Morpheus Facial OPEN Beta!

Well my internet amigos, getting closer and closer to finished here. It's been a pretty nice weekend here in the Texas sticks and I thought it was a good day to release Morphy's Facial Rig to open Beta. It's getting pretty close to done and I wanted to get some more feedback.

Download it on the new Morpheus project page . There's also WIP documentation and faqs on the page. If you have more questions, keep em comin.


What's in the pack?

• The latest and greatest Morphy facial rig
• Notes on some "hidden" controls
• Smoothers are on "faceSmoothingAttributeHolder"
• Visibility toggles on "faceVisibilityAttributeHolder"
• For the tinkerers out there, you can use the below to find and mess with stuff:
• First off you'll need to turn off, my group drawing overrides so you can select stuff:
• "Geo_grp"
• "DeformationRig"
• "Head_RESETER_bsGeo" is a head mesh to "reset" and mirror vertices if you should be inclined to start messing with doing your own blendshapes. I use abSymMesh for mirroring and resetting.
• Blendshapes for the facial rig are here "Facial_bsGeo_grp"
• Blendshapes for the facial deformation are here "FacialDeformation_bsGeo_grp"
• The last open body release (with new head referenced)
• The referencing animation file I used to render the above test
• Textures
• Rough first pass at some feminine textures and different skin tones
• Eye textures 
• Included source .psd files if you'd like to try some variations
• Scripts pack
• jbMorpheusFacialCustomGeoBaker - duplicates the wrap deformer functionality without the wrap deformer
• jbMorpheusAddHair - for easily skinning hair in
• jbMoprheusSmoothConnect - for creating polySmooth on a selection of meshes and then connecting the divisions attribute to whatever attribute you tell it to. 
• boTriggers - Thanks to Bohdon for letting me include them. To update the trigger selectors in referenced files, run the script and run the updater. 

What's New?

• Facial blendshapes
• New Lip roll, narrow, wide polish
• Facial Deformation
• NO MORE wrap deformers! Everything is hooked up via blendshapes, skinweights and pixie dust
• Facial morph polish on lots of morphs
• Weighting fixes - still not done
• bug fix - eyebrow mover rotation mirroring working now
• Customization
• Instead of toggles for the eyebrows, broke them into blendshapes for even more variety
• New hair options: Thanks to Aziz Kocanaogullair and Mary Barreiro for the great work.
• Split out bangs for more variety with the dos. They work best with the feminine hairstyles
• Lookin to get rigs into the ponytail and pigtails for animatability
• Solid Teeth option - thanks Danny Garnett! He's working on some blendshapes for em too for even more variety
• Fixed some of the ear blendshapes
• Added full Gotee (from Aziz Kocanaogullair). 
• Beards and gotees have blendshapes on them now to pull them out and push them in some. Rick, you should finally be able to get your crazy long gotee;)
• Workflow
• smoother attributes
• parent toggles for eyes

What kind of feedback am I lookin for?

• Facial Deformation:
• Are there any specific controls you're not finding that you're wanting? (i.e. I've thought about adding a mouth sac scaler to avoid some of the penetration that happens at bigger scale mouth and jaws as well as a nose bridge narrower)
• Did you come up with a cool morph you'd like me to try to incorporate? (i.e. better lip thickener or somethin?)
• Facial Rig
• The facial rig is an experiment in some areas and unlike any facial rig I've done before. The lip controls especially are an attempt at a new control mechanism for the same types of shapes I use in any facial rig. Thoughts?
• If you start doing tests, are there any things you're having a hard time getting out of the rig?
• Customization
• Some of the customization stuff is rougher than others, if you'd like to polish things up create some new ones, by all means be my guest and I'll roll it in.
• Thoughts on specific options?
• Textures
• Texturing is definitely not my strong point. The source files are there for any experts out there. I'm not 100% happy on diffuse, spec or even the colors. Just an attempt at getting something. Feel free to experiment and send your ideas.
• Yes, my tongue shader is too shiny. See previous bullet point.

Supposed to start this gig any day now so Morphy progress will slow. The main stuff left is FK/IK snapping when limbs are stretched, connecting up the head to the body and rolling in the final face tweaks. 

Bake Custom Geo at 360 degrees for 3 seconds...

...and you get fully working custom facial geo with no wrap deformers to slow things down. As you might have guessed, the custom facial geo baker is complete. So now you can...

