Flex question

[catizone]

Further playing around shows that even attempting to weight the points is still problematic. Must be missing something.

Maybe it would be better to set up a whole bone rig, including mouth, and then have ik targets for mouth bones follow flex points (and deactivate the flex deform).

Or I'm open to other suggestions as well.

Best,
Rick

[dobermunk]

not the specialist on Flex, but methinks you may want to look at FlexMotion. Same spline control as Flex, but works via bones.

[catizone]

Thanks. Yes, that's another option. I'm trying to recall if there were axis orientation issues with that approach. The seemingly nice thing about flex was that you could deform geometry without having to add bones, and it now can work from the distorted tool shape(curve) without axis orientation problems.

I thought that if I ik'd some bones, I could force the positions of the nulls to the curve points, and then animate the curve, which would take the ik'd lip and face bones with them, without having to size each point (that still didn't get me what I needed) since the effect itself would be turned off, and the point curve would just be used to animate the rig.

Best,
Rick

[dobermunk]

I'm trying to recall if there were axis orientation issues with that approach.
Yes, there are.
The seemingly nice thing about flex was that you could deform geometry without having to add bones, and it now can work from the distorted tool shape(curve) without axis orientation problems.
Just wanted to reiterate that I do not know if this doesn't work. Me thinks it must. But I don't know, so I'm just throwing the alternative out that I do know works.

Have to climb into my dungeon until about Monday. Hope this works for ya!

[borisgoreta2000]

Here is a video showing how to use flex to animate mouth. To add to this setup you could make mouth poses using curve control points on negative frames and then use MotionBlender to later animate between phonems or mouth poses. If you have any questions about this setup feel free to ask.

Cheers,

boris


http://free-zg.htnet.hr/Boris-Goreta/flex.mov

[chikega]

Thank you, Boris! This is much appreciated. :thumbsup:

[catizone]

Thanks, Boris. I'll have to check it out.

Best,
Rick

[catizone]

Thanks to Boris, watching the video also reminded me of some "small" things I forgot, such as how to see the weights and assign them with the ctrl key.

So, I've been playing around and have another question. There are width, height, and depth settings for each point in both setup and animate. Can you tell me the effect of each? If I adjust those values in animate, they do not change in setup. So....does that mean that changing the influence there is not the proper way to do it, but raher in Setup?

The problem I see is that I want to SEE how the weighting will deform the mesh, but I have to leave setup to do that.
Best,
Rick

[borisgoreta2000]

Width, height and depth are like x,y and z size of an influence sphere around the curve point which defines the weight on the object. If you change those values in animate it is normal they don't change in setup mode. That is the purpose of the setup mode, it is the same with bones, you can't change setup values while you are in animate mode. You also can't see the changes of those values in the viewport while in animate mode. Change those values in setup mode.

Every time you select another point you have to switch to setup and back to animate mode to see the weight shading. (use keyboard shortcuts 'r' and 'n' to do it quickly)

Cheers,

boris

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