using muscle/bone systems? good idea or over kill?

[stewartjones]

The setup for a muscle system normally runs a lot slower than just a skeleton rig I've found. However, that shouldn't be an issue for animation and such as I presume the animation team would just be using proxy rigs anyhow and then that animation will be ported to the "uber rig"?!?!

Anyhow, a muscle system is overkill if you need something like a quick test. I don't think that a muscle system setup is overkill for something like the new Hulk movie though. That would no doubt help deformations and give an extra level of control and realism to the character. Of course, I'm sure that even with a fancy muscle system like that corrective blends would be used in conjunction with a solid bone system.

... So yeah, to cut it short, it's not overkill if you need it, but it is if you don't... Wow, not helpful at all! Haha! :rolleyes:

[everlite]

Thanks Stewart,

This is a personal project, so no in house TDs, animators etc :)

Can you expand on a few points, the proxy rig, could you give me a quick over view of how this is set up? and whats an ubar rig?

So in pipeline environment is it common to have the rig as a seperate proxy/scene/file from the main character ? So effectively you can have people developing the rig and mesh in different depts and someone else is animating the scene, so the when the rig is updated it will cascade seamlessly to the scene in a non destructive way?? is this how it works?

I'm trying to imagine how you can do a proxy rig for max.

One other question, with muscles systems, do they usually deform against each other or do you allow intersecting or the muscle meshes?

Thanks,
Dave.

[stewartjones]

Ah sorry. An "Uber" rig is what I meant as the rig with all the bells and whistles. The one that may not run anywhere near realtime in the viewport but one that will be rendered.

Well, each project is very different, therefore the pipeline changes too. When I talk about a proxy rig it simply refers to the base level rig with proxy geometry. Meaning the animator has access to the main controls of the character, with basic geometry representing the characters mass. A layer could be included which has low-poly geometry skinned so that the animator can switch between either viewing method for the character.

The actual character that will be rendered can be in a different scene completely, as long as you have tools written for animation transfer. Usually, as long as the base skeletons stay exactly the same animation transfer is possible.

This means animation is actually created on a fast rig, with IK/FK/stretchy or whatever controls needed. This can the be transferred over to a character rig that has the muscle system, corrective blends, high resolution geometry etc.

I hope that makes a little sense? If it's a personal project you could try a number of things and see what suits you best really!

Hmmm, muscle intersection is a tricky one. I've let the muscle intersect through one another on a few of my setups, and they seem to look ok. There are a number of possibilities for stopping muscle intersecting if that's what you wish to do though. Stuff like corrective blends (skin morphs in Max?), positional constraints for dummy helpers, or surface constraints maybe? I'm not too sure on this one actually, but there's a few thoughts for you!

Thanks

- Stu

[xenoid]

Hey Dave,

Just want to chip in a few more points in addition to the good advice that stewart has given. I will be speaking in the context of Maya as well.

Since this is for your personal project, I guess here's what you may want to try:
1. Setup the proxy rig as what stewart has suggested. Use that to animate your shots with because it is really fast. I would suggest using Maya referencing here. More on it later. Do take note that the shape and sheer number of your proxy geos should match as close as possible to the final rig.

2. Setup up the deformation rig. This can come in 2 forms:
a. This can be just a "deformation rig", with only joints/muscles/skinning/blendshape fixes/etc. The joint structure should be exactly the same as the proxy rig in (1), maintaining all joint orientations and hierarchy. I will name this as a "skin rig" from now on.
b. Another type would be using your proxy rig, skin and do all the magic on the hi-res geos into the proxy rig itself. So this rig will have both the animation controls, and the final deformations in it. I will name this as a "hi-res animation rig" from now on.

3. After you have finished your animation, depending on which kind of deformation rig you build:
a. Import/Reference in your "skin rig" into the scene. Write a script to constrain without offset, each joint of the "skin rig" to each joint of the "proxy rig" used in animation. You will then have the animation driving the "skin rig" for final render.
b. Since we used Maya referencing just now, you can now simply do a reference replace of the "proxy rig" into the "hi-res animation rig". If all controller names are consistent, all animation should be transferred over properly. You now have the final animation rig to be used for render.

Sorry for the long explanation. Let me know if I'm not clear in any parts.

As you can read from online articles, studios usually have some sort of caching system to cache the hi-res geos from the rigs used in animation, so that when brought into the lighting scenes, only the geos will remain with the rigs removed. This ensures a light render scene to do your lighting and rendering with.

