Joint Angle Deformer?

[LucentDreams]

its essentially a bone driven morph, if you look in the morph tag you will see an option to create a bone driven morph. Also in the skin deformer you will see three types of skins, linear (like max) spherical (quaternion) and blend which allows you to mix both linear and spherical. using a blend of 50% produces really nice deformations, you can also use a vertex map to influence what areas are linear or spherical.

[dkennewell]

Thanks for the reply Kai, that definately came in handy.

However, i now have another problem. The character i'm using has a default skeleton rig that is pulled straight from Max, with all of the skinning applied. This means that in Cinema 4D it is just bones and no joints, and the skinning shows up as Claude Bonet and not a skin modifier.

The bone driven morpher (Auto Joint Driven) requires joints, not bones, in order for it to work. So to get it to work, i need to add/convert the arm bones into joints. This however removes my original skinning from the arms, because joints don't support claude bonet, and so i'll have to do it all over again.

Is there a work around for this? or do i pretty much have to reskin my character in Cinema 4D?

[xfon5168]

Thanks for the reply Kai, that definately came in handy.

However, i now have another problem. The character i'm using has a default skeleton rig that is pulled straight from Max, with all of the skinning applied. This means that in Cinema 4D it is just bones and no joints, and the skinning shows up as Claude Bonet and not a skin modifier.

The bone driven morpher (Auto Joint Driven) requires joints, not bones, in order for it to work. So to get it to work, i need to add/convert the arm bones into joints. This however removes my original skinning from the arms, because joints don't support claude bonet, and so i'll have to do it all over again.

Is there a work around for this? or do i pretty much have to reskin my character in Cinema 4D?


You should be able to convert the bones to joints. I THINK it should be able to convert the maps with that. If it doesn't it could probably be done with VAMP. I don't know, I can't look at Cinema at the moment, so I can't test it out for you, but if you post the scene file im sure someone could test it out for you.

[dkennewell]

Thanks xfon,

I've actually tried converting the bones to joints, but it appears that joints do not support claude bonet, so i end up losing the skinning that was originally on the bones.

Unfortunately i can't post the scene file as it is for a project here at work :(

It's kind of ridiculous that Cinema 4D doesn't convert Claude Bonet to Skin when you convert a bone to a joint. What about people who have previously rigged their characters in older versions of Cinema that do not have joints implemented? Does this mean that their characters now have to be re-rigged to support the new joint system?

[dkennewell]

Does anyone know if there is a Claude Bonet to Skin converter? That could fix alot of problems.

[xfon5168]

Thanks xfon,

I've actually tried converting the bones to joints, but it appears that joints do not support claude bonet, so i end up losing the skinning that was originally on the bones.

Unfortunately i can't post the scene file as it is for a project here at work :(

It's kind of ridiculous that Cinema 4D doesn't convert Claude Bonet to Skin when you convert a bone to a joint. What about people who have previously rigged their characters in older versions of Cinema that do not have joints implemented? Does this mean that their characters now have to be re-rigged to support the new joint system?

It should work. Try "Convert from Bones" as opposed to "Convert to Joints". It works for me. However, something to keep in mind, maybe Kai can explain the difference better than I can, but I know that it seems to come in as Axis weighting as opposed to From Parent or To Child.

[dkennewell]

If i use "Convert From Bones" i end up with a rig that is made of joints, but is not actually skinned to the mesh, and my original rig that is made entirely of bones and is skinned to the mesh.

It's almost like it is making an entirely new rig based off of my original rig, rather than converting my original bone rig into a joint rig.

Is it possible to copy claude bonet/vertex weighting from one rig to another? If i can do this it should just be a matter of copying the weighting off my bone rig and pasting it onto the joint rig?

Thanks for all the help by the way. It's much appreciated.

[xfon5168]

If i use "Convert From Bones" i end up with a rig that is made of joints, but is not actually skinned to the mesh, and my original rig that is made entirely of bones and is skinned to the mesh.

It's almost like it is making an entirely new rig based off of my original rig, rather than converting my original bone rig into a joint rig.

Is it possible to copy claude bonet/vertex weighting from one rig to another? If i can do this it should just be a matter of copying the weighting off my bone rig and pasting it onto the joint rig?

Thanks for all the help by the way. It's much appreciated.

Could you post a scene file, I'll take a look at it. When I was testing it with a simple scene, I was getting a rig made of joints with the weight tag and skin deformer applied and the joints weighted to match the bones, so I could basically delete the old bones(they were reset [the red X] so you could get rid of them).

[LucentDreams]

yea I'm surprised as well, are the bones a child of a null perchance?

For me converting bones with claude bonet or vertex maps convert properly.

[dkennewell]

I managed to get the character into Cinema with vertex map weighting instead of Claude Bonet. It was as simple as turning off "Use Claude Bonet" in the FBX import options.

But now i have a new question.
In Max, i'm using biped to rig the character. It has single bones for the hands, and all finger bones are then children of that single hand bone.
Now when it is taken into cinema, it converts those single hand bones into 5 individual bones per hand (5 fingers and all). How do i go about making those 5 bones into behaving like 1 single bone without actually deleting the 5 bones? In max it would be as simple as turning on Bone Edit mode and attaching the 5 bones to each other so they become one single object, but i just can't find this in Cinema 4D (and the help file is atrociously bad at explaining anything)

Thanks again.

[LucentDreams]

is it actually five objects in the hierarchy, or just looks like five bones in the editor? joints based systems draw bones between all hierarchical connections, the bones are just visual representations but not actual objects.

[LucentDreams]

cad apps use Z up because X and Y are the plots on the paper for the blueprint which is then extruded up to make the building or object. Z is still the depth, but most 3d apps look at depth being forward and back and cad ups look at the depth coming up from a 2D image.

[dkennewell]

I managed to work my way around it by creating a new bone for the hand and just reassigning the hand vertex map to that bone. I'm definately learning as I go.

Do joints NEED to use Skin or can you assign vertex maps to them aswell? If it needs to use Skin, is it possible to convert vertex map's to Skin?

[dkennewell]

I still can't get the Convert From Bones thing to work properly. Despite what you guys and the Cinema help file says (it should automatically convert the weighting to skin and create a weight tag)

I select the bone at the top of the hierarchy, do Convert From Bones, and i end up with 1 rig that is made of bones and another made of joints. The bones are still weighted, but are turned off, and the joints aren't weighted at all.

Frustrating :(

[xfon5168]

I still can't get the Convert From Bones thing to work properly. Despite what you guys and the Cinema help file says (it should automatically convert the weighting to skin and create a weight tag)

I select the bone at the top of the hierarchy, do Convert From Bones, and i end up with 1 rig that is made of bones and another made of joints. The bones are still weighted, but are turned off, and the joints aren't weighted at all.

Frustrating :(

Try Copying the contents of your file into a new scene, and then try the convert From Bones.

If that doesn't work, post the scene file here so we can take a look at it.

[LucentDreams]

are the bones a child of a null?

[dkennewell]

Yep, the bones are a child of a Null. The Null contains everything that is part of the character (a bone hierarchy and meshes)

I managed to get it half working yesterday by making the bones a child of the mesh and then converting them to joints. The only problem with this is that i have 3 separate meshes. 1 each for the characters head, hands and body.

[LucentDreams]

try grouping them all inside an empty polygon object maybe? it defintiely wont' work with a null and thats what its going to first search for in terms of weights and a null can't be weighted.

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