The short of it:

1. Import your new beard/gotee whatever
2. Position it where you want it in relation to a ZEROED out Morphy face
3. Select your custom mesh, then his face mesh
4. Source and run script
5. Go grab some candy. Preferably dark chocolate.
6. Come back and animate.

The long of it:
For those of you interested, here's how I go about tackling things like that. First I figure out what I want the script to do. Here's my original "plan" notes:

• Process to be scripted
• Select $customGeo followed by deformingMesh
• Create wrapDeformer 
• Get blendshape channels into array
• For loop
• for each blendshape channel on the deforming mesh (limit by facial region?)
• Get input connector value and put in $driverArray
• Break the connection on the blendshapeChannel
• turn channel value to 1
• duplicate $customGeo to freeze it
• Add new geo name to $bakedCustomGeo string array
• position new geo
• reconnect the connecter value with data from $driverArray
• Put all new blendshape geo in new group
• Name group
• Connect all new geo back into original geo as blendshape node ($customGeoBaseName_bsNode)

Of course that's not going to be everything as lots of stuff rears it's head and must be put down like a many headed beast trying to devour your time. Next thing I do is look through scripts I have or can find online that might have similar functions I can hack (see my previous hacking other people's scripts post). I had used a great script written Asi Sudai called extractBlendshapes. It will take a mesh with a blendshape that you want to get the blendshapes from if, say for example, you deleted the original target meshes. It even puts them in a handy visual columns/rows format in worldspace. I made judicous use of large chunks of his code for the duplication and extraction function. I just modified it to duplicate the wrap deformed customGeo instead of the main mesh then did all the rest of the stuff I needed to do to get things working.


Also, thanks to my buddy David Bokser who helped me out with a syntax issue I was getting stuck on last night.

Here's the script (sorry, I don't have the best coding practices as I'm still a novice at it):

/*
TITLE: jbMorpheusFacialCustomGeoBaker
VERSION: 1.0
AUTHOR:Josh Burton
www.joshburton.com
DATE: August 26, 2010

DESCRIPTION:
Script for baking out custom facial geo for the Morpheus Rig.

DISCLAIMER:
If your computer explodes, I didn't do it.

HOW TO USE:
1. First select the custom geo to bake
2. Then select the head (to wrap it to)
3. Run script

HISTORY:
08.26.10 - BIRTH!

Acknowledgements -
1. Blendshape extraction, size, existance checking from extractBlendShapes - Asi Sudai
asi@asimation.com www.reel.asimation.com
2. David Bokser for helping me fix some of my syntax issues
*/

//sub Procs

// Debuging printing proc - Acknowledgement 1
proc extractBlendShape.debug(string $msg)
{
if (1==1)
print ("\n***Debug: " + $msg +"\n");
}// End
// Get object bounding size - Acknowledgement 1
proc extractBlendShape.getBounding(string $node)
{
float $bounding[]=`xform -q -bb $node`;
float $xSize=(`abs $bounding[0]` +`abs $bounding[3]`);
print $xSize;
}// End
// check the object have blendShapes - Acknowledgement 1
proc string extractBlendShape.getBlendShape(string $node)
{

string $shapes[] = `listRelatives -s $node`;
for ($shape in $shapes){
string $tempArray[]=`listConnections -s 1 -d 0 -type "blendShape" ($shape + ".inMesh")`;
if ($tempArray[0] != "") return $tempArray[0];
}
return "none";
}// End

//Main Proc
global proc jbMorpheusFacialCustomGeoBaker() {

//Declaring our intial variables
string $blendShapeNamesBaked[];
string $blendshapeConnections[];
string $currentConnections[];
string $selected[] = `ls -sl`;

//Josh, do an error check to make sure the selection order is correct
$customGeo = $selected[0];
$deformerGeo = $selected[1];

//create and store name of Wrap deformer
string $wrapDeformer[] = `deformer -type wrap $customGeo`;
select -r $customGeo;
select -tgl $deformerGeo;
AddWrapInfluence;
select -cl;

//reorders deformation order for proper baking of skinned mesh
reorderDeformers "tweak1" "face_skinCluster" $deformerGeo;