As for the muscle intersection, I guess ultimately, it is the skin that matters the most. So I would not worry too much about muscle intersection. Just need to make sure the final skin looks good. :thumbsup:

[everlite]

Oh man, that's a real mind f**k :) but im getting a rough picture. So for any given character you can swap in and out a proxy rig?? ie simple one that drives the basic animation, another that is used to tweak the skin deformation etc, so effectively a given character doesn't have one rig but a few to control each aspects of the deforming mesh inside a master scene??! so in the end you use a master rig that has all deformation controls?

So what happens if you later need to edit the rig, does this propogate through the rest?

Well im using max so not quite sure how this would be handled, not even sure if you could do this in max.

Thanks again,
Dave.

[stewartjones]

I use both Max and Maya, and whatever one is capable of the other can do exactly the same!

For me, the base rig (the one animation gets) should be as final as it can be. This means that the only tweaks that take place are on the rig that will be rendered. Of course meaning no rework for the animators. We all know things don't always go as planned, but a solid base rig is one of the most important parts in my opinion. xenoid's overview is great btw, and those Maya specific things can be done in Max pretty easily (although referencing is not as neatas it is in Maya!).

So a little more Max specific stuff:

>>> Base rig (Proxy models)
This has all the animation controls for the animators, but has basic proxies and/or low resolution mesh. The animator still has to be able to pose effectively after all! Save this file as it's own scene, from here the animators can take this and start their animations.

>>> Render rig
Take the Base rig, and strip out all the unwanted low resolution geometry. Get rid of the IK, reaction controls, float controls, expressions etc. You just want to be left with the base joints that drive the main motion of the character. From here, import the high res model, and skin this one as needed. Of course add in all the dynamics, muscle systems, skin morphs etc that you have.

>>> Getting animation onto the Render rig from the Base rig
There are a number of ways to do this, here's a couple of ideas:

1) Xenoid mentioned using constraints. Sounds like a good plan, so simply constrain the Render Rig skeleton to the Base Rig skeleton (the one with animation) without an offset and you should be good to go!
2) Export out just the animation for the Base Rig skeleton. Hit youf 'h' key and switch selection mode to joints, or use the schematic view to find 'em all! From there, export selection! You could use FBX or collada etc, up to you and whatever you have really. Importing is just the same, get the Render Rig and grab all the joints that need the animation on them. Then Import and match by name.
3) Write your own animation transfer script. If you're savvy with MaxScript you should be able to come up with something, even if it's something basic like selecting joints, baking each key, then taking the position/rotation/scale of the joints for every frame and transferring across to the other skeleton etc... Just an example, don't take it literally! :arteest:



I hope that's a bit of help. Good discussion!:thumbsup:

[eek]

Yes max's referencing is pretty shitting/non-existent. As to using muscles - always think in terms of a production. If this if for high-end film work develop systems to deal with high details. If its for game work, only put in the muscles where need be - also remember deltas are expensive in games so you may have to convert-to-bones.

Personally i dont see the point in doing a perfect muscle system, if you can fake it with bones, animated normals, uvs etc.. then do it.


So in pipeline environment is it common to have the rig as a seperate proxy/scene/file from the main character ? So effectively you can have people developing the rig and mesh in different depts and someone else is animating the scene, so the when the rig is updated it will cascade seamlessly to the scene in a non destructive way?? is this how it works?

This really depends on the production, a lot of studios i know just cache out the mesh, and hand it over to a lighting TD for final passes before comp. The only real way ive found is to have tools to bring everything over in different ways: save/load the skeleton, the animation, just the controls, the vfx, the collision, caching, muscles etc etc..

The key with referencing is its just the animation you want to preserve - so the controlers or ID's to the controllers have to be consistent in the proxy rig as they are in the high-end rig - the rule being, if it finds the controller load the animation, if it doesnt skip it..

[PEN]

This might be reiterating what has been said but I thought I should put in my two cents.

As for muscle bones I use then all the time in just the simplest form of stretchy bones. You can play with squash and stretch on them but often you just need stretch. Also don't go over board with them, you are really not trying to recreate a human but instead making it look like a human. There is a difference. I then use skin morph to tweek out joints so they have really nice deformations and create the correct shapes.

When I start to get very complex rigs going like some you can see on my site I then go with the proxy system that you have seen talked about. I use a scripted tool that I build that merges a high res rig and contraints or bakes it to the animation rig. The animation rig is a rig that doesn't have any deformation tools used in it. So, no skin, no muscle bones, just the animation controls, main bones and a cut up proxy mesh. The render rig or high res rig is all the deformation tools and no animation tools. It has a basic FK bone system that is identical to the animation rigs bones and on top of that has all the muscle bones, skinned mesh and morphing. What this does is seperate two distinct steps in production, the animation and the rendering, both have very different needs. The scripted tool that I created to handle this allows me to add, replace or remove any render rigs in the scene at any time. Another simple way to handle all this is just with the Save/Load Anmation tools.

