Page 2 of 2

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 5:04 pm
by blindsaypatten
I have been experimenting with a shoulder cage, with encouraging results. In these images the shoulder on the left is with the standard armature, the one on the right using a deformation cage that is controlled by the standard armature. It's a rather crude mesh and I haven't added any shape keys.

shoulder45d.jpg

Shoulder90d.jpg

Shoulder1d.jpg

Shoulder135d.jpg

Shoulder180d.jpg

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:00 pm
by joepal
It's an encouraging experiment. Especially arms upwards have always been tricky for MH toons, even with MHX's corrective shape keys.

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:32 pm
by bogdan666
One important question still remains: Does this work with Unreal Engine or Unity3d or is it only meant for use with blender?

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 12:46 am
by blindsaypatten
bogdan666 wrote:One important question still remains: Does this work with Unreal Engine or Unity3d or is it only meant for use with blender?


I spent a few minutes with Google trying to find out if either game engine has an equivalent of Blender's mesh deform modifier, and failed to find anything. It's a bit tough because the words are used in so many related contexts so I could easily have missed something among all the irrelevant search results.

One possibility would be creating a shape key from the difference in the armature controlled mesh and the mesh deform controlled mesh as a sort of shortcut to manually creating shape keys for armature-based movements. Which might work for predefined movements anyway.

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 8:33 am
by bogdan666
If it is one of the modifiers from the modifier tab in blender, I'm sure this will not work outside of blender, because I've had this problem with other blender modifiers in the past and found out that it's simply not possible to export them from blender to another application.

The best and simplest way at the moment is to make "direct" shape keys for the character mesh and drive them either by bone movements or manually, when doing animations.
But in my opinion probably only the shoulder area needs a shape key if you use Dual Quaternion Skinning.

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:54 pm
by Mindfront
The knee and shoulder deformation is a real problem. I use corrective shape-keys and corrective smooth modifier, vertex group weighted to avoid smoothen the shape-keys and other body parts. Dont know if you have seen this about corrective shape-keys http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/ ... shape_keys

Soo far I haven't had the time and patience to dig deeper so this topic it's much welcome inspiration. :geek:

Re: Blender bendy bones and deformation cages for joints

PostPosted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 2:07 am
by blindsaypatten
Mindfront wrote:Dont know if you have seen this about corrective shape-keys http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/ ... shape_keys


Thanks for the link! It's always nice to have detailed step by step instructions.