Envelopes, Weights, Deformers and setting them up.

[probiner]

Hi
We use Species here for ease and speed. So the head and jaw have their deformers, and the facial expressions are done through Shapes on a FaceRig panel. For some time now the animator wants some additional Facial controls so he isn't restricted by the range of the shapes. And he wants something that does not turn into a cumbersome task given the revisions/iterations over an asset. I'm fairly new to Softimage and these were the approaches I went about:


Doritos
I had it setup, just one thing that is dragging the process; Envelopes are generated by distance but there's always normalization. So if I want them to just have a straight spherical falloff into black I can't. Or even to falloff into another dummy null weight, I can't. So I had to paint, around the ears, on the top of the head and sides, neck, etc. I was trying to minimize paitings so iterations on a model's rig can be faster.
I could put an inplicit per Derformer set on Bounding Volume > Limit. But it's an abrupt cut off.


Deform by Spine
Creates the falloff I want from the curve. I like the "drawn" deformations it does on mouth and eyes. I do an operator per curve, since the combined weights of several curves seems wonky. The downside seems to be that I can't transfer them with GATOR. How would you come about to transfer Deform by Spine between objects to save time?


General Concerns.
I come from Lightwave and Envelopes to me seem to be like a box of weights that are usually normalized. I see that deformers like Cage, Spine also generate such box of weights, but they don't seem to be handled as envelopes.
How flexible and manipulated can be weights and the underlying connections of Softimage between the mesh object, the weight, the control null and the deforming operator?? Seems to me that such weights don't exist without the deformers.


Image link illustrates what I'me trying to do.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/143 ... Deform.png

Thanks again

probiner

[missingkey]

a riggers life really.

I'm not sure on what approach would be best for you. I think getting into scripting would help aid some of the more complex stuff though. at least as far as speeding things up, and repetition.

You can accomplish what's in your image pretty easily, are you using multiple head meshes? if not, the first head mesh will need to be piped into a blendshape that is live in a duplicated, no-history head mesh. that way you can apply a new envelope to the 2nd head mesh, while it's still receiving the deformations from the first head mesh, through the live blendshape. It's hard to tell if that's what your missing. I hope that makes sense. I'm fairly certain it talks about this on that xsi-blog dorrito page. mmmmm dorritos

[Mathaeus]

General Concerns.
I come from Lightwave and Envelopes to me seem to be like a box of weights that are usually normalized. I see that deformers like Cage, Spine also generate such box of weights, but they don't seem to be handled as envelopes.
How flexible and manipulated can be weights and the underlying connections of Softimage between the mesh object, the weight, the control null and the deforming operator?? Seems to me that such weights don't exist without the deformers.

Yeah envelope is supposed to be normalized. As you said, box of weights. As far as I know, more or less the same is in all three Autodesk apps, Blender as well.
Cage and Spine (as far as I know), they are using a part of envelope system, but weights are computed exclusively by parameters - weight painting is not allowed, so shouldn't be hard to re-create their parametric falloffs on something else, without GATOR.
For envelope, you can always save the preset with weights.

If you want something unusual, it's quite easy to setup this in ICE. According to your posts, I believe you're capable to do that, about ten times more than setup of this kind needs. Let's say, group of nulls with additive weighting ( like shape keys), modulated by distance to mesh. Never SI versions allows to setup the static kine state, even null is not a part of active envelope. So, usual formula, get static kine state of null (or group), inverse and multiply by global transform (global transform goes in bottom input), multiply point position by result matrix, that's it.
Also, not big deal to use something else for weighting, instead distance to mesh. Let's say, UV distance, looking from closest location on mesh.

[probiner]

Thanks Mathaeus I was a bit focused on the standard tools and forgot to check the avaible ICE properties. Was quite easy to solve with the EnvelopeWeightsPerDeformer property.

I'll have to invest time analyzing your Deform by UV compound, not for this in particular, I think, but it allows all sorts of mapping tricks, even with the given problems on seams, but it's something I relied many times in LightWave.

Cheers