[JHN]

We use a motionbuilder<->max pipeline... I have created a guide rig, which I can easily place/scale in position in a model, there are some extra bones in it, we name them scalar, muscle and twist bones. With scalar we up or downscale the mesh on triceps for example, these are simple "square" bones with no children. The muscle bones are as Paul mention just stretchy bones that do mainly the shoulder and thigh area. But some are added when needed. The twist bones are for arms etc.

After the guide rig (which has lots of constraints scripts etc) is placed, I convert it to a "standard rig" with a script. That leave's a clean, parented only, bone skeleton. It already has the naming convention Motionbuilder needs. We skin and then import it to motionbuilder and connect the muscle and scaler bones through some constraints to the skeleton, this emulates the muscles. And we hand the file to an animator which is comfortable with motionbuilder. Since we use a lot of mocap data it's a very transparant proces, so the actual rig is motionbuilders control rig. We're a small shop so that saves loads of time setting up a rig in max. After animation is done all animation is plotted back to the skeleton/bones and imported into max. Result: a lightweight solution with bones+keyframes only... pointcache it out at will. A good thing about that is that an animator doesn't have to learn every rig, all rigs react the same. There are some limitations to what can be done with motionbuilder, but for bipedal animation it's great, for extra ordinairy cartoon rigs it's not so great although you can pull it of with some customization.

-Johan

[luigi]

so this is a great thread m goign to get a few minutes fo my busy time to try to add my two cents.

firstable about the transfer to proxy and Hiress rig. Max got a already built tool that work ok but is not the easiest to people to understand in the past i endup doing a few video demos for animators and other people to understand.

so with animation you can load animation to the proxy to the hiress , the thing you always ave to do is to review the mapping , normally it doesnt work great so you have to check it.
for making the mapping work ,check that you got custom attributes checked and modifiers. and you wil need to select the same object in incoming and current and closest button will take care of doing the connection.

one quick trip you can use with the mapping is you can use the notepad with it. them and replace name inside , so if you got a naming convention in your rigs (and your rigs got the same controller or same kinf of rig)is easy to reuse the mapping for two characters to another two diferent character only changing the name fo the character with replace.


the other option is creat your custom save and load tool , that is what i use in my case. is done by maxscript and will save and the keys for al thr controller that are keyables, not forget the custom atributtes. and later will load it in the hires rig. I prefer this opion to the constrain oen because it keeps the facial animation , the morphers animation and ...

I use this save and laod even for load newer version of the rigs , so if the character got new bits or props or .. it will gt my files updated in a few clicks. and you can go clever and batch process the update of rigs. changign main charcter in 100 shots can be quite time consuming.


when we dealing with rigs is necessary apart of saving and loading to know if the hierrachy is not been change , sometimes the animator wil link and ik to another rig or object , and... and the wil use link constrain. so a more advance save and load animation tool with get that in account too. or if you oing ti by hand with save and load animtion for max yuo wil have to redo the hierrachy as the other file befoe you load the animation in.


and for deformation iw il follow paul neal suggestion , I use strechy bones, twist bones , skin moprh , morphx2 and a few more techiches to get my deformation looking nice, and if you want to go deeper have a look in kees plugin skinfx.

[kees]

A REAL man uses a muscle system of course, but whatever...


:) Just kidding.


I think it is most important you start by trying the 'simplest' solution first and then work your way up to more complex setups.

First setup Skin as best you can.

Add twist bones where needed to reduce the twist problems

Then add some stretchy bones in areas that need it.

Then add some bones controlled by spring controllers for secondary parts like floppy ears.

If at that point you still are not happy with your deformation and you want to add some skin sliding and/or flesh jiggle, then it is usually time to grab a proper muscle system.

I personally like what skin sliding and flesh jiggle add to the deformation.
It make it more alive and gives things more volume.
But it is meant to be a subtle effect so it is complete overkill for some rigs and it does take a long time to setup.

The thing to remember is that a muscle system can't really help you if all your previous steps are not done right. If your Skin modifier is not tweaked properly or your bones or animation controls are not working right, then forget about adding muscles for a while until you've got the first stages working right.


Take care,

[metamesh]

great thread!
I don't really have anything to say...just wondering if people really use muscles in their rigs when working in max...i know about stretchy bones are kind of standard but muscle setups, in max? here at mpc the amount of muscles that they add is pretty high, but everything runs under maya so i was wondering what the approach in max would be...
Also Luigi, i've seen that you are using morphx2 quite a lot? in which way?
kees any updates on skinFxanyitime soon? :D

[wamo]

As kees said a Real man uses muscle system :cool: ,i wanna segusst his great Plugin skin-fx,
at the moment in a New film Hulk 3(it's a short film)i'm using Skin-fx,amazing plugin , work fast and easy to use.just you should use some great tricks to setup its muscles,i mean using standard muscles dont have a great resullt for a project,but they are good as base of real muscles.