// Check if object have blendShape node. - Acknowledgement 1
string $blendShapeNode = `extractBlendShape.getBlendShape $deformerGeo`;
if ($blendShapeNode == "none") { print ("\n"+ $deformerGeo + " don't have blendShape"); return; }
// Get all BlendShapes shapes - Acknowledgement 1
extractBlendShape.debug $blendShapeNode;
string $blendShapeNamesShort[] = `listAttr -m ($blendShapeNode + ".weight")`;

int $n = 0;



//Creates a new name for the geo to be baked
for ($name in $blendShapeNamesShort) {
$blendShapeNamesBaked[$n] = $customGeo + "_" + $blendShapeNamesShort[$n];
$n++;
}

// Start extracting
// Get object size, to better spread the blendShapes - Acknowledgement 1
float $bounding[]=`xform -q -bb $customGeo`;
float $boundingSizeX=(`abs $bounding[0]` +`abs $bounding[3]`);
float $boundingSizeY=(`abs $bounding[1]` +`abs $bounding[4]`);
extractBlendShape.debug ("Bounding size = " + $boundingSizeX);
// Start extracting each shape - Acknowledgement 1, changed to export the custom geo instead of the deforming Geo
int $t=1;
string $bakedCustomGeo[];
for ($i=0; $i<`size($blendShapeNamesShort)`; $i++) { int $row = `floor($i/5)`; if ($t>5) $t=1;
extractBlendShape.debug ("doing blendShape - " + $blendShapeNamesShort[$i]);
//queries the connection that goes into the blendshape node and stores it
string $currentBlendShapeChannel = $blendShapeNode + "." + $blendShapeNamesShort[$i];
$currentConnections = `listConnections -d off -p on -s on $currentBlendShapeChannel`;
$blendshapeConnections[$i] = $currentConnections[0];
//breaks connection on blendshape node
disconnectAttr $blendshapeConnections[$i] ($blendShapeNode + "." + $blendShapeNamesShort[$i] ) ;
//back to Asi's code
setAttr ($blendShapeNode + "." + $blendShapeNamesShort[$i] ) 1;
string $bakedCustomGeo[]=`duplicate -name $blendShapeNamesBaked[$i] $customGeo`;
xform -r -t (($boundingSizeX*($t+1.2))*1.1) (($boundingSizeY*$row)*-1) 0 $bakedCustomGeo[0];
setAttr ($blendShapeNode + "." + $blendShapeNamesShort[$i] ) 0;
// Restores connection
connectAttr $blendshapeConnections[$i] $currentBlendShapeChannel;
$t++;
}
//Restores deformation order of the Deformer Geo
reorderDeformers "face_skinCluster" "tweak1" $deformerGeo;
reorderDeformers "face_skinCluster" "face_bsNode" $deformerGeo;

//Delete wrap and connect baked custom geo as blendshapes to original custom geo
delete $wrapDeformer[0];
$customGeoBlendShapeNode = $customGeo+"_bsNode";
blendShape -n $customGeoBlendShapeNode $blendShapeNamesBaked $customGeo ;

//groups our new baked geo for easy cleanup later on
$bakedCustomGeoGroupName = $customGeo+"_bsGeo_grp";
group -n $bakedCustomGeoGroupName $blendShapeNamesBaked;
setAttr ($bakedCustomGeoGroupName +".v") 0;
parent $bakedCustomGeoGroupName customFacialGeo_bsGeo_grp;

//Connects our custom geo blendshape channels to the original deforming mesh channels
int $b=0;
for ($bshape in $blendShapeNamesBaked) {
connectAttr ($blendShapeNode + "." + $blendShapeNamesShort[$b]) ($customGeoBlendShapeNode +"."+ $blendShapeNamesBaked[$b]);
$b++;
}

//Skin the custom geo
$customGeoSkinName = $customGeo+"_skinCluster";
skinCluster -n $customGeoSkinName -tsb qssFaceSkinJoints $customGeo;

//copy the skin weights from the deformer geo to the custom geo
copySkinWeights -ds $customGeoSkinName -ss "face_skinCluster" -noMirror -surfaceAssociation closestPoint -influenceAssociation name;

//renames our original custom geo properly
$customGeoProperName = $customGeo+"_customGeo";
rename $customGeo $customGeoProperName;

//Report complete
print ($customGeoProperName + " exported properly. I'd move the joysticks around to make sure.") ;

}

What else?

