no skin
Posted: 01 Aug 2015, 02:29
Hello,
just wanted to show my long time summer project in H. It is a parametric human body deformation system, completely based on Houdini VEX - that will be 'based on ICE' in Softimage. So, no any usual operator like envelope, shape key or lattice, exactly nothing of these. Instead, there's sequence of dedicated operators, each one is concentrated to certain body part, doing the all deformations and applying matrices taken from rig, in same time - or, forth - back chain of matrices and related deformations. For example, one operator for foots, another for leg, yet another for spine area, so on.
While I already tested some basic concepts in ICE, still it was one of things, asking for about a week of work in advance, just to see is it even feasible. Hopefully, now I'm sure it is. For now, I could see some good and bad points, compared to classic approach.
Good:
- topology independent, completely. Influences are ( mainly ) based on bone coordinates.
- adaptive, almost all parameters are relative to bones.
- pretty much closed, only processing structure. Theoretically, it should be just applied to some humanoid structure and appropriate skeleton.
- nice and precise falloffs generated by machine, almost impossible to do by painting the weights manually, or by any comparable masochism.
Bad:
- works only in dedicated 3d app, only way to export the deformations is baking the animated mesh.
- significantly slower than classic envelope-plus-shape-key method - for now, I'm getting more than 25 FPS, on around 20 K triangles ( 10K quads), on i7 quad core.
As it constantly catching the multi threading in H, thing should be faster on stronger machine. Also I believe I'd be able to squeeze the evaluation to some extent, in future.
- pretty much closed structure. If something goes wrong, only way to fix is wonderful world of matrices, 3d vectors and such, somewhere in Houdini VOPs.
Just technically, for now, it's a bunch of Houdini optransform functions for transferring the matrices from rig, imported as detail attributes onto one dummy object in H network. Then there's sequence of VOPs, serving as static setters. After that, around ten of "dynamic" VOPs. Reference pose is a dummy object, saved on disk as bgeo.
Hope I'l able to show much more, sometime in autumn or earlier. Also, I think I'd definitively try to repeat the thing in Fabric.
P.S. as it is noticeable, there's a sort of custom rig, built in H - nothing smart about this one, just made it to have something to generate matrices.
just wanted to show my long time summer project in H. It is a parametric human body deformation system, completely based on Houdini VEX - that will be 'based on ICE' in Softimage. So, no any usual operator like envelope, shape key or lattice, exactly nothing of these. Instead, there's sequence of dedicated operators, each one is concentrated to certain body part, doing the all deformations and applying matrices taken from rig, in same time - or, forth - back chain of matrices and related deformations. For example, one operator for foots, another for leg, yet another for spine area, so on.
While I already tested some basic concepts in ICE, still it was one of things, asking for about a week of work in advance, just to see is it even feasible. Hopefully, now I'm sure it is. For now, I could see some good and bad points, compared to classic approach.
Good:
- topology independent, completely. Influences are ( mainly ) based on bone coordinates.
- adaptive, almost all parameters are relative to bones.
- pretty much closed, only processing structure. Theoretically, it should be just applied to some humanoid structure and appropriate skeleton.
- nice and precise falloffs generated by machine, almost impossible to do by painting the weights manually, or by any comparable masochism.
Bad:
- works only in dedicated 3d app, only way to export the deformations is baking the animated mesh.
- significantly slower than classic envelope-plus-shape-key method - for now, I'm getting more than 25 FPS, on around 20 K triangles ( 10K quads), on i7 quad core.
As it constantly catching the multi threading in H, thing should be faster on stronger machine. Also I believe I'd be able to squeeze the evaluation to some extent, in future.
- pretty much closed structure. If something goes wrong, only way to fix is wonderful world of matrices, 3d vectors and such, somewhere in Houdini VOPs.
Just technically, for now, it's a bunch of Houdini optransform functions for transferring the matrices from rig, imported as detail attributes onto one dummy object in H network. Then there's sequence of VOPs, serving as static setters. After that, around ten of "dynamic" VOPs. Reference pose is a dummy object, saved on disk as bgeo.
Hope I'l able to show much more, sometime in autumn or earlier. Also, I think I'd definitively try to repeat the thing in Fabric.
P.S. as it is noticeable, there's a sort of custom rig, built in H - nothing smart about this one, just made it to have something to generate matrices.