Beginners Skinning & Poly-Morphing Animation Tutorial

[thyme]

Many of the new nurbs control point animation features have now been extended to skinning and poly-morph animation.
Just like in nurbs control point animation where you can drag a control point and the anim bar captures it for play back, you can drag a vertex and it will be captured. To see how to use these new features see the YouTube Tutorial:

Beginners Skinning & Poly-Morphing Animation Tutorial.

Although this video uses poly modeling in the example, poly morphing is not limited to using blue parts, it can also be used with white parts. I have tried to keep the new poly morphing features uniform with the nurbs morphing features but decided it was best to add a button to enable poly-morphing as I felt it would be too easy to unintentionally drag a vertex in anim mode especially if the user is unaware of this new feature.

The morphing nodes can be output to HAnimDisplacer nodes when output to vrml/x3d. When outputting poly morph animation to vrml or x3d make sure genHAnimNodes, genColorIndex and outScriptAsRoutes fields are ticked.

[griff]

Very nice thyme - though I was a little overwhelmed by the first run of the tutorial. However - I had not had my morning coffee

I notice that you collapsed the inner vertices of the bend animation at the elbow - an issue which we discussed in the Choosing groups at a joint thread.

I think this looks way better in your tutorial example. I assume that it would be best to make those changes before doing the muscle vertex displacement - so you don't get the re-indexing issue.

My first impression - great improvement. Seamless3D has come a long way since I first started trying to create animations.

By the way, I took down the "swordsman" video - I think I have a better quality video now. But I will probably be putting a different version up on the weekend. The "swordsman" is/was "Calico Jack" Rackham - a pirate famous mainly for having two women pirates on his ships

griff

[thyme]

thanks for your reply griff

though I was a little overwhelmed by the first run of the tutorial

I can understand that griff and I did worry I explained too much in the end as the tutorial's main aim is to show all you need to do is drag a vertex at a point in time and the anim bar will capture it for play back but thought that’s so simple I might as well cover the basics in skinning too.

Knowing what information to put in is just as important as knowing what to leave out. If you stop the video at 4:26 (just after the morphing has been shown), it is about as minimalist as possible, the video after this point just goes on to explain some things that are likely to be helpful.

I notice that you collapsed the inner vertices of the bend animation at the elbow

I agree griff, deleting the triangles like you said does improve how the arm animates in this video and it reduces the poly-count too however this has not been the practice for at least the majority of my non nurbs-animations, I just left them with complete rings. My pirate on my front page is such an example:



I much like how this avatar's shoulders turned out (where the rings are very close together) as I have often found it very hard to make animated shoulders look good (or just acceptable) when directly animating a mesh. Getting shoulders right for me has often been more of a black art than a science but when you do get something that works you have an example that can be replicated in other models. (like Darwin's natural selection)

Looking forward to your new Calico Jack video

[griff]

as I have often found it very hard to make animated shoulders look good (or just acceptable) when directly animating a mesh.

Agreed. The arms are much trickier than elsewhere because of the amount of twist along the length of the arm. In fact it would be interesting to see how those inner triangles at the "elbow joint " behave when you apply a twist rather than a bend. I always try to spread the twist out over the whole arm if I can. And a triangle joint at the shoulder may be of benefit when the base starting model is in a T-pose.

I do think that all the improvements you have made to Seamless3D have really eased and simplified the tasks. Am I correct in thinking you can export animations created in Seamless3D as BVH files?

As for "Calico Jack" - it is the same video but hopefully with slightly improved quality.

griff

[thyme]

I always try to spread the twist out over the whole arm if I can.

Yes good point griff that reduces the amount of distortion in any one area.

And a triangle joint at the shoulder may be of benefit when the base starting model is in a T-pose.

For action avs that sword fight or play tennis this is good but a 45 degree angle maybe better for a fashion model that spends 99% of its time with the arms resting down.

The default pose for an hanim av is the arms resting down (which was defined before hanim supported skinning) which is what I did for Zoe (the only thing that differentiates her from Lucy) but I think this pose is too problematic especially when modeling and even more so for other modelers because when I did Zoe's arms I used a TransferOwnership node which specifies indices. Few modelers would have such a techy oriented approach available I would imagine.

Am I correct in thinking you can export animations created in Seamless3D as BVH files?

Yes griff you can export to BVH by right clicking on an Anim node in the scene tree and selecting export to bvh.
I can see now though when exporting BVH that bug you reported about subfolders not showing for some operations is also showing up here so will fix that soon.