welcome to the xsilist, even if you’re a bit late to the party.
If I read your question correctly, you want to have an animated character break
into parts, each with their own animation, and each breaking apart again, and
so on.
eg. a humanoid character: the arm separates and moves on, in turn the hand
breaks of, and then the fingers and then the individual bones - all this in one
fluid motion.
generally speaking, there is no real paradigm for this in the software (turning
a rigged object into two rigged objects).
I think the best approach would be to think the other way around: decompose the
character in all the separate parts (each one as an object), rig each one, and
have them move together at first, creating the illusion they are one, and then
gradually have parts move away from the whole.
So then the question becomes how to make all the individual parts move
together?
There are more straightforward solutions and tools for this.
- the skeleton:
use constraints to attach the rigs (bones) of the parts to the corresponding
bones of the full character – and disable the constraints to liberate the parts.
ideally, you’d have a 1 to 1 correspondence between both: the full character
has a complete, hierarchical skeleton, and the decomposed character has small
skeletons of one or two bones each (or simply nulls..), that precisely match
(the transforms of) the corresponding bones on the full character.
That would allow for an elegant transition when detaching parts.
You also have a null constrained to each bone in the (full) skeleton, and plot
their animation – and copy/paste the plotted animation from the nulls to the
proper bones (of the individual parts). A less interactive solution, but you
can do some fine massaging of the fcurves.
Or why not: full hierarchical skeleton with animation on one side, animated
individual parts on the other side.
Then have a null for each bone which is constrained to both corresponding bones
(on the full skeleton and the decomposed one) – now you can animate the blend
of the constraints (or the linear interpolation on a two point constraint) to
transition from one animation to the other.
- the skin:
Now, how to ‘stitch’ all the parts together?
It could be as simple as doing a merge operation with all the separate parts
selected, and having an appropriate (small) distance in the merge operator.
If you started from the full character, and split the parts along edge flow
lines, that could work quite well.
As long as the parts are following the animation of the full character, the
merge is going to stich the parts together. Move a part away and the merge will
not stitch it anymore.
This could give some trouble though, because the merge is simply distance
based, and points could erratically be stitched to other nearby but unrelated
points.
So you’d probably get more reliable results by doing a merge with zero distance
first: now all the parts are a single geometry, but it’s not stitched (you’ll
have blue boundary edges). So then, for each ‘seam’ you can select the proper
edges and connect them. (is it bridge?) That way there would be no confusion
when points move close to other (non related) points. More work to set up, but
better control and results I think.
It’s going to be a bit of an undertaking, so best to do some proof of concept
tests first to get your methodology right, before delving into the final
character.
There’s other approaches or workarounds, but that’s what comes to mind at first.
If the look allows for it, I’m sure something cool could be done using
polygonizer, which would work a bit like metaballs.
Hope it helps?
From: Nicole Beeckmans-Jacqmain
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2016 1:08 AM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: new member ( also has a question)
hello,
you understand, i am new here, i've been sent here from support (ending)
and no one to turn to there, to solve my little problems.
i will try to seize here the opportunity to meet new people and realities.
i will briefly present my relation to softimage.
i am probably far far less advanced than most of you.
i don't know any plug-ins in xsi, nor arnold etc
yet i have done a first fifteen minutes movie (in 2012) which will go along a
book of
poetry and 2d and the whole shall be published early 2017
softimage is my only contact with 3d since 1997- i've studied and did
experimental animation in school, yet have done ink animation
since i was 17 after watching winsor macquay early movies.
why have i taken so long before producing a first 3d anim?
i think its mainly because of 1) interest in metaphysics and
writing. being autodidact. 2) i never had access to knowledge about
thinking the process as a whole, like a) you draw a mesh that will be deformed
b) you build a rig this or that way, etc until i got to see it in manny
papamanos
with the larry dvd. until then my knowledge of the software was way too much
scattered,
fragmented - and i wonder if its still not the case, (i follow some of courses
online) but a bit late, yet now
i
have written a whole script (a philosophy with characters in English
dialogues), now a storyboard of the first scene or
chapter of this. first scene that, again, i want to draw in 3d Softimage and 2d
Painter
entirely by myself before finding any production.
by the time i complete first chapter (next two years) i hope there will still
be people working
with softimage to go along with me with this "feature" movie.
now is the question:
i have a wish to have a rigged animated mesh (a character) to scatter, or
fragment
(as in ice) and to have the fragments to become themselves rigged (tinier)
animatable meshes.
i have the option of doing a cut insert at the editing (postproduction) table,
but i wanted to ask if you saw anyway to make the becoming of the character
into fragments into characters in
a continuous fluid animation in 3d, as we would do rather easily enough in a
drawn ink animation?
do you see a way to accomplish that effect in ice, or some other combinaison
module in softimage?
i salute you,
thank you,
saitham jacqmain
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