BTW Messiah is a really interesting app!
seems that displacemet works great and rendering too.i always read good things about it and having a good artists like you, Taron helps alot into its development, i think…I also know it has been used coupled with Lw the great from studios like DNA and others. actually hope to see it grow more and more on serious steroids!
BTW there will be a demo for Messiah studio 2.0c? so far i can see only a Messiah animate demo. interesting as well i’m planning to download it to try and animate some Lw char. 
Frames Of A Neckling, Timur Baysal (3D)
Nemoid
#100
visualboo
#101
Hey Timur, good work bud.
A friend of mine sent me this link (sorry I’m a little late in here) but I’ve actually been working on this same technique in XSI since may.
For anyone else who’s interested, there is a GREAT free plugin from Reinhard Claus for XSI called “tension map” that lets you easily do all kinds of cool things. Having a stressed state for say the wrinkles on your wrist when it’s all the way bent is super simple.
Tension Map…
http://www.xsibase.com/tools/plugins.php?detail=878
Taron333
#102
Hey visualboo, the xsi thing is something else we had in the messiah globals for a long time, it offers the stretch information for polygons so you can use it to blend in and out alternative maps that are either hardmapped to the surface or controllable in all the ordinary ways. That has little to nothing to do with what TextureDeform does for you! Just examine the footage and the little explanation. Technique behind the Neckling
Thanx for showing that stuff, I’ve seen that at some point before…
visualboo
#103
Right, I’m sorry. The way I worded that was a little confusing.
Actually I got a little side tracked with the tension map comment for people who didn’t know about it. Basically because it’s an easy way to automatically blend the maps, but what I was talking about working on was more about animated displacement maps.
The thing that your doing that I am not is the bone stuff… which seems pretty cool. Is all the distance based bone stuff calculated at render time with the displacements? If that’s the case, what kind of options do you have for the bones?
Oh, and what was your setup time for this head btw?
Taron333
#104
No need to apologize, all is well! 
Setting up that head was a playfull half an hour, but only because of a few rendertests. Once you know what you’re going for, it’s a matter of seconds of putting the pieces in. You can also simply work out one half it and mirror your setup to the other side. Whenever you add something like a “muscle”-bone and its target, you can just mirror it over. That speeds it up tremendously. Not to mention that the setup mode allows you to do your animationtest and adjust things at any time afterwards, keeping your animation, you can even change the geometry if that’s what it takes, but in this case it was extremely simple.
I guess the “option” for the bones could be called either a straight forward ordinary bone, or a muscle-bone, which requires to put in a target for the bone to stretch and orient to. These are build in features of the bone system and therefore are very simple. The mirror action includes the mirroring of the target automatically as well, so you don’t have to worry about that at all. Besides, due to it’s flexible nature you can use anything as a target, including other bones. This way you can create chains of deforms as well!
As for the rendering, there are a few things that it only needs to compute ones, which it does in a millisecond preprocessing but it saves a lot of operations for each point. After that, the mapping is done at rendertime of course. This technique allows to not only map images flat along a bone, but to even twist it based on the “muscle”-bones original orientation and the targets rotation. This is very powerful due to the fact that none of the mapping is flat, but instead it is volumetric and can remap procedurals as well as images.
The only drawback at the moment is, that there’s no openGL displacement YET! So in order to see what your displacement looks like you have to render it. The big advantage in messiah:Studio is, that it renders incredibly fast, even with GI turned on at decent qualties. For such tests, although this might be considered silly, I actually have mostly everything turned on…gives me the final look right away. Depending on the level of complexity of course…if a render takes more than 30sec I switch the GI off for the tests…haha… 
I will prepare a simple tutorial that will show exactly how to set all of this up, and the only reason why I havn’t really done such a tutorial yet is because I’ve started to take the simplicity of it for granted a long time ago and it’s difficult for me to realize that people simply don’t know about it or can’t imagine how comfortable it is. That’s sort of a general problem I have…I apologize for that myself.
Dyrn
#108
I’ve missed a beat here.
Displacement maps work by subdividing polygons, and then moving the new vertices out along that poly’s normal according to the map, yes? That way, they aren’t limitied to within the silhouette.
