dual quaternions + heat, in high end packages ?

[alec.tron]

Hiya,
afaik there s no quaternion skinning by default in any package yet...that should just be a matter of time though. But on the site you linked there s a plugin for maya...
c.

[LucentDreams]

Cinema 4D not only offers quaternion skinning but a Blend mode which allows blending witha simple slider between linear and quaternion, but also using a vertex map to indicate what points should use which skinning algo.

Here is a simple comparison I did in a discussion regarding using two joints for knees and elbows.
http://www.kaithestuffguy.com/images/skintypes.jpg

Quaternion skin does have its issues and limits too. Unlike typical skins where you get crushing, if you rotate to far you instead get a flipping effect where the effect is almost like rotating the joint 359 degrees in the opposite direction. Also certain advanced cinema 4d functions don't behave as well with the quaternion algo, such as weight effector (dynamic 3D falloffs instead of or on top of painted weights)

For quicky projects a blend of 50% offers the best results with little manual tweaking/weighting, but honestly in my experience if theres time, I'm still going in and tweaking weights for even nicer deformations. The other nice thing about Maxon's implimentation is that the three modes (linear, spherical, and blended) are in drop down in the skin deformer and can be switched at anytime in the production. Since Quaternion skins are in fact slower than linear sometimes it can be the difference between nice smooth playback in editor and choppy playback, so the animator can easily switch to linear while animating or even just playing back. And then whenever doing a playblast (called preview in cinema) or final render, it can easily be switched to the blended or full spherical mode.

The Since the initial linear data is still used when solving the quaternion deformation, the blended mode has no additional speed hit over spherical. Sadly since it does have to calculate the spherical and then blend with the linear, even when the slider is set to 0% or the weighting value of a vertex map is 0%, it doesn't actually get faster (closer to the linear speed).

Maxon's had this implimentation in public release for about 10 months.

Theres one ore two plugins for maya that offer spherical/quaternion skinning, but sadly no other app to my knowledge has a solution for blending them as of yet. I'm willing to wager the current spherical implimentation being done for blender will soon also have blending capabilities because of their more open and quicker adaptation capabilities being opensource.

[CGTalk Moderation]

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.