lkruel
We want to know what the desired workflow would be when procedurally manipulating skeletons
Thanks for looking into this subject!
I think there is a lot of potential here for procedural modelling to become more relevant for creatures and characters. It might seem like there is not much interest in this area but pairing procedural modelling and rigging together could really be a paradigm shift especially if it could integrate with muscles system. Artists could generate a lot of variations of a model with animations and poses as well as muscles and skin deformation. I think it's just not on a lot of peoples radar mostly due to inertia and the fact that there isn't a lot of procedural modelling of creatures going on.
I could rant about this for a while but on to practical considerations:
A lot of the data required for rigging can be generated at the Sop level when creating the procedural meshes in the first place.
Ideally the nodes would take the a bunch of curves and generate bones based on them, then maybe have a separate node to generate the skin weights. It would be good to have to an option of influencing the bones with attributes or groups for example designating which bones are IK which one is the end effector or limiting certain bones skin weights.
This would be consistent with the ongoing theme of bringing things into Sops from other contexts.
I would eventually like to package my creature generator as a hda so I would greatly prefer nodes rather than a shelf tools, because they could be incorporated more seamlessly, even if they require a bit more information from the user to work.
Sorry for the long post, here are some gifs of what I'm working on: