Dejan Njegus

Hello everybody, need a little tip, how to setup single bone stretch based on distance to (rig) CTRL object? Been digging on the net, but only a few tutorials exists and they all addressing the case of a stretchy arm (or leg) case with IK's and the whole shabang, and I'm not in the mood for "R&D" (i.e. pulling my hair out why something won't work as it should). In my case this would be basis for facial rig in combination with franken muscles and FEM simulations (bunch of these stretchy bones with muscles attached to them). Something like this example in the video. Here is the file of my "progress" so far, I need stretching in "Z" axis, volume preservation is not necessary (imho) . I'm sure there will be a s**ttone of problems along the way (since I'm out of geometry/retopo phase), any more tips would be highly appreciated. I guess the rig (if it's ever created) will be as slow as a wounded snail, but who knows...

Well thanks a lot! I guess the next question is how do you accidentally change the point order (most common way)? Last night I tried some basic skinning with a couple of bones and everything went fine, will muscles affect point order (I guess they shouldn't)? I'm thinking about creating some kind of temporary facial rig with muscles for creating series of blendshapes for use back in Maya, they don't have to be perfect, lets say 70-80% of precision, so the artists could sculpt them just a tad to a desired state.

Has anyone tried this? I mean export lets say a cube from Maya as .obj, import it to Houdini, affect it in any way, with skinning or modeling, or deformers and export it back to Maya again as .obj, and use it in Maya as a blendshape (morph target whatever)? Will vertex Id (order) stay the same or it requires some mumbo-jumbo back in Maya?
Of course while importing exporting we will not delete vertices of polygons...