[PEN]

I haven't had to use skinFX in a project yet as I'm not usualy working on feature work and that is where you might use it the most. But from working with it a bit when Kees released it looks great and allows for that little extra. You do need the time to setup such systems and that is one of the reasons that you will not find it in broad cast work must. Also speed of the rig, unless you are setting up a referencing system for dealing with low and high res rigs.

One thing that you really need to consider, and Kees touched on this. Do you really need something that fancy. Often what I find is is junior TD's want to throw more at it to get it to work when really they haven't learned to use the existing tool sets correctly. Skinning is an area that I know of only a couple people that I could hire to do it for me, Kees being one of them. TD's don't understand it so they don't give it the time it deserves and want to move onto systems to try and correct the bad skinning like Skin Morph. This just creates more of a mess and doesn't correct anything. Now if you add muscles and skin sliding sliding on top of a bad skin you really can get in trouble if you don't have the first steps right. Follow the steps that Kees listed and that will get you going. Try and post skinned characters for review, we would have to see the actual model I would think working to know if it was done right or not.

[luigi]

what kees is write is quiete on the spot.

i use morphx2 instead of skinmorph for a few cases.

he first oen when you set a skin moprh for a joint it wil be only 100 on the angle defined and later he wil start to fade. if i use morphx2 i can setup my own expresion so i can make th value to stay aftter it has reach a value. skinmorph is based in angles with morphx2 yop can connect to watheever yo need position, distance of two point and ... so morphx2 will be a more customizable skinmoprh with a bit off need to know expression.

so you are not any more in ilion , with abraham and Juanillo, if you are in london we are planing to do a spanish 3d meal soon . and we can meet in person and show you the stuff.

so i manily do cartoony rig so i am not in a need of muscle, mor stechy bones , mrophx2 , tesit bones and..

but for moster , animal and other creatures make a nice update and make the subtle diference , in my point of viewmuscle is always well done, when is subtle and is not so obvious and is not making yo focus on it.

[metamesh]

hey Luigi,
The main problem i found when i tried morphx2 is the fact that you can't add progressive morph targets, so just 1 morph per channel ( as far as i know..) with skinmorph you can add as many morphs per angle/joint and ( normally ) should work, even tho is a bit of a pain to setup ( at least for me...)
No i'm not in ilion anymore, I may go back in a future, it was great fun working there with Abraham and Juanillo so i wouldn't mind, also the second project is starting and is quite cool.
So yes let me know if you guys plan any 3d geeks dinner and I will go too...also i'd like to go to nexus to visit you and see what you guys do in there! i've never been and also i'd say hi to matt C. :)

I also think that for realistic stuff skin slidding and muscle sim adds this bit of realism that makes the model work so much better...if you guys have the chance to have a view on some super slow motion videos of people walking, running etc you will see how big the ammount of jiggle etc is happening...
Another good point is that is very difficult to have the perfect skin system for all the actions that your character is gonna do, and in some situations no matter what, the skin will break, so most of the big studios ( again as far as i'm aware ) they have the "shot sculpting" department or skin fixing department or whatever they call it, where people fix problems on the skin in a per shot basis...my 2 cents now :D


what kees is write is quiete on the spot.

i use morphx2 instead of skinmorph for a few cases.

he first oen when you set a skin moprh for a joint it wil be only 100 on the angle defined and later he wil start to fade. if i use morphx2 i can setup my own expresionn so i can make th vlau stae anfetr it has reach a value. skinmoprh is based in angles with moprhx2 yop cn conct to watheever yo ned positoon distance of point and ... so moorphx2 wil be a more customizable skinmoprh with a bit off need to know expression.

so you are not any mor in ilion , with abraham and Juanillo, if you are in london we are palning to do a spanish 3d meal soon . and w cna met in person and show you the stuff.

so i manily do cartoony rig so i am not in a need of muscle, mor stechy bones , mrophx2 , tesit bones and..

but for moster , animal and other creatures make a nice update and make the subtle diference , in my point of viewmuscle is always well done, when is subtle and is not so obvious and is not making yo focus on it.

[kees]

I did a bunch of creature TD work for "Journey to the center of the world" with Frantic Films and I used a ton of SkinFX and MorphX2 in those projects.

