Driver item in the model?!?


#1

Hello, all.

I need some help. I’m trying to haul my alligator boy model out of v8.5p+ and into v10.5q.
It’s not going too well. A bunch of facial poses don’t work anymore. What’s worse, I can’t seem to find a way to rebuild his ubercool Anzovin “eyeline” pose. :sad:

Anyway, I noticed there’s a “Drivers” item within the model. This is new. Other models don’t have it. What is this for? Is this healthy?

Sincerely,

Carl Raillard


#2

That drive thing is quite common in 10.5. I have it in a lot of my models. It doesn’t seem to do much in the way of harm (at least it never did for me) so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.


#3

My driver folder only contains info about my model’s ‘Groups.’ If I drag a material onto a group and then change any value in that material’s shortcut, a new driver is created.

The only problem I’ve had with the driver folder, was once, everytime I copied and pasted in the model window, the operation became slower and slower. When I looked in this folder it had reams of files. Deleting the driver folder cleared up the problem.

I can’t help you with the poses… you know as well as I do that smartskin and poses were the major casualties from the transition to v10. Although my poses certainly survived the crossing better than the smartskin. Is the eyeline pose similar to the Anzovin’s mouth setup, where poses drive smartskin bones? That setup is working fine for me in 10.5/11.1.


#4

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I deleted the Drivers folder. Didn’t seem to do Gaty any harm. :slight_smile:

Yeah, it’s a nifty thing Raf came up with. When the eyes are closed, the upper lid and the lower lid meet in the middle of a totally relaxed person. When a person is awake, and just blinks normally, the lids meet lower down – essentially, the upper lid comes down more, and so the “eyeline” occurs lower down. When someone is laughing uncontrollably, his lids will often be forced closed by excessive cheek bulge, and in those situations, the eyeline goes up. Raf’s cool pose allow you to set the eyeline up or down by means of a slider. The way he has it rigged, another slider allows you to controls the eye blinks… and it doesn’t matter where the eyeline pose is! :buttrock: It works flawlessly in v8.5, of course. I’m reluctant to describe this stuff in too much detail, 'cuz Raf sells this info. It’s on his Rigging a Face CD. It’s in part 10, the “Eye Controls” section.

Well, I’ve done some more tests, and I’ve narrowed the problem down to the scale factor on Gaty’s eyes. Gaty has “Tooneyes.” Sort of like Kee Kat. The eyeball geometry is attached to a bone; this bone is a child of a scaled parent, which squooshes the eyeball, giving it a nice traditional cartoony appearence.

Each of Gaty’s eyes is a perfect sphere, his eyelids are perfect hemispheres, and the bones controling the three are children of the same scaled parent. I decided to delete the scale factor on his right eye. Here is a quick test render of the eyeline pose.
http://www.sonic.net/raillard/hash/eyeline_pose.mov
At frame 0 the eyeline pose is set at -75%. At frame 10 the pose is 0%. At frame 20 the pose it set to 75%. It looks good, right? Aside from his swollen right eye, of course. This just demonstrates what the eyeline pose does.

I did another test. I set the eyeline pose to -50% at frame 0. Then I advanced to frame 20 and opened both eyes. Behold:
http://www.sonic.net/raillard/hash/eyeline_@_minus50_and_eyes_opening.mov
On the first and final frames both eyes look okay. But notice the glitchy behavior of the left eye as it opens? This is my problem. The right eye works fine. And, no, I’m not going to live with a bug-eyed alligator boy. :hmm:

Does anybody know how to work around this? Is there some arcane driver setting that I might alter, or Relationship blend method, that might cure this glitch? I’m spending too much time rebuilding Gaty. I’d like to shoot him, preferably with a magic bullet. :stuck_out_tongue:

Sincerely,

Carl Raillard


#5

Yes! I fixed the problem! :smiley:

http://www.sonic.net/raillard/hash/problem_fixed.mov

The solution required relocating the eyelid pointer control bone out of the tooneye scaling parent bone. I just dragged 'em onto Gaty’s head bone. I also had to redo the pose Relationship, but that was super-easy, since it only needs two keys on two bones.

Amazingly,

Carl Raillard


#6

Hey carl,

I knew you would figure it out If I gave ya enough time :wink:

Had me stumped. I thought about it but with out the actual model to play with, that was a tough one.

Looks like you have a real nice eye set up though. Gives me something to think about for next character.


#7

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