Volumetric Data

[gmr]

I wonder is it possible to use a volumetric data e.g. MRI data for topology purposes? It might improve potential topology issues if there are any present since there would be actual medical data (it doesn't get any more realistic than that) and in addition it will provide a good insight into future MH multilayer features such as "softness/stiffless/goal in blender" mapping for soft body simulation* as well as some armature related features. The advantage of MRI or other volumetric data is that knowing the composition of the body inside it is possible to "re-simulate" the approximate neutral shape of a person without gravitational deflection. Thus even if scanned person on MRI will be lying it might be relatively simple/efficient to approximate the shape of the person when standing.

*
Why soft body for static models?
It is useful for collisions when e.g. person is sitting or lying, the body deforms in a different way as when body stands for instance if we consider an extreme case of a person with bigger belly when standing straight the belly bends slightly towards legs due to gravity. Though if the same person is lying belly would bend towards side (or flatten and stretch). This is an extreme case these deformations occur to certain extend across the whole body. It might help with partially automatizing morph creations for e.g. old people and wrinkles hence partially lighten the burden of HM target morph artists.

Future why soft body for animations?
Further advantage is in oscillations. When person makes a sharp move or is in a fight and gets e.g. a punched into the body. A pressure wave will propagate across the body even if the person is not fat - simply because people are made of elastic tissues. Humans are used to such phenomena and intuitively estimate physical properties of objects accordingly. Absence of such oscillations might cause effect of CG models looking unnaturally stiff with combination of SSS they might resemble wax or plastic figures and hence look realistic when static but plastic when in motion. Note this phenomena is mainly relevant for relatively high accelerations so I do understand that this is not of any high priority for now though it is good to keep in mind that Moore's law regarding computational power still holds valid and most likely will be valid for quiet some time. Thus fear about computational power should not be the main restriction.

[Manuel]

Interesting idea, but too expensive to be coded at current time.

Best Regards,

Manuel

[gmr]

Hi Manuel,

Did someone in the recent past create any exporter for MH -> Blender for soft bodies please? Be it for the purpose of hair simulation or for anything else?
Many thanks

Best Regards

gmr

[Manuel]

Nope...

[gmr]

Is there any way of exporting vertex groups and weight maps into Blender?

I mean if one vertex group has all the vertices of the model and weight map depicting "goal" and one "stiffness" they can act like inputs for Blender soft-body simulation. While things such as contrast, saturation etc. will be modified in MH. With the addition of option to exclude all vertices from the "soft-body layer" that are weakly affected by soft-body sim. in order to speed up simulation according to user defined threshold. So overally it would add a few (perhaps 1 or 2 vertex layers with weight paint) and some algorithms for simple picture processing. In fact perhaps a bit-map can be used for this purpose and an arbitrary 2D computer graphics program...
Where the weight map will be generated by MH either by some mixing of morph maps, by manual input (of someone from MH community) or the most preferred way is by automatic generation from 5 meshes each representing different aspect of human tissue type (skeletal, muscle, stiff & soft organs, fat) by either ray tracing or by distance approximation.
Thus providing the possible future extension of MH into simulating wounded people and allowing animations depicting surgery, medical environment and might be of a great use for crime, action and horror movies which form perhaps majority of modern cinematographic production.

I also thought of other additional features but firstly it is a good to know the fundamental export possibilities/impossibilities.