• Been doing some polishing on some of the blendshapes for the rig and deformation
• Pushed Nose widener more at a beta tester's request
• Bug fix - eyebrow mover rotation is now properly mirrored
• Moved out the jaw_anim control so it wouldn't get stuck behind beards
• Moved the hair over to using skinning rather than wrap deformers

Now, pardon me but I have some pig tails that were sent in to look at. Keep em comin!

Morpheus Ladies putting on their faces and a UI update...

So queuing off a commenter's post, I decided to play with some texture variations this morning. I learned something - that is I have absolutely no idea how women's makeup works. Having learned that, I decided to go simple-Lipstick, eyeliner and a little sun kissed cheeks action. If there are any woman animator/texture artists following this, I could use some help:)

Thankfully I have a generous female animator already working on more hair so we'll get even more feminine sensibility into the mix for final release.

Playing with the face rig some more brought up some new notes I need to fix as well with some shape interaction.

Yesterday made good progress on the UI, have it semi workin in scene, just waiting to lock down some things before hooking everything up. Here's my design that I'm pretty close to in Maya.

Goofy, no? So the idea is with pretty much any customization you wanna do with Morpheus, you'll just go to the Morph-o-matic control and have everything in one place. The squash and stretch reseters will be on their respective part controls and hand and head scaling will be connected to this interface as well (already have hands hooked up and I like the interactivity - I really wish I could make the whole scaling customization kinda like this but one step at a time). Also thinking I'm gonna move the custom geo stuff from the custom geo text control to the head in the interface...even thought about doing some fancy system where the interface would change based on your customization but that would just take way too long.

It's a nurbs based ui so you can scale it, contstrain it, snap it off in its own panel, whatever you please.

That's it for now. Guess it's time to buckle down and write this geo baker for the custom stuff...

Morpheus Open Body Beta 2!

Made some good progress this week on Morphy and had a small gig too. Speaking of, I'm looking to start a long term gig in the next week and so Morphy progress is gonna slow down a bit. Apologies but paid work comes first:)




Without further ado. Here's the new beta release. DOWNLOAD ME!

What's in the Latest Beta rar?

• Updated Morphy body rig with body morphing and TEMP ui
• A new open release of the Morphy head rig with all the current customization stuff in EXCEPT for the facial rig. Sorry, you still gotta wait for that. However, I did leave you the eye/lid rig setup to play with. The head rig will not be referenced in to the body rig for the final release, this is just for testing purposes.
• The maya scene I used to make the vid above so you can get a feel for how things work. You'll need to fix reference paths
• What am I using to scale him/her?
• Limb scaling - on the limb segments in FK mode and the end effectors in IK
• Torso - just squashing him down manually
• Shoulder widening/shrinking - is on the main shoulder IK controller (yellow circle at shoulder level)
• Neck - see torso (works better with some of the squash and stretch mode, see note below)
• Head - the blue circle arrow around the head
• Everything, the big anim_all circle arrow at the bottom of the scene
• Hands - on the nurbs palms
• Facial deformation. I'd recommend just opening the face rig alone and messing with it to get a hang of it before digging into messing with everything at once.

What's new?

• Body has been rerigged several times as I've been trying to test and find the best placement for several joints. The shoulder, ankle, hip and torso were bigger hassles than expected
• Added in Doublestein's limb squash and stretch and found a way of "resetting your baseline" for when you use the controls to reproportion the body. In the beta release I have the expression commented out till I get everything fixed but you're welcome to get a sneak peak by uncommenting. However, if you've changed the stretch on the limbs or torso it's gonna look strange.
• Satisfied with a pretty solid pass for body morphing
• Weighting will be done when it's done
• Chest widening/shrinking is in (on the shoulder control)
• Been getting some great contributions from folks in the geometry category. Even more options incoming. Thanks all.
• Fixed some twisting issues because of rotation order problems

What's left before release?

• UI - Got a pretty good plan on how I want the Morphy UI to work with housing the body morphing, facial deforming and all of the new squash/stretch reseters
• FK/IK Switching - works fine unless you start messing with arm/leg proportions. Need to fix
• Textures - Still waiting for some variations from contributers or I'll just have to make em. How many options would you all like?
• Facial Geo Baker - Need to write a script for baking out the appropriate morph targets so that the custom geo can be skinned in rather than using the wrap deformer I had been favoring before it threw molasses in animator interactivity
• Final the head to body connecting workflow and documentation for others being able to do the same (one of the ideas with the rig is that you can take just the head if you like and put it on whatever body rig you please)
• Testing - wanna get some solid animation tests to get as many bugs out as possible before final release

The return of GLaDOS and a couple of great shorts!

