To bone or not to bone?

[LucentDreams]

never modeled something posed before, but from what I have heard from a few who have, its more difficult, especially in temrs of proper proportions and anatomy. arms tend to bee too short or too long and such.

How ever I may still recommend that depending on how much time oyu have. bones take a fair bit of use to be good with, your also going to find that just because you model a man and put bones in him to pose him into a yeling position, your still going to need to do a lot of tweaking. in a really impressive rig likke that used on gollum, every move a bone makes, morphs part of the body to keep muscles and bends and stuff correct, bones alone will deform yourmesh in unrealisitc ways and often make things worse.

[xeno]

hmm, i dont think i totally agree with that. I think that if u bone a character the right way, the whole clipping problems dont really have to occur. I have also "boned" a character i made which was already in some sort of pose, and still it came out working pretty good, so yea its "do-able". But then again, i dont think i would actually recommend it though!

[AdamT]

I think most animators would agree that the best way to rig a character is to use a combination of bones for the body and morphing (i.e., Posemixer/P2P) for facial expressions. Which is not to say that you can't get good results using bones for facial expressions....

[phobos]

O.k so I think that I'm gonna use bones. Maybe for the body and morphing for the face. But is there a way with v8 to store some morphs and then use them when I need them? I think that this is a new feature on 8 but can you be more specific?

And thanks to all of you for all your answers.

[CosmicBear]

i think, you are talking about the mocca-tools. they are ecellent for character-animation or - in your case - characterposing.

mabye you should get the demo-version of R8 in order to try out a few things

[phobos]

I own the v8 and the appropriate plugin (thanks dad!!)...
I think that I have to read the manual....
Anyway I hope that the tools for morphing are easy...

[Wilson-3d]

Hi. I have been working on a rig for a character and it is a big job when it is the first time. A tube is easy to bone. It is when you get a lot of parts with a lot of bones that it starts to get complicated. Figuring out the hierarchy and limiting bones to certain geometry ect. The nice thing is once you have the character boned you will have him in your library and will be able to pose them different for other projects. Also if you model in the rest position and model you can adjust the pose of him shouting if you change your mind about anything. With morph targets you would model the head in a relaxed position and then make a duplicate and adjust it to be shouting. possible many duplicates for more contriol-say the mouth open on one and the brow down for another. Together you have the shouting morph. My thoughts are that if you are not going to do anything else with the character why not model him shouting and save adjusting duplicate targets later. Just some thoughts. In my opinion I would say if you have time bone him-learn more while doing it and have a more flexible character. If time is short you may be able to just model him shouting and be done with it. Hope that helps a little.
Wilson3d

[DannyB]

Are there any good tutes for utilising morph targets in animation, i have heard them talked about alot in facial animation especially in gaming.

And would you get as good results as with boning a facial movement?

Do they work well with C4D7?

Can they be synched up to vocal expressions?

[AdamT]

Originally posted by DannyB
Are there any good tutes for utilising morph targets in animation, i have heard them talked about alot in facial animation especially in gaming.

And would you get as good results as with boning a facial movement?

Do they work well with C4D7?

Can they be synched up to vocal expressions?

Let's see: no, better, yes and yes. :)

R8 (Mocca) has much better morphing tools than XL7, although there are two very good morphing plugins for v.7--Vreel Morph and Quickmorph (http://www.studio-fabian.de/).

I don't know of any Cinema-specific morphing tutorials offhand, but if you search the web pretty much any facial morphing tutorial can be applied in either XL7 or R8.

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