CGTalk - Weight morphing?

MJV

05-18-2006, 06:56 PM

Has anyone ever tried to morph between two or more weight envelopes? For example, you could have two envelopes on a character, one where the arm works when outstretched, and one when it is at the character's side. Then you script the envelopes to morph as the arm rotates. Instead of using a geometry morph, you could use a weight morph. Has this ever been tried? Is it even possible in XSI? I was able to set up multiple envelopes on a character using clusters, but can't figure out how I would morph blend between them. Is this a stupid idea?

ThE_JacO

05-19-2006, 12:40 AM

No it's not a stupid idea, and no, it's not possible out of the box.
It's not particularly hard to write as a tool (I know, I have it in my toolbox :p ), but the solution isn't as trivial as you might expect when you work with weights.

A trivial but expensive solution is having two meshes deformed by the same deformers but with different weightmaps, and biasing a third between the two (or more), which is a simple vectors averaging, but it can be fairly dataheavy as you can imagine.

The alternative solution, of working weights-side, while not being anything phenomenally hard, isn't as simple as it may sound. The example you're thinking of is probably just a few bones and all points are already weighted to those bones and only need shuffling, but blending between very different sets of deformers can turn out unpredictable very soon.

I know it took me a while to get something that would average satisfingly for more then just an arm bend, and it's not particularly snappy.

MJV

05-19-2006, 01:13 AM

Thanks Raffaele. Your reply was vey helpful. It's good to know that I'm not crazy for having the idea in the first place.

CGTalk Moderation

05-19-2006, 01:13 AM

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.