Messiah Project Log - Mech by Layer01 - WIP

#10

Make your skeleton. Disable the influence of bones on the mesh of the robot.

parent each piece of the robot to the corresponding bone, keeping the orientation and position.

Dont worry about meta effectors. you will save yourself alot of time…

#11

You got Joe Cosman CDs on metaeffectors?

#12

Is that adressed to me?

I dont understand why weight and metaeffectors are even in the picture, even if you do hafve something on your mechanical mech that deforms rather then pivots, most of the rig can be just parent based and save you ALOT of time and effort.

#13

I was going to suggest this to Peter too, but the objects go all over the place when I parent it to the bone.

Stooch, is there something like ‘parent in place’ in Messiah? So when I parent something it will not follow the parent’s transformation/rotation.

I’ve been dying to know how to do this in Messiah.

Thanks!

#14

I always thought weightmapping was for organic stuff… and Mechs like these are better off with parenting.

But I want to see someone pull it off anyway, so hats off to you Peter. :thumbsup:

#15

setup -> items -> parent items

check Keep Position and/or Keep Alignment

hope that’s what you’re looking for?

#16

yep thats the stuff. for some reason you must use those buttons in messiah, otherwise if you drag and drop it wont parent in place. just a quirk of messiah that i hope is addressed in the future.

#17

Thanks Jipe… however… I think I’m missing the block for the Parent Item:

Weird… maybe I should re-install. :curious:

#18

Hmmm wouldn’t this only work if i had the seperate parts of the mech as different onjects? cause as it is it imports as one big object…as far as messiah seems to be concerned its leg is the same mesh as its head etc etc
unless i’m missing something here.

i thought about re exporting it in chuncks, but i got into this battle with the effectors and wanted to not give in lol :wink:

which one is that? the “rigging 2” one…with the dog and tate? i have that one, but i’ve only done tates body, notb his head yet…i need to do that i know lol, its just so hard not to just jump into it straight away.

anyway thanks for all the support guys :beer:

and shadowfork, its odd that you seem to be missing the block, i’ll check in a bit if i have it too.

#19

But isn’t this better in the long run? I mean, setting this up will be quicker than modifying each part with a metaeffector.

In theory (if i only got that parent block working)…
you would just have to :

  1. parent each object to the bones
  2. Bam! All set to be animated.

Against Metaeffecting (6 steps):

  1. Add an effector
  2. Add mesh to weightlist
  3. Add metaeffector tool
  4. Grab the metaeffector tool and parent it to the bone
  5. Set the area of influence of the effector
  6. Assight the Metaeffector tool on the bone block (weight)

But then again, if ‘metaeffecting’ is faster for you, and you can make it work, then I would definitely like to see your workflow.

:applause:

#20

yeah you have to make separate objects. but honestly thats far far far less work then what you are doing. and really, i admire your will to solve it, but it shouldnt be your method of choice, why make it harder on yourself?

#21

when you say seperate objects, do you mean he has to save out seperate files for each piece of the model? ie. head file, leg file, arm file, etc… ? Is it possible for messiah to import a file that has all the meshes and for messiah to recognize them as being seperate?

George

#22

In Modo if I save an LWO file out with each piece on a separate layer it will bring it in to messiah so that each piece can be used separately. So one LWO file, but separate parts. I assume that an LWO file from Lightwave would work the same way.

#23

Hmm… i wonder if that works the same way with maya…

#24

well my original reason for sticking with the MetaEffector was this:

In silo the mirroring is a little lame atm, so i had to merge the leg into one single object so i could mirror it (it was that or mirror each individual piece seperatly). add to that, that i had neglected to keep the object centered properly and so the mirroring didn’t work automaticaly, so each bit would have to be eye-balled, which would take yonks to do.

and then i’d have to pair them off into sections and save them out multiple times…my lazyness kicks in about here :wink:

That was until Alex_K kindly pointed out, in IRC, that i had it all wrong lol, in fact its going to be a piece of cake to seperate the objects in Silo and i wont have to re mirror and re scale etc etc…so yeah, i’ll let the effectors drop now…now that i am satisfied that i have them under control and Could use them if need be :stuck_out_tongue:

so atm i’m preping the mesh…and then the fun really begins :cool:

