Hello everyone,

Once again I'm standing in front of a wall with H. One of these days I'll get it! But today, I'd appreciate your help, please.

What I'd like to do is make Maya or C4D like clusters. The goal is to have nulls that will be driving points on my mesh, preferably with painted-in weights for it. The application for this is I'm getting the nulls from a facial mocap out of Movimento. Those nulls should then, naturally, move my face mesh.

Now, I'm not looking for a step-by-step, but a hint in the right direction would be super! Or you got a better solution than my nulls/cluster method, please suggest away. I don't need a super complex rig though, I only need cheecks, around the mouth and maybe a bit of neck.

Cheers!

A couple of ideas off the top of my head ( I haven't thought them through to decide how much work they are).

You could take your mo-cap null points, copy Capture regions to them and Deform the surface with those. You would use the second input of the Capture sop for the “extra” capture regions.

Or, you could bring in the null points to the sop level of your geometry, give each point a unique colour, do Attribute Transfers (which is based on proximity and has a fall-off control), use these transfer values to generate point groups based on the colours and use Softpeak or Softtransforms to move the geometry surface.
This method would give you two levels of control over the fall-off of each point; in the Attribute Transfer and the Softtransfroms, and thus good control over the surface deformation. However, this would also be computationally more expensive that using Capture regions.

Those are two good suggestions, thank you. And there I was already setting up muscles with the nulls as anchors.

I think the capture region one is probably the better way because it would give me more control over the shape of the influence area.

How ever, I could modify your 2nd idea and paint the weights in myself with different colors and assign the color to its respective null. That would give me full control over the influence field, but it's a bit messier to set it all up. Either way, I'll try something tomorrow and post the result.

Thanks again!

Hi probbins i was reading the post with the tips, and i was wonder what you mean with the “Extra” on the second input of the capture node?

thanks

hi zaroun,

To add to Peter's suggestions, you could instead put a metaball or metaballs in each of your nulls, and capture the face geometry using a metaball capture. You will need to give the metaballs in each null their own pimitive color (for visualization/paint) and group name (needed for capture), and with that done you can use a capturelayerpaint sop to paint the wieghts directly.
You would have the control of arranging the size and position of each null's metaballs in a way that captures the areas you want, and still finer control of being able to paint the weights.

pelos
Hi probbins i was reading the post with the tips, and i was wonder what you mean with the “Extra” on the second input of the capture node?

thanks

At sop level you can call in Capture region sops (one or many depending on your needs) and those get plugged into the right hand input of the Capture sop.

zarroun
Those are two good suggestions, thank you. And there I was already setting up muscles with the nulls as anchors.

I think the capture region one is probably the better way because it would give me more control over the shape of the influence area.


Thanks again!

As you've probably already discovered you have limited options regarding the shape of the capture regions (the default pill shape).
If you need to have a greater degree of control over the shapes then I would recommend the metaballs that NobodyInParticular has mentioned.
Definitely listen to that guy, he knows stuff.

Thanks for the tip. I ended up combining what both of you had to say.

What I ended up with is capture regions on the nulls, then a capture paint for additional weight control, and then I put a deformer at the end. Works great and is exactly what I needed. So, thanks again nobodyinparticular and probbins.

Now I need to figure out why my hair is jumping around and then I can show some renders.

Cheers!