Hopefully I'll be able to share some of what I learned in the near future on my website.
I'm just working on setting up my blog system (at lumonix site). so I should be able to share some tricks on there soon.

But basically like Paul said, this movie project had the right budget and requirements to benefit from a muscle system. We had creatures on the big screen extreemly close to the camera with lots of motion so it needed the extra detail. For most other work (like broadcast, games etc) I avoid it because you won't really see the difference and is certainly not worth the additional time and money it costs to set it up.

Because you often have so many things working on the same little area of the mesh it really becomes tedious to tweak and get it all to behave.

I sometimes get people asking me how to properly setup muscles and really there is no one solution for all creatures. It depends on how your rig works, how your skin weights are setup, if you have morphs targets, etc etc.
It is really case by case.

One of the reasons I wrote morphX2 was actually in response to using skinFX on creatures because usually I would have the muscles and flesh behave quite nicely except for a few small areas or even specific shots.

So I wanted something that would allow me to tweak any mesh deformation quickly as 'fixer' shapes. Because endlessly trying to fix the muscle behavior is almost impossible sometimes (unless every project had unlimited time and budget, lol).

It was not written to replace skin morph at all. But as pointed out before, skin morph works on bone angles. Although both plugins overlap a lot in what they can be used for, I found cases where I didn't even have any bone-angles at all and still wanted to be able to use fixer morphs.

Sometimes I even wanted to provide morph fixer shapes that the animator could activate when they wanted them via a custom attribute. So then skin morph really doesn't help you.

But the nice thing about max is that there are many ways to solve problems, so morphx2 i'm sure is not the only solution to these problems.


As for progressive morphs, you can do that in morphx2, you just have to set up the expressions yourself. There is no reason why you could not take 5 morphx2 channels and wire them so that the progressively activate and de-activate.
I guess i'll have to do an example of that too :)

And updates to SkinFX, I'm not sure. It depends on if I find anything while doing creature work that really needs to change. There is at least one thing in the flesh sim I want to improve. The thing is, only a small group of max users ever get deep enough into creature work to actually buy SkinFX, so for financial reasons, the development of skinfx is mostly driven by my own needs and the needs of customers that have bought it and give me feedback.

I don't think I can make muscle work a lot easier for people because it simply is really technical work. It just isn't for everybody :( (until some genious programmer comes up with an automated-always-works-muscle solution)

Take care!

[luigi]

frantic is always creating great stuff with max , i think wih ilion and blur are the ones pushing max further.

I have to agree with Kees , is strange the case on broadcast that i need muscle simulation , normally characters are not than long in screen or you dont se them that big. and max is not that use in features , can be the best place for muscle the cinematic for games.

as kees really when pointed you can do it with expression. i got a small trick for getting a proggresive target without having to switch of one or the other.

imagine you got a progressive morpher of 2 targets.

so what a progressive target does is firstable go to target one and later to the target two.

so for having the diference betwen target1 and target 2. so can morph 100% target two - 100% target one. this wil creat a morpher of the diference.les call target2diference.

so making 100% morpher 1 + 100% target2diference. you wil get your progreessive target.

I us this tecnic a lot in complex facil rig when i got two moprher that mix and i create a third one that fix the problem , for extracting this one i use this tecnic, and this 3 morph wil be launch by expression depending of the other two moprhers value. I start using this tecnic when i was working for 6 moth at ilion with juanillo the character modeller supervisor.


and kees i thinK riggging is dificult ,people is always saying that will be and automatic tool that wil rig a character for you with cloth , muscles and... but i think after 7 year on this, the studios wil always need a custom rig an tool that work with that custom rig.

[metamesh]

btw have you seen the facial stuff from Liam Kemp? how do you think it's driven? morphs...skinning...?

hey luigi I will have to try that... I used to do that with a script that calculates the difference between 2 meshes and adds an edit poly to the source with the transform info of each vertex to be the same mesh as the target, and then u can copy and paste that ediy poly to whatever other copies of the mesh...it was a cool trick but i will try yours too!

[kees]

Hey gentlemen,

I like Luigi's method for creating progressive morphs. Nice.

I've setup another way to do it by wiring several morphx2 channels together to a single viewport slider and then they 'progressively' blend in and out.

I've put an example 3dsMax file on my blog if anybody wants to see it.

It uses a fairly simple expression to blend in and out the 3 morph channels.

You could expand it to use more then 3 is needed.

Hope that helps,

[luigi]

hi kees thanks for putting a sample will try to find time to do sample with my system too.

i dint know you got a blog :) , nice redesign of the site. is just new???

[kees]

hi kees thanks for putting a sample will try to find time to do sample with my system too.

i dint know you got a blog :) , nice redesign of the site. is just new???


