Just wondering if when you are capturing geometry that it should always work on an open mesh? Are there any limitations to be aware of?

Looking inside the ‘bonecapturebiharmonic1_solidembed1’ it looks like it's meant to close a geo with ‘create closed solid representation’ but have had it fail last week.

Thx!

Hi aRtey,

not having any problems capturing an open tube here… are you able to share a mesh?

Here we go, some MakeHuman lips. Want to open and close them. Thx!

Here's an initial capture setup, super rough and rubbish, but even with this simple two bone setup you can get an initial solution. Two important settings that I changed from default are firstly, check ‘Use Bone Link’ on the bone capture lines SOP, if you turn this off then the SOP generates lines based on the central section of the capture region, which in this case isn't long enough (by default) to penetrate the tet mesh created by the solid embed, which is what the biharmonic capture relies on to transfer the capture attributes. I also unchecked ‘Enlarge to Cover Input Mesh’ which just means there's less intersection between upper and lower lips. This stage is arguably not very useful because we are still left with the need to do some heavy weight painting to get a working thing going.

Obviously this joint setup is far from ideal and you may be able to get a better initial result by improving that, but I'd be (happily) surprised if you managed to get a setup going on rigging lips that didn't require some painting.

Hope that's somehow helpful,

Henry

Nice work! I think my failed attempt didn't have the bones close enough to the geo.

I'll try painting next as I would like the top lip to move much less when the lower one is moved. Are there any other tricks than weight painting?

thx!

Looks like painting works well! But how to stop the painting affecting areas away from where you are painting, see attached .gif. Where the upper lip is being painted even though it is far geometrically away from the paint brush.

Hy aRtey,

your radius brush seems too big.
Some tips if you want :
-If you want to paint only a certain region , use the group entry(avoid smooth as it's unpredictable).
(visibility node work well too).
-Turn off “orient brush to surface” option (in the stroke tab).
-Begin to paint your mesh with opacity set to 1 (big contrast) and refine with lower values.

PS : did ‘0.001 == 0’ ???

I never had luck capturing a non-watertight geometry with biharmonics. The weights were always wrong, especially when the geometry was packed close together.

What I usually do is to separate my asset into parts that can be captured with different weighting algorithms.
Biharmonic likes watertight shapes, so I take any PrimGroup which shapes can be closed with a PolyFill SOP, close them and feed them to a SolidEmbed SOP. (I then feed a nonclosed geo to capture SOP).

Anything else, like single-sided leaves of a plant sort of things, I separate into a different pipe. I delete any PrimGroup that doesn't match the rule.

Then, I capture weights for PolyFilled geo with biharmonics and one-sided geo with proximity or regions, and Merge SOP those guys together before Deforming them.

This saves a lot of weight painting you would otherwise need to do.

@dedak3000 awesome - thank you very much for those tips. The orient brush option looks perfect for this work too!
PS nah as 0.0009 is smaller than 0.001

@ajz = thanks! I'll check out those tips too. Cheers!