuts.

To make your eyes etc move with the nones but not get deformed you can make them child objects of the head bone. They are in effect now glued to it.

Another alternative is to drop a "Stop" tag on the eyes and beak. This stops deformers having any effect.

Look forward to seeing you in the forums.

I'm just finishing off a hand rigging tut for 8.5. Some of the stuff coverd could be applied to to CE6 like the vertex painting.

Cheers
3DKiwi

[malthus]

Thanks 3dkiwi, bizzarely I had this revelation just before I was going to sleep last night, and am going to try it out now. Always nice to have my thoughts confirmed by the experts! I look forward to the hand-rigging tute :-)

[malthus]

60 seconds later...

Tried it out, and they move with the head now, but they also distort. So I've had an idea that involves a dummy nul object and a COFFEE expression (I've been putting off trying to use COFFEE for a long time now!). r6 doesn't have "stop" tags, alas.

[malthus]

This is still driving me nuts. Ok, here's where I am:-

If I make the beak a child of the head bone, it moves how I want it to but unfortunately it also distorts. There's no such thing as a 'stop' tag in r6, so I have to get creative. My idea was to make a null object the child of the head bone and call it, say, "null1". Then I would have another null object (null2) in exactly the same place that wasn't in the bones hierarchy. Then I would make the beak object a child of null2. Then I would write some beautiful piece of COFFEE scripting that ensured that null2 had the same position, scale and orientation as null1. That way the children of null2 would only move/rotate and not distort.

The problem is that I can only find a COFFEE expression which retrieves the location of an object RELATIVE to its parent, not the position/scale in the World co-ordinate system. I've looked at SDK for r6 and I can't find the correct term. Just plain old getposition. Can anyone familiar with COFFEE help? I can't believe that there isn't a simple and elegant answer to this problem! :argh:

Thanks in advance guys.

Matt

[3DKiwi]

Hi Matt

Using COFFEE sounds like a very extreme measure to me. Any chance you can send me the scene file. I still have CE on my PC so could take a look and see what other alternatives there are.

3DKiwi

3dkiwi@c4dcafe.com

[3DKiwi]

Thought about it. Piece of cake.

A much easier solution to stop the eyes etc being deformed by the bones is to set up selection(s) on the body mesh. On each bone you make a restriction tag and type in the name of the selection. Make the eyes and the beak a child object of the head bone. They will then move with the bone but won't be distort by that or any other bone.

This works in any version of C4D. You should be setting up restriction tags anyway.

~3DKiwi

[malthus]

I feel very stupid. It works, many thanks! My penguin can now nod without his eyes rolling around inside his head :-)

[3DKiwi]

LOL. No worries. The only silly questions are the ones you don't ask. I've been using C4D for 12 months now and I'm still learning things.


Cheers
3DKiwi

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