Thanks! Yea just put it online last week. So the blog is still a little empty (and I am still workin on the php code for the blog so the format may still change a bit).

[PEN]

I'm wondering what Liam did for the facial work as well. Could just be lots of very well built morphs and a few bones or something more complex like skinFX. What ever it is it looks great.

Well done on the new additions to the site Kees.

[luigi]

i dint see liam kemp stuff before i went to his site.

http://www.liamkemp.com

http://www.liamkemp.com/www.liamkemp.com_test03_sor3.mov it loks to me well doen morphs.

are you guys spekaing about other video , it wil be great to have the link.

[everlite]

I thought i'd share this video breakdown of Prince Caspian, specifically Aslan and Truffle hunter (badger) from the framestore website:

http://www.framestore-cfc.com/#/Film%20VFX/TheChroniclesofNarnia,PrinceCaspian

I noticed in this, especially with the badger, they build the skeleton quite accurately, but are quite selective in the choices of muscles, is this because they choose only the primary deforming muscles? So i think it probably is a good idea to model the skeleton too, instead of just using the default bones in Max.

Dave.

[PEN]

That would have been so much fun to work on.

[metamesh]

nah man, those things seem fun to work on when u watch the making off...when u actually work on that is just a pain in the butt!! :)

[wamo]

This is a wip of the new short movie(Hulk3) that we are making...
just wanted to show you a screen capture of what i'm doing with skin-fx on the Hulk.
I used Expersions and some morph tricks for first stage of muscles setup,but there are twe stages to finish the muscles simulation.
http://i35.tinypic.com/ele8u8.jpg
i recommend Kee's skin-fx to every crazy Rigger :).

[metamesh]

what about complex rigs/creatures in max? how do you guys approach that from a production/productive point of view when it comes to handle a complex/realistic creature in terms of rigging+facial setup+muscledeformation/skinmorph/blabla...I don´t really know what would the best option be, if you split the rigs in diferent rigs for diferent purpose, so the animator/animators get one rig with a proxy mesh, they animate with that and then the "fx guys" load that animation into the same rig with all the deformations running...and if these kind of stuff goes on in companyies using max, how does that work basically? in-house tools? max from-the-shell tools...? i remember reading a thread about that, but i couldn´t find it so i thought i may post here since this is still alive! :)
luigi, pen, kees, the rest of the guys.. what/how do u approach that?

thx!

[PEN]

I use a tool that I have written that merge and constraints or bakes the animation to an FK high res rig from an animation friendly rig. I'm also setting up a system soon that will save the animation to memory, delete the rig, merge a new one and load the animation back on. I'll let you know how that goes when I get to it.

[luigi]

hi pen and metamesh.

I have write the tool pen is speaking about already , few suggestion , you have to check if the hierarchy is been brake or it diferent to the original so you can reproduce the same changes when you load the rig , later check if the rig got object linked to them and redo this one tme the animation is load.


other think to take in account are the constrain, linkconstrain is a bit dificult to reproduce and dificult to edit so i have write my own tool call object constrain that you cn edit the keys easly and save and load two his own format too.

i starting saving to a ini file but ini are not that stable so i endup using my own format that i call ard. animation replace data.

so metamesh i got a rig for animators and later i load the animation to my vfx rig and reproduce exactly the same animation, i used to use max save and load, but mapping and redo hierarchy and constrain was so much time consuming.

i even use the tool to udate between rig version.

last thing is good to have a option to load a hall folder so we dont have to do character by character.

hope this helps, and thanks to carlos anguiano thta point t this solution in another thread a few months ago.

[PEN]

Sounds good Luigi, have you thought about just writting the data to memory to make it faster? I was thinking of formatting an XML to a stringStream.

[eek]

Sounds good Luigi, have you thought about just writting the data to memory to make it faster? I was thinking of formatting an XML to a stringStream.

hehe same here! - actually looking into javascript DOM objects to format the XML.

[abahena]

Hi,
I recently switched to max because my job. But regarding the use of fancy stuff I will leave it to the end and I only will use objects with a spring controller. it works for me and is fast.
And I believe you can achieve all the desire deformations with a good bone structure, paint the weights very carefully, then use skin morphs.

[metamesh]

that sounds very interesting Luigi, any chance to see a video or some examples of that? anyway i guess i will see u on wednesday so we can discuss all this stuff! :)

PEN , any chance to see a video on your approach or something? also how do you find max rigging tools so far? with things like Blur switching to XSI for rigging and also Blizzar to maya for their cinematics i wonder how "clumsy" really is max for complex rigs/characters?
hey let's try to keep this thread alive with rigging info for max, i just find it very inspiring! :)

also what about facial stuff? how do u approach it? for me the best option is still morphs...what about the rest of people, and why?