Finished up a short gig a bit ago and gonna hop back on Morphy after lunch but wanted share a few gems.

• The return of GLaDOS - Portal was one of my favorite game experiences of the last decade and this new sneak peak is looking awesome. I didn't watch the last half cause I didn't want to spoil the puzzles for myself so be forwarned. However I for one can't wait to have a hilariously sadistic robot attempt to kill me again. For science.
  
  
  
• Couple of great shorts. Hat tip to lineboil for these. The first from the great animation school Ringling where some talented students have made a great little short with snappy timing and great shot composition and color use.
  
  
  Followed by a charming liveaction/animated short story. I love the "animated kid telling a story" genre.
  
  

Cheers to Doublestein!

First off, just wanted to mention again that The Morpheus body rig is based off of John Doublestein's rig which you can download off of his site. It's been mentioned several times on my blog but most people don't read back that far or always catch the details. So, I'm making a whole post on it to make sure it's clear. I'm using his rigger (which you can download from his site). I'm also grateful that he's taken the time to answer a few of my questions as I've been working through some things. If you want a head start on Morphy functionality, go ahead and download the Andy rig from John's site or creative crash.  Morphy's body rig is pretty much the Andy rig with a new mesh and body morphing on the mesh (the head is a a tad different:)). Nothing exactly ground breaking. The only real variation on the body rig is I'm using a different hand rig (mainly from Jason Schleifer's Animator Friendly Rigging stuff).

My own rigging skills I'd place at intermediate and am stumbling my way through Morphy and learning lots. Most of my focus in school and after has been on animation though there's so much more competition in that area now that I wanted to build the rigging muscles. Just wanna make sure credit goes where due and John is certainly deserving a great deal. Learned loads from his rig and eyelid setup tutorial which I used and expanded for Morphy's eyelid setup and Squirrely's as well if memory serves.

Thanks, John!

Morphy Stuff...

Question to the void - Trying to figure out if I wanna do a picker/UI yet. At this point leaning towards a nurbs based one so you can scale it, constrain it, whatever rather than a seperate UI window. Thoughts?

I'm gonna try to release another body beta with the body morphing in it later this week so check back if you're interested.

Body Rig

• Shoulder width widening/shrinking is in
• Rerigged body after deciding I wasn't thrilled with some of my joint placements.
• Fixes to some rotation order stuff that was causing some flipping out - (hat tip to Josh Bowman for that bug discovery and to David Bokser who gave me the insight in how to fix it as he had the same issue on our rigs for Garden City).
• Mid Spine IK control is enabled
• Initial implementation of squash and stretch in the limbs affecting the mesh. Still need to add a differential for when you want to create a new proportional baseline and not have it affect the squash/stretch. Pretty good idea how to do that.
• Polishing on body morphs
• Added one more section of roll joints in the limb segments

If anyone is offended by the google ad on the side, apologies. Just experimenting as the traffic has been just a wee bit up over the last week or so. :)

Nice, it picked up a Burton Snowboard ad. Alas, I'm not related to that Burton clan. Nor Tim. Shame.

Avatorpheus!

Just got this in from one of the beta testers. I'd have never tried that. Made me laugh:)

Not what I would have thought of. Some creativity from Rick:)

Rolled out another head beta today. Things are moving along...

• So, wrap deformers aparently are slow as molasses and the more customization options I add, the slower the rig gets, so....I'm workin on another way to pull in stuff. It involves some potential scripting so I'm avoiding it for now:)
• Yet another weighting pass on the head deformation joints
• Ears visibility toggle works now
• Added in two new controls on the face rig
• Ear morphers (upr/lwr) for having some customization option on the ole' listeners
• Nose bridge thickener - put this one in at a buddy's request and I like it. Hope you will too.

Looping back to the body for a while. Workin on increasing shoulder width right now. Crossing my fingers that it works. Got a rigging gig starting tomorrow but will get back to it when I can.

Body Morphing Controls Pass 1

First real pass at splitting up the body morphs. Currently I have them symmetrically done. Thinking about whether left/right would make sense or not. Thoughts? Any other prebuilts you'd like to see?



