How do you add Squash & Stretch to your rigs?

[Suricate]

While unfortunately there is no lattice in messiah (as you already found out), you can use muscle bones or curve-based tools like Flex, FlexMotion or Bulge. All of them have explicit Squash & Stretch options (which will maintain volume), so I guess one should be able to get cartoony deformations rather easily. If you have an already rigged character with bones, it might be just enough to turn some of these bones to muscles.

[Suricate]

OK, to test what I'm saying, I created a quick and dirty scene, see the attached *.mpj file. If you move the 'Spine_2' bone up and down, the muscle bone 'Belly_Stretch' will deform the belly, giving a nice cartoony effect.

[ThomasHelzle]

If you use IK as an expression instead of the interface thing, you can place a telescopic IK after the IK2D to get a stretchy effect after the maximum reach of an arm etc.
I have an old example rig with this on my website that I did long ago for a german magazine:
http://www.screendream.de/digi_pro_5-2002_messiah.htm
The direct download link is:
http://www.screendream.de/files/BeeMan_DP.zip

The model is done by Christophe Desse (http://www.xtrm3d.com) and only free for personal use.

The way too complicated foot setup is no longer up to date (Joe Cosman has shown us all what efficient rigging looks like) but the shoulder technique is still rather funny.
For the stretch, drag the arm or foot goal away from the body to see the effect. It doesn't maintain volume though.

I hope the file still works in the current versions :)

Cheers!

[colour]

Thanks for the insights guys, I'll at least have a starting point with these suggestions.

[maks]

For the stretch, drag the arm or foot goal away from the body to see the effect. It doesn't maintain volume though. You can make them maintain volume (squash and stretch) by building your IK rig out of nulls and stick muscle bone between the nulls. This way, when telescopic IK gets active as you drag the goals away from the body, the arms/legs get naturally thinner the more they stretch. I'm working on some rigs for a client right now that are set up like this, and this works pretty well. Muscle bones are great for squash and stretch stuff, and they can be used in many different ways with some imagination. For an easy squashy and stretchy head, just make a null at the head base, and parent another null and a bone to it. Move the second null to the head's top and make it the target for the bone that you set to be a muscle bone, and cartoony you go! Flex and Flexmotion have also the ability to squash and stretch, you can find some nice applications for them as well for more advanced setups. Hope this helps :)

[secretalienlab]

I´ve got two pretty nice scripts in maya that I plan to re-create in messiah.
What they do is they lag and bounce a chain or object based on velocity and acceleration.
I´ll post them as soon I get it done. (probably 2-3 weeks, considering current workload..)
It´s pretty simple, probaly even easier with messiah expressions than in maya, I glimpsed there was a function to get the acceleration directly, instead of having to "sample" it from past velocities. Ended up with a rather massive node network in maya..

-mattias

[ThomasHelzle]

Sounds very cool mattias!

I'm still a bit uncomfortable with messiahs motion dynamics so alternative approaches would be very welcome :)

Cheers! :thumbsup:

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