CGTalk - MetaEffector acting up

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Layer01

01-08-2006, 06:49 AM

Hi
i'm trying to rigg a robot i made and i'm haveing a lot of trouble getting him to deform in solid blocks, IE: no organic stretching etc.
he is made up of lots of individual parts and i want certan bones to only move/affect those parts, and affect them %100.
so i have been adding MetaEffectors to almost each bone and then setting the effector to "All Connected" andselecting my "blocks" that way. then setting the bone weight to the appropriate meta effector.

first thing i noticed which kind of ticked me off is that other bones seem to still have an influence over some of the areas controled by the meta effectors so it seems i will have to add a meta effector to almost every bone. this is ridiculous, there must be an easier way!?

But i can bight the bullet and live with that, but then problem number two popped up.
i went to add a meta effector to one of the leg shields and it seems to ignore the shield!? the shield is pretty big, but i can only get it to select the shield in one location and then it selects a bunch of other stuff i dont want it to! :banghead:
also i'm not sure if this is important but when i add the mesh to the weight drawing list (for the shield effector) the green tick is greyed out :surprised

here are two images one showing the effector selecting the shield and everything else under the sun, and one when its where i want it to be but where it is selecting nothing.
i'll also attach my scene file if anyone cares to look at it ;)

this is the shield not being selected:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y244/Layer01/Screen02.jpg
This is the shield and everything else being selected:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y244/Layer01/Screen03.jpg
and when i move it away from the other stuff the damn shield DESELECTS!! arrg
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y244/Layer01/Screen04.jpg

here is the scene file
http://files.filefront.com/Scenezip/;4580787;;/fileinfo.html
(its 440kb)

Layer01

01-08-2006, 08:56 AM

OK update

Isobar was awesome and helped me out on IRC and together we solved a few of the problems. i for example didnt know that the effectors were vertex based, and that explained the weird selections a was getting.
also seems my pitch's and stuff are a little messed up in my scene so i'll have to fix them too, but thats a side note.

This has highlighted some issues i have with the way messiah deals with objects, it works great when you are doing organic deformations on a character, but when you have objects that you want to move but remain solid it gets to be a big hassle. it would be awesome if in the drop down menue where you choose what influences the weight of a bone you could choose objects. then a table would appear and you could add objects you want that bone to move and influence %100. this would save you haveing ot deal with thousands of metaeffectors reducing the chance of an error dramatically.

I hope these issues will not be overlooked pmG, as something as easy as having a bone affect all of one or more meshes should be incredibly easy to do and not require this much head ache.

*wheeeee i discovered colour lol* :D

Lino Grandi

01-08-2006, 09:29 AM

In my experience I think that when dealing with creatures such as robots or mechanical characters, is better to use different object for every rigid part. You can use IK on the parented objects or parent the objects to the respective bones if you want to use a complete bones made skeleton structure.

My 2 cents...;)

svintaj

01-08-2006, 11:18 AM

In my experience I think that when dealing with creatures such as robots or mechanical characters, is better to use different object for every rigid part.

Yes that's the way to go, or for more advanced control like blend between rigid and soft deformations, you can use PuppetMaster.

/ Svante

Layer01

01-08-2006, 12:21 PM

thanks Lino Grandi and svintaj, i'll look into both those options :)

maks

01-10-2006, 01:35 PM

Hey Layer 01,

set the weight calculation pulldown in the "Target Object Options" tab of your Bone_Deform to "Direct Weights" instead of "Factored Weights", this "will ignore the bones' weight influence and instead use the weight field of the weight tool (such as MetaEffectors) only." (from the messiah docs). This should work for your robot.

Layer01

01-11-2006, 04:38 AM

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01-11-2006, 04:38 AM

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