The meat of it are a muscular, heavy, skinny and feminine morphs which I've then split up using Jason Osipa's tutorial in chapter 6 of Stop Staring (second edition). He's talking about doing a full face scrunch and then painting out the various regions. I just took that and applied it to painting out regions of the body. A bit tedious but it seems to work okay.

Here's what's on the slate for Morphy this week.

• Body rig
• Polishing body morphs and blends between sections
• Skinny's lower torso is doing some funky stuff with some other shapes.
• Splitting body morphs to left/right sections if that level of control is desired
• Add Mid spine ik control
• Add some manual neck scaling to make tying into the head better.
• Look at adding chest widener for shoving the shoulders further apart without complete breaking doublesteins setup.
• Look to at what's breaking on the fk/ik switching when scaling limbs
• Facial Rig
• Add movers on control groups to move the controls out should the custom geometry the user has on block things
• Add nose bridge thickener
• Possibly redo bridge flattener to not squeeze so much

I have a few more contributers who look like they're gonna come through on some stuff so even more variety is in the works. Thanks guys!

Little better teaser....hopefully....

Did a quick "Plop the head rig on the body and see what happens" exercise. Played around with changing the body for about 30 minutes and got these.

• Worked on the head hierarchy to figure out easiest way of plopping his head on rigs (my own included) and that's about good to go
• Just plopping it on works but I think skinning it in partially is gonna get better results
• Been polishing on the body morphs and figuring out how I wanna split em up still.
• Still need some new skin textures. Think one of the contributers is workin on it so hopefully I can get that rolled in next week.
• Wushu-Rick found a bug in the facial customization that I knocked out. Apparently rotating the eye orb as well scaling and translating it is desired. Whoda thunk?
• Started working on the FAQs for release (speaking of, keep sending em!)

Back to figuring out how to split these morphs up...

Also.

Houston is still too muggy for it's own good. It's muggyness should be mugged.

Geo Customization Pass Dos...

Spent another day finaling up Morphy's face. Threw some of the range of motion poses on him to make sure things were working on that front....

• Worked on keeping hair line intact during deformation
• More weighting work
• So, for the most part, the facial customization geo works fine when the face is deformed. However, when you're workin with it and get a look you like, you may want to freeze the deformed hair and reskin it to have more control over the firmness of portions of it.
• Added chin deformation control
• Setup customization toggles. If I get any good submissions geometry wise I'll add em but for now I'm done making new ones.
• Friends and contributers can expect probably the last facial beta rig in their mailboxes later this evening.
• Tomorrow, I plan on working to final up the body morphs and start splitting those up and setting up their respective morph based deformation controls.

Ran across some really neat stuff recently on the internets:

• There's been a neat Disney motion blur vid making the rounds and this is an interesting take I'd not seen before. (hat tip to Spungella)
  
  
• Some great Glen Keane art
• Another great post by Cameron Fielding on the imperfection or reality in terms of motion
• I found this film absolutely mesmerizing. I think it has something to do with the seasons, but whatever...visually stunning. Please watch it full screen.

Geo Customization Pass 1....

So yesterday was pretty much a wash with errands but today I was able to buckle down and get some good Morphy progress kickin.


Updates...

• Created 4 Men's hair styles and 2 Womens (I suck at modeling women's hair so please make something better if you can)
• Mustache, beard, soul patch added as well
• Need to solve how to keep the hair line with the ear during deformation (got a pretty good idea how to do this, just need to implement)
• Added teeth controls as per Kung Fu Rick's request (translation,scale, rotation)
• Also set up hierarchy so you can easily throw new teeth in and they'll work with the controls. Create some, toss em in the respective groups and you're all set. Ears should be the same (should memory serve...so I prolly should check that)
• Removed Chin and upper nose deformation joints as they weren't doing a whole lot
• Plan on adding some more chin morph options to get some more feminine stuff
• Thinking I need a thin and thicker eyebrow as well.
• Did some testing with the the picker script and I think I'm gonna keep it in though folks will have to install a script if they want that stuff to work. It adds a good bit and it isn't that much of a hassle
• Did some more weighting polish on the deformation facial joints. Still more to do but it's getting close.

Still waiting for geometry submission, peeps. I know a bunch of folks downloaded the Morphster so....if Morphy comes out and doesn't have the afro you wanted, I don't wanna hear squat about it. :)

Really shooting to have the intitial full rig ready for animation tests by late this week early next week as I have a gig I'm supposed to be starting before too long and even if I can't start my own animation tests, I'd like to have some testers doing it to find bugs.

