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forgetful
01-07-2003, 07:00 PM
I'm having a terrible time trying to to work with joint angle deformers in the max 5 skin modifier. Has anyone had any luck with these things? I've tried useing all the joint and morph angle deformers with no luck.

Here are the problems I'm having:

1. Joint angle deformers - the lattice is very low res there are not enough points on the lattice (I don't think there's anything I can do about that). Also, the twist lattice function doesn't work correctly...If I twist the lattice so that it lines up better with the mesh it squews some of the vertices. Finally, no matter what I do with the lattice when the mesh is in a deformed state (say the arm bent at a 90 degree angle) I cannot get the lattice to mold the mesh properly.

2. Morph angle deformer - just doesn't work. I select the bone envelope of the child, in this case the forearm. Then turn on the vertex selection option. I select the vertex's in the elbow area of the arm. I add the Morph angle deformer. I then add an edit mesh to the stack and adjust the vertices. I go back down the stack to the skin modifier, turn on envelopes, making sure the forearm bone is still selected and the vertices are still selected. I choose 'get from stack'....I've had two results. The first is nothing happens. The second is if I turn on 'show end result' I do get a morph target BUT not all of it. Some of the vertices are not passed down the stack.

Am I missing something important here or is this another bug?
Mahlon
01-07-2003, 11:50 PM
Generally, I've not run into the vertexes moving when twisting the deformer, but I just did a little test and I see what you mean. When you twist, I think some of them are fall outside the gizmo --not sure why they move so far away though.

Yeah, not being able to control the no. of points in the lattice is not good. Go to the discreet forum and put it on the wish list. The more of us that do that, the more they are likely to implement it.

I mostly work with 2 control points at once and try to keep everything somewhat neat on the first pass of setting up the deformation. Once I've gotten it close to the way I want, I tweak individual vertexes. But I haven't had any real problems getting an elbow area to bend convincingly. If you can post a file, or that part of a file, and someone can take a look at it.

As for the morph angle deformer, on a simple example I'm able to get it work properly. Are you doing the edit mesh at a new angle for the bone? Not sure why you're getting those errors. Again, if you have an example file, or could make, one, it'd be easier to figure it out. Also, be sure to delete the edit mesh modifier when you've 'gotten' it from the stack.

Sorry, not much help.

Mahlon
forgetful
01-08-2003, 02:53 AM
Well I got the morph angle deformer to work, finally. What I had to do was select the bone, then select the vertices I wanted to morph. Then apply the morph angle deformer (I find it very funny that the accronym for it is MAD). Add an edit mesh to the stack and then and only then do you set the pose for the deformation you want to adjust. When I was done with the edit mesh adjustments I went back down the stack, made sure the proper bone and verts were still selected. Toggled on 'show end result' and chose 'add from stack'. Then deleted the edit mesh modifier.

Whew!:surprised

I had to give up on the joint angle deformer. Since I can realign the lattice it was unusable.

Thanks for the info!
Mahlon
01-08-2003, 04:13 AM
Originally posted by forgetful
(I find it very funny that the accronym for it is MAD).


Heh heh :beer: that's pretty funny.

Don't give up on the JAD. It works pretty well for things like finger joints, knees, and elbows.

Now what I wish discreet would pay some attention to is the reactor controller. Unless I'm just using it completely wrong, it has some problems. I can't really get much info from anyone about it, but I'm going to persevere.

Mahlon :D
forgetful
01-08-2003, 02:35 PM
Well I'll give the JAD one more try on the finger joints. As far as the reactor controller goes I haven't really messed with it much but a friend of mine wrote a bones rigging tut that uses the reactor controller to drive the foot rotation. Check it out, it may answer a couple of questions for you. http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/bones%20tut/Bones%20tut.asp
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