Methods for subskin deformations?

[veclock]

Hi, I was thinking about subskin deformations like the scapula moving and deforming the back as the arm of a character moves, or deformations from muscle flexing. Or tendons in the hand becoming more or less visible as the fingers move.

What’s the best methods for these kinds of subskin deformations for characters? In movies, not realtime graphics. Maya or 3ds Max. I guess you can’t achieve all this with ordinary skinning?

Thanks in advance!

[Pahuska]

I don’t know about 3DS, but in maya, you can use the bones or a pose reader to trigger correctives shapes, bump/normal maps, or both. Sometimes you can also use bones and skinning for such details, if you connect them correctly to the rest of the rig, you can have nice results, even better than corrective shapes.

[eek]

I’d say if you want to go ultra-high end go full sim, so thats a fem (finite element model) to simulate muscles, fat, fascia and skin. With this your doing full 3d elements (muscles, fat), 2d elements (fascia) and 1d elements tendons. Weta have an entire toolset around this called Tissue.

You could do a mixture of fem’s for gross motion, PSD’s for major deformations about a sub-space. Then put a simple skin sim on top for fine creases. This primarily the techniques they use at ILM.

On an even lower level, deformation could be purely from PSD’s about a sub-space. How you solve the subspace is really up to your but don’t do it brute force, you’ll only really be able to handle 2nd and 3rd order deformations before pulling your hair out.

PSD’s are your friends, here’s the paper about them: http://graphics.ethz.ch/teaching/former/seminar/handouts/Croci_PoseSpaceDeform.pdf

cheers,

[guidosalimbeni]

I believe that you already have received great informative answer. I would like to suggest also to try the new version of advanced skeleton auto rig system . It has, now, a corrective shape script , which makes very fast to create correctives deformation.

There is also a great plug.in called L brush and a similar free version called sculpt in between , that you can find on creative crash. These let you sculpt corrective shapes on top of an animation. I personally like this way of creating deformation fix.

Good day.

Regards.

[Pahuska]

I don’t know the Adv. Skeleton’s script, but here’s the one I use : http://danielslima.com/sculpt-inbetween-manager/

It lets you create corrective shapes, edit them, add inbetweens, etc… Very useful

[veclock]

I don’t know about 3DS, but in maya, you can use the bones or a pose reader to trigger correctives shapes, bump/normal maps, or both. Sometimes you can also use bones and skinning for such details, if you connect them correctly to the rest of the rig, you can have nice results, even better than corrective shapes.

Yes, if I find other methods to complicated I might use bones and skinning. Would be a challenge but I’d learn something useful in the process.

I’d say if you want to go ultra-high end go full sim, so thats a fem (finite element model) to simulate muscles, fat, fascia and skin. With this your doing full 3d elements (muscles, fat), 2d elements (fascia) and 1d elements tendons. Weta have an entire toolset around this called Tissue.

You could do a mixture of fem’s for gross motion, PSD’s for major deformations about a sub-space. Then put a simple skin sim on top for fine creases. This primarily the techniques they use at ILM.

On an even lower level, deformation could be purely from PSD’s about a sub-space. How you solve the subspace is really up to your but don’t do it brute force, you’ll only really be able to handle 2nd and 3rd order deformations before pulling your hair out.

PSD’s are your friends, here’s the paper about them: http://graphics.ethz.ch/teaching/former/seminar/handouts/Croci_PoseSpaceDeform.pdf

cheers,

Thanks alot for your informative answer! I’ll look Weta Tissue up. Looks good. Hope there are free tutorials somewhere. But this implies I don’t need to sculpt the character? It’s all simulated. Only thing I need to sculpt is the skeleton? Because right now I’m sculpting the characer in Zbrush.

Edit: couldn’t find Weta Tissue as a product to try/buy? Do you know of any others that are like Tissue? Maya has muscle tools built in, question is how good they are.

I believe that you already have received great informative answer. I would like to suggest also to try the new version of advanced skeleton auto rig system . It has, now, a corrective shape script , which makes very fast to create correctives deformation.

There is also a great plug.in called L brush and a similar free version called sculpt in between , that you can find on creative crash. These let you sculpt corrective shapes on top of an animation. I personally like this way of creating deformation fix.

Good day.

Regards.

Thank you! Right now I’m sculpting in Zbrush, then I will bake the normals on a retopo model. If I use corrective shapes, should I have a totally smooth character? No muscle deformations in the normal map that is. I’ve never used corrective shapes so I don’t know what the pipeline looks like.

I don’t know the Adv. Skeleton’s script, but here’s the one I use : http://danielslima.com/sculpt-inbetween-manager/

It lets you create corrective shapes, edit them, add inbetweens, etc… Very useful

Thank you

[veclock]

I’d like to know more about this subject, do you guys have more info/resources on this? It would be really helpful if somebody could answer my previous post. Thx

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