An open letter to the creators of the Antivar Virus

Dear makers of the Antivar Virus,

Bravo.

I'm a very careful web user and you've successfully infected my computer twice now - my only infections in the last 12+ years of computer work. Still trying to figure out how you did it. You've successfully stolen several days of my working time with my own scanning and removal work for my computer and for that of some friends whom you've infected as well and aren't quite as tech minded.

I have to admit, you've put together quite an nice package - locking off access to the good stuff and blaring warnings signs that would certainly make my mom click it. Especially clever in mimicking a real product. I never click anything which makes my infections especially curious to me.

It's puzzling to me why you would spend your obviously talented minds and skill sets on a product that might land you in prison when you most certainly could be creating something useful to folks that they would freely pay for.

It just doesn't make sense to me why you'd spend so much time and effort which would likely get you punched in the face if you happened to share what you did at  local bar with someone you've infected when you might get a beer bought for you should you create something that very person might need and want.

I had hoped to work some on Morphy today but I guess it'll have to wait.

Knowing this is a pointless exercise,
-Josh

p.s. Should anyone else have problems with said infection - Here are instructions for removal.

Morphy Body Open Beta!

Well, Morphy is coming a long slowly and surely and is getting pretty close to being primetime ready. The reason I'm releasing the body in beta is a couple of reasons. I'd really like to release the first wide release with quite a few options in customizing the character mesh wise. So this is another call for help with that. My hope is that Morphy becomes somewhat of an Open Source community asset that people customize and share their customizations.

Download here! 

Notes on Beta rig (Maya 2009 and up):

• There are some quick poses in the scene I was playing with while weighting stuff
• The rig is based off of John Doublestein's rig because frankly it's a sweet rig with right click follow, switching and parenting menus AND pinable elbows! Try em out.
• There are quick select sets (my preferred workflow method) for the controls
• The Body morphing joystick control is temp while I'm playing with body morphing. The real release will have things split up more like I have the facial morphing stuff
• Hand scaling is on the palm looking controls. Currently it's a nonkeyable attribute but I think I'll probably switch that over.
• There's a semi height scaler on the all_anim control, but it's a pretty solid hack job. Version 2.0 of Mophy is gonna do more than I have the time to get done at present. I'd kinda like to animate him too as that's why I made him:)
• I'm playing with a couple of picking methods. I tend to use quick select sets but have used panel pickers and onscreen ones as well. Any preference there?
• If you toggle his mesh to a "3" smoothing manually, it get's a little wonky sometimes when popping through frames. Anyone have an idea why that happens?
• Why did I bail on rigging him completely from scratch? There's so much stuff I wanted to do that you'd be seeing version 1.0 sometime about 2012. I'll get to it when I can:)
• Give me his face rig, Burton! If I did that, would you be so inclined to help? :)

I'm interested in in:

• Geometry. Please look at my previous call for more information there.
• Clothes
• Textures - If you like painting freckles and skin, go to town. The face is fully UV'd
• Wrinkle map help - If anyone out there has done wrinkle maps and interested in this project I'd love some assistance. I know I can figure it out and it's on the list, but the list is still pretty long and I'm not ashamed to ask for help:)
• Facial stuff - beards, mustaches, other eyebrows, hair dos, glasses, etc. His head (sans facial rig is in this version so you should have all you need there)
• Teeth - Something feminine would be great. (Aaron, I'm looking at you;)
• Bodymophs - if you think mine suck or have new ideas, have at it. You can fine the necessary stuff under the bsGeo_grp. bodyBridge_bsGeo1 is there as a reseter mesh. I use abSymMesh for help when doing that stuff.
• Information.
• Questions - for FAQ's and for clearing things up, most folk don't think like me (and that's a good thing) so my rationale for placing a control somewhere might not be exactly apparent.
• Bugs
• Weighting issues

Please title emails to me (see contact page - remove spaces) with a subject line of  "I heard Morphy's Call!" so I can easily find them:)

What do you get for helping (should your asset be usable)?

• Early access to the release rig to animate tests with (as I'll be looking for those as well as most of my time will be trying to finish up the rig here and my animation time will we light). I expect to have a full beta rig ready in the next week.
• Your name and a link on the Morphy page when I get around to updating it.