Ok, there should be an obvious solution for this … I'm doing part of a rig with bones and part of the rig with muscles.

How does one blend various capture weights from different capture systems (or at least what's a very straitforeward way)?

I'm getting an additive deformation effect right now when doing a deform and a meta-ball-deform .. and the capture layer paint seems to only work on one or the other.

What's the standard bone/muscle blending workflow?

ok, no replies … are there any really non-straitforeward ways anyone knows about?

I've checked around on other forums and haven't found much. I'd hate to try and re-invent the wheel because it seems like people would have needed to do this plenty of times before

What about using the Inflate SOP instead of metaball deform? Metaball deform was meant as an alternative to the regular deform I think.

my understanding of the inflate sop is that it will acutally conform the mesh to the muscles. I simply want to deform the pre-existing mesh with the metaballs. Then blend this (as opposed to add this) with my bones capture / standard deform

Why not just use the muscle deform for the whole rig, I'm sure you can mimick what you have in the bone setup in the muscle one.

Otherwise you could try a blend that uses point weights to blend between your two captures. The only way I can think of to do that is using a custom vex sop its very easy to set up though. See attached.

ah, blending by point weight … that might be the ticket … I'm going to check that out. I'm still very new to VEX

Related question.

Assuming that the Inflation is disabled on the DeformMuscle SOP, what's the difference between it and the DeformMeta SOP? Is there any advantage to using the DeformMeta SOP? I also noticed there isn't any multithreading options on the DeformMeta SOP either.

Wolfwood
Assuming that the Inflation is disabled on the DeformMuscle SOP, what's the difference between it and the DeformMeta SOP? Is there any advantage to using the DeformMeta SOP? I also noticed there isn't any multithreading options on the DeformMeta SOP either.

In theory there isn't a difference. In practice, you might notice some issues; fixes made to DeformMuscle might not have been reflected in DeformMeta. I don't believe this is the case, but I have been proven wrong before.

I have just filed an RFE for DeformMuscle to be renamed to DeformMeta, with the old DeformMeta to be removed. Hopefully this will get addressed in Houdini 9.

ah good to know, there still isn't a straitforeward way to use muscle/meta deform along with standard bone captures is there? I'm about to do the VEX

Joe
In theory there isn't a difference. In practice, you might notice some issues; fixes made to DeformMuscle might not have been reflected in DeformMeta. I don't believe this is the case, but I have been proven wrong before.

I have just filed an RFE for DeformMuscle to be renamed to DeformMeta, with the old DeformMeta to be removed. Hopefully this will get addressed in Houdini 9.

Thanks Joe. As far the RFE, that sounds like a good plan (for Houdini 9)

andrewlowell
ah good to know, there still isn't a straitforeward way to use muscle/meta deform along with standard bone captures is there? I'm about to do the VEX

What about creating a Muscle Object then wiring each of the bones into it? That would form a chain of metaballs along the bones.

I tried that … I have lots of bones following my wires from a dynamics sim in the tail right now. I had like 40 muscles for my tail and it was insanely slow and crashed my computer a few times (its a good computer). The muscle envelopes didn't look as good as my adjusted bone captures either.

The bones/wires are easily workable for animation even with the dynamics sim and deformation all cooking at once

What was your level of detail in the viewport set to? The default of 5 is quite high depending on the size of your object.

The LOD was at one, I changed it to .1 and it didn't have a noticable effect on playback speed. The muscles are working great with just the head, but I think the tail is too much.

Thanks for your suggestions though, I was approaching it like I would with Max and just assuming the captures worked the same. At least with this software there's a way to fix it if it's not doing the way you want. I do think it would be nice to have a SOP to blend capture types though if I've gathered correctly that there isn't one. I was trying to avoid using the code since it's not the most visual approach to adjusting envelopes.

andrewlowell
The LOD was at one, I changed it to .1 and it didn't have a noticable effect on playback speed. The muscles are working great with just the head, but I think the tail is too much.

You probably don't want to display muscles at all. As you noticed, it's way too slow to draw them in the viewport, and unless you specifically need to see the muscle outlines, it tends to be overkill.

Displaying the muscles isn't necessary for muscle deformation to work.

yeah I turn them off when animating, I just couldn't seem to get the envelopes right like on the bones and the bones were still much faster … ok … here's a question

do the “dimensions” of the muslces, like, that curve … xyz etc have anything to do with the actual deformation that will occur, or is it simply squashing and stretching according to the metaballs, and everything else will follow along.

Or phrased another way … does the size of the muscle effect how the muscle works or does it only effect the capture.

The thing I liked about the bones was that they didn't have any squash etc so for things like boney surfaces I didn't have to worry about weird deformation.

andrewlowell
Or phrased another way … does the size of the muscle effect how the muscle works or does it only effect the capture.

It will affect the deformation as well as the capture. Muscle deformation samples the metaball density fields at the point locations, which means that if the density field is different because the metaball/muscle is a different size, the points will deform differently.

That being said, you can easily change the weights being used by painting muscle weights on the skin using the Paint Capture Layer tool (or the CaptureLayerPaint SOP).

ok thats what I thought … I will have to play around with the paint weights to choose which works better