[PEN]

PEN , any chance to see a video on your approach or something? also how do you find max rigging tools so far? with things like Blur switching to XSI for rigging and also Blizzar to maya for their cinematics i wonder how "clumsy" really is max for complex rigs/characters?
hey let's try to keep this thread alive with rigging info for max, i just find it very inspiring! :)

also what about facial stuff? how do u approach it? for me the best option is still morphs...what about the rest of people, and why?

I'm going to guess that Blizzard has changed because it is easier to find feature film Maya artists in LA the it is Max. I would not jump to the conclusion that it was done because one is better at something then the other. As for Blur I didn't know that ALL their character work was being done in XSI, was it some one at blur that you got this information from? As for Max rigging tools I think that they are very good. Skinning is far better then it is in Maya and so are the bones. Some things are good and some are not but over all I think that it stands up to what I have used in Maya, I have not used XSI in production so i can't comment on that.

I'll see if some one I can do a camtasia of my Merge Render Rig tool working and post it.

Eek, why would you go with a Javascript objects instead of dotNet? Do you believe there to an advantage?

[PEN]

Forgot to comment on facial rigging.

I think that the facial rig that you use is all dependent again on what you need. There are advantages to a bone based system in that you can repurpose it to other characters very easily. Morph based system allow you to be more acurate. Here is a UI in progress for a hybrid system that I'm building at the moment. It is using dotNet pictureBox controls and GDI drawing methods.

http://paulneale.com/temp/joyStickControls3.jpg

[abahena]

wow! nice set-up
Also your tutorials are awesome, they put me working on max in two days

[wamo]

As for Blur I didn't know that ALL their character work was being done in XSI, was it some one at blur that you got this information from? As for Max rigging tools I think that they are very good. Skinning is far better then it is in Maya and so are the bones. Some things are good and some are not but over all I think that it stands up to what I have used in Maya, I have not used XSI in production so i can't comment on that.

Paul,will you use XSI in production soon as Blur or others doing it?
aslo your facial GUI setup is nice,wanna ask you this DotNet you mention is visualC.net
or is sth diffrence?can you tell more about it!?

[PEN]

Wamo, at this point XSI is not impoertant to how we work, there just isn't a big enough user base to have to add that to our tool set. We service other companies so we use what we get hired to use, has nothing to do with what is better or worse.

The whole UI you see is dotNet pictureBox controls, dotNet or .net is part of the windows development frame work and replaced activeX in 2006 I think. When this happened Max opened up access to it through Max script.

[metamesh]

so what is exactly this DotNet stuff? i heard it many times and i'm still not sure what exactly is? just another programming language for windows that got integrated into max or something...?
Hey kees, I had a look to this Hercules muscle stuff and something that i really liked whas the fact that i don't need to add a flex on top of the muscles since they have already an algorithm for dinamic jiggle and stuff, I could be great to see that implemented into SkinFx...?
the behave of the jiggle was very good and stuff, even if it was with the default parameters...something like that in skinFx would push it even more to be the best muscle tool for max...

[PEN]

It isn't a programming language but a set of tools that you can call from other languages. It is open to just about anything but was added as something that could be called by Max script. So if you have a look at your file brower in windows that is a "system.windows.forms.treeview" or the Layer Manager in Max is a "system.windows.forms.listview", look it up in the Max script help, only gives you a small bit of information on it but will get you started. I would sugest that you need to be an intermediate Max scripter to fully understand what it is all about.

[eek]

Eek, why would you go with a Javascript objects instead of dotNet? Do you believe there to an advantage?

max 8 bud.

As to highend rigging/face stuff, im still learning/theorizing a lot of this stuff - currently im learning an IDE completely seperate from any 3d enviroment. Plus im working on something which will stay in the dark until ive resolved some issues with it's ideas/theory.

The only bug i have with face rigging via gui's Osipa style is visually your seeing 2 variables x and y that dont feel intuitive inside the fcuve. I liked pixars wall-e gui system with mouse-over sliders that would work similiar to Houdini.

cheers

[metamesh]

max 8 bud.

The only bug i have with face rigging via gui's Osipa style is visually your seeing 2 variables x and y that dont feel intuitive inside the fcuve. I liked pixars wall-e gui system with mouse-over sliders that would work similiar to Houdini.

cheers

the what...? :)

[eek]

the what...? :)

http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/06/26/votd-the-making-of-wall-e/

watch the first video, about 2/3 way along. Marionette i presume in all its glory.

[wamo]

I had a look to this Hercules muscle stuff and something that i really liked whas the fact that i don't need to add a flex on top of the muscles since they have already an algorithm for dinamic jiggle and stuff, I could be great to see that implemented into SkinFx...?