PS:
ShadowFork i checked and i do have the Parent block, so something wierd is going on in your messiah :surprised

#25

Well, I am glad I could be off help. Can’t wait to see that robot moving. :applause:

#26

OK new update time.

i’ve exported my object into individual sections of mesh (all 43 of them) and imported tem into messiah, parented them…so far so good…then i run into this problem

notice how the bones are not visible…except for when they are seen “through” certain mesh :surprised

thats a problem obviously lol.

the solution being to use expressions, this one in particular

but on top of that the object manager gets a bit messy with bits of object breaking up the bone sections etc…just not as nice visually :p, with the parenting option. so now its a question of whether writting an expression 43 times would be faster than the original MetaEffector way ack

anyway here is the scene file to pick apart

#27

Layer01, here’s your mech with working weights. No billion objects, and only 1-2 effectors per bone. I did a little kick to make sure it works. The rig, she is solid.

Here’s some notes;
Bone Deform is set to Direct Weights.
Each bone has a MetaEffector selected as it’s Weight (Bone tab for each bone).
One metaEffector per chunk of mech (thigh, shin, etc).
Effectors’ Fields of Influence are set to “All Connected”.

With Direct Weights, geometry that has no bones will collapse because there’s nothing to hold it. That’s why the unweighted bits disapear when you go into Animate mode. You can do the rest of the mech; I’m lazy :wink:

Second, because the bone deform is using direct weights, every bone needs a MetaEffector (or some kind of weight tool). If you have non-weightmapped bones, you’ll notice your geometry is laggy and …scales… as you rotate your bones.

I pulled the Effector heirarchy away from the bones. This means you can move around your bones, add more, move pivots, whatever, without breaking your weights. Most effects that use weight tools (like here) are “static”–they’re evaluated when switching from Setup to Animate mode, and after that their position doesn’t matter. Sometimes, like with Melt, you can have Dynamic weighting, which means the weight field can be animated.

OK so why do it this way?

  1. You can cheat your rig. Want to stretch those legs just a smidge? Like a little bend in your kick? No problem.
  2. Batch exporting geometry is a big fat pain in the tuckas.

Happy animating!!!

#28

Isobar, thank you very very much :thumbsup:
this is exactly what i wanted to happen with these “project logs” a sort of remixing, where the scene files were available and others could play with them and show how they would do things differently, imho a very powerfull learning tool. so thank you for your time and effort, it is aperciated :applause:

i have a few questions though. some you may have already answered but i’m not sure so i’ll ask them anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

  1. is the mesh disappearing between setup and animate, is something to do with direct weighting and not having MetaEffectors set up?

  2. you have all the bones preceded by “aaa” is there any reason for this other than personal choice?

  3. you have a LOT of MetaEffectors in areas where i had only one, is there any reason for this too? You have 4 in the calve where i had one, i see you added some movement to the foot in areas i hadn’t thought of…i like it, but even so it seems like a lot or am i missing something?

  4. when you say you “did it this way” so you can cheat in the animation, by squash/stretch etc…, how would this be done i am not sure i see how you could cheat if the ME’s are influencing all the mesh…i understand the idea just not how you’d do it

again thank you for your input and help, i will chew through the file tomorrow in more depth :slight_smile:

#29

L1, 1) you are correct sir! There’s no weight tools to hold the geometry in place so the points collapse to 0,0,0.

  1. imo it’s a good habit, so if you have another character in the scene you can differentiate between them.

  2. not really, it just took me that many to tag all the bits of mesh.

  3. The metaEffectors are becoming the weight fields for the bones, right. So let’s say you wanted to have a bendy thigh.

First switch your Bone Deform over to Factored Weights.

Then split the thigh bone and use the same metaEffector’s weights for both bones. Now you’ve got overshoot on your knee rotation. Now make those thigh bones muscle bones, add a couple nulls, and you’ve got stretchy legs. You can still do whatever you like within each broad chunk. example That worked better than I expected. It actually looks kinda cool because the shin guard stays stiff.