If that’s the case, then where’s the benefit? I mean, all those subdivided polys still have to be rendered, right? Why is using displacement maps different from just having a really high-res model to start with?
Taron333
#109
By now it may even be difficult for me to explain the entire depth of why subdivision based rendering and the animation of low polygon cages is the current state of the art in 3D by choice, because it has quite some amount of reasons for it’s justified success.
But let’s start at the easiest of all points:
- moving around large numbers of points may seem effortless during rendering, but in realtime performance as it is necessary during the animation process it is next to impossible to deal with. If the renderer grants itself several seconds to generate this new dense geometry for each new frame it renders, in realtime you don’t have a second between each frame, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see the animation while you are working on it.
And some more points:
-
a low polygon cage can be designed to deform correctly, by controlling just a few easily and visually separatable vertecies. When you build a setup with deformers like bones for instance, you can place them based on the visual feedback your model provides. During the smooth subdivision process for generating the dense geometry that gets eventually rendered, it interpolates between the edges of the low resolution mesh to compute a smooth surface. It still requires a little bit of experience to make use of that trade most efficiently, but this experience is easily and quickly aquired!
-
The displacement possibility then allows you to fill in the vast amount of detail that such a subdivided geomtery will offers to you without interferring with your low polygon animation procedures. Some tools even allow you to animated those displacement independently from your low polygon cage and therefore allow access to this otherwise inaccessable phase to the animation during rendering.
I’m sure there are quite a whole lot more beautiful ways to mention as for why all of this, but hopeful for now that gave you an idea. I just give you one more aspect of it and that is the number of detailed objects you can deal with in one scene. Due to the subdivision principle and the ability to completely rely on the details such models can get through displacement, you can populate a scene with large amounts of them…let’s say a large group of protestors during a peace demonstration. With the right software and a proper machine it then may even be possible to animate such groups and observe them together close enough to realtime to still make judgements. Saving such a scene or better loading such a scene would only take a ridicolously small fraction of the time it were taking if you had all these models with highly detailed geometries.
Ah…if somebody else is in the mood to think about all of this again, it’s kind of fun, but I had enough of it for now…
Nemoid
#114
its fantastic to see how the subpixel displacement technique is making such progresses, and can make your life easier.
i’d actually like Lightwave had this as well, but fortunately there are apps like messiah XSI etc. that make a good use of it. animated displacement advances the progress even more ! really great thing.
I like it because allow you not to waiste time working on scenes given the fact it all happens on rendering and that it allows to make a top notch work.
VisualKing
#115
Hi how are you…I got your dvd and its great so far i only went through it fast to some parts i wanted to see, are u going to have any dvds with other polygon modeling methods like…edge extrusion. I usually do the head with edge extrusion, and do the body from primitives, cylinders for hand, body, legs…and model hands separately. Ears i do what u do, off the head.
That is all my question for you, i just wanted to ask if you have any other method than using a box to model. I love the way the outcome came out, but personally i have not seen anyone starting with a cube and finishing everything on that cube to model the whole body.
Another question would be, that if i want to add shorts or pants and shoes, i wouldnt have to model a whole body would i? Just asking if modeling everything from a box if its better than separating the head for animation purposes. thats all…i would definately order more of your dvds if u come up with new methods of modeling in poly. I am not a fan of nurbs anymore because poly these days are much better with texturing and saves lots of time on me especially with the help of zbrush now.
Thanks a lot for the great work that you do…hope to have more from u.
Cheers and have a happy merry xmas and a great holiday.
Taron333
#116
I think you mix me up with Tareq again. I havn’t released my DVD yet. It’ll be ready to release in probably in February 2005. I will also really try to make it so that very little questions remain other than: When’s the next one coming out…:applause:
Haha…ehh…I’m just kidding, but yeah, I’m planning to make a whole series that includes far more than just modeling!
I havn’t seen Tareq’s DVD, yet, but I bet it’s good…you should email him your questions…I think you find him somewhere in the thread! :shrug:
Merry Christmas to everyone!
foleypro
#118
Man…That is totally Mind Blowing…Need to start saving my money it seems…340 Poly’s with a displacement Map…Awesome work
Folashade
#119
Bloody awesome!! Don’t know diddly squat about polygons or Zbrush… but I gotta say your work’s fantastic!! 