Seperate Meshes - same rig?

[wesdood]

You could have lower res geometry as seperate pieces, and then just directly parent then to the joints on your rig.

[IamNova]

You could have lower res geometry as seperate pieces, and then just directly parent then to the joints on your rig.

That kinda sounds like making a pre-vis model for fast animating/playback. Or are you suggesting using a lower-res model, drive the skin of the higher-res model using a wrap deformer? That indeed would be interesting...but i'd imagine it'd be rather slow, so perhaps geometry caching would be needed...

But im sure there's a way to have seperated meshes and still have a seamless appearance - like the work-out dude in the autodesk demo/tutorials. His seams weren't perfect but it looked good.

[wesdood]

you could have the low res mesh and high res mesh attached to the same rig, and then make a high/low res switch to key the low res one off when rendering.

[Klaudi]

As far as seamless normals and weighting you give the same weight to the verts of two diferent objects (so if the joint is rotateing, it should move both verts by the same amount)
no clue about displacement.
As for hair you just copy the faces you need from the head and make that a separate geometry, this way you can hide that after you had setup the hair (just parent that geometry to the head joint, it dosent need deformations)

hope it helps

[yenvalmar]

its faster than you think. i use it for furry characters for this exact reason mentioned by the original poster, its just more manageable in chunks vs furring it all at once. at least with maya fur...

seams arent that big a deal because, well, its furry. but using a seamless wrap should keep things close enough.

http://www.yenvalmar.com/Still/images/bonbon_01_wire.jpg

http://www.yenvalmar.com/Still/images/bonbon_01.jpg

this shows it in action. here i made the character surface that the fur grows from with nurbs, just cause of the built in UV parameterization. but a regular poly model (hidden in the wire image) is weighted and used as the wrap. you can see the seams arent perfect but you cant tell in the render.

[IamNova]

Thanks everyone!

Problem is that my windows drive had to be formatted due to a hostile virus takeover, so i've lost all my work and apps so far, but I hope to be up and running soon and able to try out the methods you have been suggesting so far.

Let me see if I understand,
Wesdood is suggesting having a high (single piece) and a low (multi-piece) res mesh of the same model, bound to the same skeleton, and just toggle the visibility when needed for rendering or fast display.
- This isn't exactly what I was after.

Klaudi suggested making sure that the verts along the seams have equal weighting to the bones, so that they don't split apart when animating.
- I figured that approach would be necessary, but how do you achieve this? is there a way to copy the weights over? Would I have to start with a single-piece mesh, weight it, then split it into pieces?

Yenvalmar suggested using a low-poly mesh to wrap-deform the higher res mesh (the higher res being in pieces assumingly)
- that's an interesting idea, but i'm not a fan of hiding the seams with geometry tricks (such as the fur/clothes), but it's an excellent idea that I might try out when if I ever need a furry character.

Perhaps I should elabourate what I need

Problem:
I can never get the topoloy-projection to work perfectly for the hands/feet/head all at once without using the morph tool. Plus, I can never reach inbetween the fingers/toes with the topology brush without it snapping to the nearest point, so I can only re-topologise the large areas such as the body&head.

Goal:
I would like to be able to export the different body parts topologised (seperated) and assemble them together again in Maya, while preserving their displacements if possible, and without merging the seams - so that when i go to make blendshapes for the face or knees etc, I can simply duplicate that part of the geometry rather than the entire figure.

I am a novice when it comes to character setup, so perhaps there is a rediculously simple solution that I don't know about. Maybe the simple solution would be found in the Zbrush forums and forget about the blendshapes and use some other rigging process to fix problem areas...

Thanks again guys

[Klaudi]

Klaudi suggested making sure that the verts along the seams have equal weighting to the bones, so that they don't split apart when animating.
- I figured that approach would be necessary, but how do you achieve this? is there a way to copy the weights over? Would I have to start with a single-piece mesh, weight it, then split it into pieces?



You achive this by useing the Component Editor, after you have bind the objects select the verts near the seam and in Component Editor manualy put the amount you need, do the same with the other object

TIP: avoid the seam at the most deformation regions this way is easyer.

Component Editor:
Window>GeneralEditors>ComponentEditor-SmoothSkins(tab).

[yenvalmar]

create your blend shape node, THEN weld your vertices. you can then continue to add new targets to that same blend shape node, all day long, of say, just your character's head, even if its all a seamless naked guy. i do this all the time, i didnt understand your situation before. its very very simple.

obviously this does require the foresightt to make a blend shape node for any part of the character you are going to want to use a blend shape on, before you weld the vertices. but thats a hell of a lot easier than painting skin weights to not tear apart on seams, and anyways the shading is never perfect across a seam, and manually typing them in is slow and totally non-artistic.. gimme a break.

and if theres perfect weighting, when there is a seam it starts showing up in occlusions, specular highlights, etc. the only good seam is a seam thats covered by something else.

even the wrap deformer approach i outlined will show seams if they are present, although it does a pretty excellent job of keeping them together. But i only use that approach on characters which are SUPPOSED to be or HAVE TO BE made of many pieces, but which would be a pain to rig otherwise. if it should look seamless, weld the verts and then smooth the normals!

as to dealing with seams that will show up on your displacement maps- search the forums, theres many threads and few guaranteed solutions. i'm certain you will have trouble with that even once you figure out the adding blend shapes to a seamless mesh trick that i tried to explain.

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