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Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 5:53 am
by ThomasL
On Marc's suggestion, I'm taking a stab at the Perfume mocap competition. Here is a first WIP. The big deal is that the motions have been edited to avoid self-intersecting limbs.

http://youtu.be/JJ4p85Tv1wA

A frame with the real mesh turned on:

perfume.png

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 8:53 pm
by brkurt
Terrific!
This begs a question for me: "How much FK/IK does a MH model need in a typical animation?"
I'm assuming you used a straight-ahead bvh rig.

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 5:41 am
by ThomasL
You are assuming wrong. I'm using the mhx rig. Unlike the mocap add-on that comes with Blender, the MH mocap tool is specifically designed to handle the mhx rig.

I'm only using the FK part of the mhx rig, though. It is possible to do a FK -> IK retarget and then continue to work on the IK data, e.g. to make sure that the feet are planted. But this is extra work, and it turned out to be unnecessary in this case. This depends on the quality of the mocap data.

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 5:42 am
by ThomasL
Here is a second WIP:

http://youtu.be/4aucKEkEWRA

Hair, clothes and a stage were added, but I'm still using the proxy meshes. There is some motion blur (a vector blur node in the compositor), but the blur does not seem to affect the shadows. Is this a bug?

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 11:13 am
by Rhynedahll
Wow, very nice!

What mocap data are you using?

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 12:14 pm
by ThomasL
The data are from the download section of http://www.perfume-global.com/.
The homepage of the Perfume Global Site project #001 is http://perfume-dev.github.com/.

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 8:50 pm
by duststorm
I like! :)
How do the clothes work out with posing and animation? Did you have to tweak a lot yourself?

If you want I can have a look at making adaptations to the textures next week. Like adding a ripped look to the bottom of the jeans shorts.
I'm amazed at how good it already looks. Great advertising for MH. Now let's go and win this competition ;)

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 11:43 am
by ThomasL
Here are the final renders. I made two, one day and one night version.

http://youtu.be/l8-S_Y82dys
http://youtu.be/oQZL8pYiTXs

Finally, this was done with the real mesh, and a cloth modifier on the hair.

The clothes were not edited any more than the obvious stuff: colors were swapped in the red T-shirt, the jeans were cut off, and masks were added for clothes that didn't have any. I should have moved the bottom of the T-shirts outside the jeans, but in the end I lacked the energy to do so.

The hair was trickier. I went for short hairstyles because long hair tends to penetrate the body. However, it is not possible to just cut off long hair, because then the strands would end in the middle instead of fading out, which looks weird. So I had to shorten the hair by moving the verts in the tresses up.

In the final render a cloth modifier was added to the hair. Here I found that it was useful to load MakeClothes to get the button that removes all vertex groups. All verts belong to the DfmHead group at 100%. In addition I added a Skull group which affects the pinning of the cloth modifier. Even the verts at the bottom are pinned to some degree, to prevent hair movement to go out of control. This is important because collision detection is turned off. Collision detection takes forever in Blender :(

Another thing that I noticed was that the mesh is very heavy inside the mouth. When I removed these verts, render time went down from 16 to 10 secs/frame. In contrast, removing the verts beneath the clothes was hardly worth the effort.

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:57 pm
by brkurt
Great work. What thrills me is that problems I have been having with the MH mesh are real, and not just my own ineptitude.

First: Long hair will need additional bones--the Wig rig I call it--and that will need to addressed in the MH program. Three bones will solve most of inter-penetrating problems.

Secondl: The mouth needs to be a separate export, including the mouth cavity. That should be not so hard a problem to solve.

Third: The pubic area has far too many vertices; it can simplified. I shudder to think what uses might be made of a such a detailed vagina! ;)

Re: Perfume WIP

PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:00 pm
by ThomasL
The problem with a wig rig is that there is no bvh data for the hair bone, so you have to pose them manually. *Lots* of work! Actually, I tried that out (the long2 hair has a rig), but gave up.

A cloth or softbody simulation can probably look good, if done well, but I don't have a lot of experience in this area. It should be possible to handle collisions with an invisible collision object with very simple geometry.

Mouth: agree completely. If the character opens her mouth at some time, you can't get away with deleting what's inside.

Pubic area: agree again. A sharp border between a high-density and a low-density region makes weight-painting difficult, too. A female proxy analogous to the male one would be nice. Some day I will remove the diamonds from the male proxy, too.