turbosmooth and morpher?!

[OmegaN]

Where do you have your turbosmooth modifier in your stack? how does your stack look like?

[Hordak]

hi like this:

.morpher
.uvwmap
.uvwmap
.uvwmap
.turbosmooth
.editable poly
:bounce:

[Chris Thomas]

Ah, your stack workflow is wrong. It should be more like this....

Turbosmooth (for best speed have set to off in viewport/on in render)
Morpher
Skin
Unwrap UVW
edit mesh

This means that the turbosmooth kicks in last, and even better, only at rendertime. Don't forget that when it comes in at rendertime in your setup it doubles the number of polys being passed up the stack, this blows everything above it out the water as the topology they are "expecting" simply is not supplied to them, instead of say 500 polys, they now are passed 2000. This will break the Unwrap UVW's and the Morpher as they are both topology dependant.

So remember, most modifiers are topology dependant... if not, cool enough, but you allways have to bear this in mind when setting up a stack. Don't put any topology altering modifiers below topolgy dependant modifiers in your stack. The main thing to look out for is anything that changes the vertex/poly count as the UV unwrap tool is dependant on this, as is skin, morpher, skin morph, etc.

Hope that makes sense?

Hmm, looks like I'll have to do a DVD on proceduralism and stack use sooner rather than later eh?

[Hordak]

thx for the replies guys..jmonkey2000 the thing is if i put the morpher beneath the turbosmooth, I can't pick any of my morphtargets, because the morpher doesn't registrate that there is a turbosmooth above it.. Is there anything I can do to keep turbosmooth on top and still use my morphtagets?

[sean_dunderdale]

you shouldnt need to have turbosmooth on to animate your morph targets. Simply keyframe what morphs you want then when you exit the morph modifier it will render at high poly as long as you have render iters set on. Im not 100% ive understood your question though, but if you want to see exactly what is going on in the viewport as you use the morpher, with your stack in the correct order then just click on "show end result" and it will update to show your entire stack as you animate. Hope this was close to answering your question.

[Chris Thomas]

sure, your original turbosmooth should stay put, infact select it in the stack and choose "Collapse To" this will collapse the mesh to that point. Its like this you see..

Your origianl mesh had say 400 verts, then in the stack you added a turbosmooth and that altered the mesh so it now has say 800 verts. At that point you copied the object and used that copy to make your morph targets, each of which has 800 verts. If you remove the TS in the original model your back to 400 verts again, and the morph targets are still at 800 verts, so the morph modifier see's no correspondance between the vert numbers and will not allow you to pick the models.

So, you may as well collapse your stack at the original TS level and stick with 800 verts in the base mesh from now on. Your workflow was actually flawed in that if the original 400 vert mesh was detailed enough to make the morph targets for it, it would have been better to stick at the 400 vert level as less poly's = faster deformation and less memmory needed for each morph target. But that horse has bolted, you now have a number of 800 vert mopth targets so your stuck with the 800 vert base mesh.

So, "collapse to" the original turbosmooth modifier, you should find you setup still works at this point, morphs should stick work. Then add a turbosmoth at the top of the stack to add the required level of smoothing. Yeah?

[Hordak]

jmonkey2000:
true.. thing is that if I collapse it now I can't really change my iteration later on should I want that and it becomes an editable mesh, which i am not as comfortable working with as editable poly... But I see your point and didn't know the "collapse to" part. I usually just converted the mesh into an editable poly, but that ruined my uvws.
The problem was still solved by just moving the turbosmooth atop of the uvws, even though my morph-modifier is above it. Thx man I learned something new again

sean_dunderdale:
hi. The thing was that when I put the morpher beneath the turbosmooth it didn't register the turbosmooth, even though the mesh was smoothed in the viewport, so I couldn't pick my targets because their vert count was higher, seeing as they WERE end result meshes and the original just showed it in the view port...

I guess I will do my targets and then move the morphmodifier beneath my turbosmooth on my main mesh.
THX ALOT for your input guys.. CGtalk is great:bounce: :thumbsup:

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