As i said i used SkinFX , for some places i use Flex to get the Jigiling behavior and some places i use Skin-fx own features.in fact i use skin-morph to shap the muscles after set it up using expersions and rigs.

[PEN]

You could set that up with the system that I have done with the pictureBox I would think. Ofcourse it is a fair bit of code to get it all working.

[kees]

Hey kees, I had a look to this Hercules muscle stuff and something that i really liked whas the fact that i don't need to add a flex on top of the muscles since they have already an algorithm for dinamic jiggle and stuff, I could be great to see that implemented into SkinFx...?
the behave of the jiggle was very good and stuff, even if it was with the default parameters...something like that in skinFx would push it even more to be the best muscle tool for max...

In my experience, putting jiggle on muscles directly doesn't give you anywhere near the same quality flesh looking jiggle motion as putting it directly on the characters mesh.

That is why I focused on the flesh-sim option in skinFX instead and allow you to either use flex or skinFX's own flesh sim on top of the muscles if you wanted too.

But the Flesh-sim will give far superior fleshy blubbery motion then a muscle bouncing against your skin.

I also don't believe in re-creating features that already exist in max and make users pay for that development. So if Max has good build-in tools for doing flex on muscles, why add it again. It only takes about 2 minutes to add flex (or skinFX flesh-sim) onto a muscle and tweak some parameters.

Either way, I appreciate the feedback.

take care,

[metamesh]

hey man, no problemo!

what is this skinFx flesh sim stuff that u are talking about? i guess there is something that i´m missing ?
thanks for the info, appreciated!

[luigi]

PEN , any chance to see a video on your approach or something? also how do you find max rigging tools so far? with things like Blur switching to XSI for rigging and also Blizzar to maya for their cinematics i wonder how "clumsy" really is max for complex rigs/characters?
hey let's try to keep this thread alive with rigging info for max, i just find it very inspiring! :)

i kind fo know the reason why both studios move software, incase of blizzard was rendering issue when the did the latest work with max he nice star craff introduction. the where having big issues and endup having to render everithing in lots of passes, they where using brazil and that time was only 32 bits so only 2 gigs of ram , so all the raytrace engines always have problems with the ram they decided to move to maya and renderman because renderman is not raytrace so the could handle much more render withour worring of the ram.

in case of blur is the found much more help form xsi , they tired to get max people o get more involve but max couldnt get that much involve.and xsi got involve in helping the studio i thin they even send s few guys to blur for see what they need.and and that time max rig was slower so they move to xsi and found a imporve on it.
as far as i know they till use max in some projects depends of the project they will use max or xsi. their bif the was the gentlemen duel.

i dont think max is worst that other softwares for rigging in my opion is much less dedicated rigger in max in alot fo places i bewn the rigger will be the aninmator or a vfx guy or ... , so is not that many as big sudios use maya or xsi and they can allow o have a team of or 5 riggers and really puss maya foward. I only been in 2 studios with more that 1 rigger with max :). so normaly max rigger is over busy as kees said before is question of time and budget to be able to go farther with max.

max is been missing rigging improvement in the last to version , and they thing i have to admit trackview is the slowest of the tree packages and should be one point where max shoudl be improve.


n my experience, putting jiggle on muscles directly doesn't give you anywhere near the same quality flesh looking jiggle motion as putting it directly on the characters mesh.


wow didnt know that
i have to have alook in all the stuff include in skinfx , just to find a most realisctic project to do it, startignt to think to do a personal project to test it.


Sounds good Luigi, have you thought about just writting the data to memory to make it faster? I was thinking of formatting an XML to a stringStream.


i was thinking to make to memory but i was wory im cplex rig with heavy animation they menory was goign to get full so i decided to make t a external file.

the god thing of a external fiel is you can have difeetn files for diference character.

so in complex scene imagine i got 4 characters each animator does his charcter in a separated file and create the data for me, later i can do when i got time load the external data in a file where i got the 4 characters. having a external file allow me to load the animation whenever I need it.

know i got my tool i can be sure we can work with it , I can start doing tet with memory so see if i can break the limit , but at least i am double sure the tool i actually got in production doesnt break.

[metamesh]

i have to have alook in all the stuff include in skinfx , just to find a most realisctic project to do it, startignt to think to do a personal project to test it.



yeesssss, let' s do it man! :) we should meet sometime and talk about it! i'll pay the beer this time

[IkerCLoN]

I'm also looking forward to try SkinFX at home (if a demo version exists, I have to check its web), so if you Lui and Alex want to do something, count me in, dudes ;)

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