Curve as an influence obj fails but as wire deformer works

#1

Hi,
Currently I’m rigging a male humanoid and I’m at the face.I’ve been working on the eyebrows and lips but a weird thing occurs.Even if I check that no other joint has influence on the respective geometry areas that I want the curves to control,the vertices shoot towards one direction like crazy when I paint the influence of the curves.That’s when I try to use the curves as an Influence Object.
But I found a workaround with using the wire deformer feature and I’ve made them but now I’m not sure as to how this might inconvenience me in the future.

I’d like to know why influence objects method doesn’t work(especially since I’ve already used this feature before in the shoulders and it worked).

PS:I have turned Use Components on.

#2

Is the skin weights normalize feature on “post” or “auto”. I had the same problem, and the solution was to set normalize to “auto”, because on “post” the vertices were essentially getting double transforms. I hope that helps.

#3

If you mean the normalize weights option in the skin cluster node then there’s only None,Interactive and Post but none of that helps with Use Components On.As soon as I turn Use Components off no matter what kind of normalization I have(or haven’t in the case of None) everything goes back to normal and I can deform the skin(i.e. the brow) through the wire but not through the clusters.

I’ve moved forward by use of wire deformers(though not as easily as I’d like…no one said there was a hidden wire making transformations and when I tried to make the wires/clusters move with the head something was left behind causing vertices to remain behind and only a few at that,it got very confusing but I’ve fixed it).

I sincerely hope that whatever problem there is with the influence object method isn’t gonna come later and bite me in my respective behind…

#4

As I feared the problem with the influence objects did come and bite me…since I had already made everything work with wire deformers…there was a drawback to using wire deformers which might have a solution but I haven’t found it yet.The performance drop.I noticed that after the wire deformers were in place that the whole rig slowed down significantly.However as soon as I deleted the wires from the geometry the rest of the controls were working smoothly in terms of performance.No lagging.

So I tried to see if I had used influence objects it’d be the same problem and I ended up figuring out why I had those weird transformations in the affected vertices of the curve shooting up that far away from the rest of the body as soon as Use Components was On.
The reason is yet another time the hidden base wire node that gets created either using influence objects or wire deformers.In the case of wire deformers though it’s easy to deal with.In the case of influence objects though it’s just causing problems.The way to deal with this is to just delete the base wire node and all’s well.

The only problem i’m facing now is that I have to redo the weights… :banghead:

EDIT1:Scratch that…deleting the node disables the clusters somehow,even though it fixes the double transforms.

#5

Ok fixed the problem with influence objects.The reason why the vertices shot upwards was not the hidden curve as I thought(this was the problem only when using wire deformers).

When using influence objects the problems are three and all of them are in the skin cluster options.First of all you need Use Components On.Secondly the normalization needs to be Interactive instead of Post.And lastly,the skinning method cannot be Dual Quaternion.For some reason CV curves and Dual Quaternion don’t go well.I set this to Weight Blended to keep the volume but also give a lot of influence manually.also Linear skinning works well too.

EDIT1:Never delete the hidden base wire node because it messes more things up.it did seem to fix things but instead messed up other things.

#6

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