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Sunday, August 22, 2010

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

10 comments:

Animetrik said...

Hi Josh, what a cool news you have. I start download it and i am very happy to make a comment first. Paid works always comes first :) Keep up your wonderfull workflow and news i will look ar your rig and try to do some animations. Take care...

Animetrik said...

I looked all documents and tweak all controls it seems perfect. It is really an amazing work. As soon as posible i make my own character and animate a walk cycle. You make an incredible work Josh. Thanks million times ;)

BHAVIN JOSHI said...

Hey Josh, amazing rig!!! I was wondering about the jaw and eyebrow controls and now really waiting for the final product... Facial and Body GUI will make icing on cake. This rig will stand equal to the one with animation mentor. Thanks a lot!!!!

Unknown said...

Thanks Ugur. Can't wait to see what you do:)

Bravin, glad you're likin how it's comin together. The facial rig I've held off on releasing open beta for a couple of reasons - 1) to entice more contributers and 2) cause I still got a good bit I wanna fix before everyone sees it. First impressions you know:)

Mary said...

. . . and female animators around the world rejoice!!!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Thank you for making the female hips and breasts separately customizable.

Mary said...

I agree with Bhavin that it stands up to Bishop.

Lindsey said...

I've been playing around with the rig a bit and I love it! :) Great work.

Would it be possible to add some sort of eyelash on the eyes that can be toggled on and off? Maybe something simple like the eyelashes on this rig http://vimeo.com/11102168

This will help make the female face morphs a bit more feminine :)

Just a thought!

Unknown said...

Thanks Mary, glad you like it:)

Lindsey, thanks! On the eyelashes, (nice piece of animation you linked to there), it looks like texture lashes there and if so that is currently doable. I was actually playing with some new skin textures last night and some of em definitely look more feminine. I'll try to do a work up and see if it works. Geo would be doable as well, I'm just not sure how folks do em. You're welcome to give it a go and if you find something you like I'll be happy to roll it in for you. Just make some temps, skin em to the lid joints there, copy the skin weights from the head mesh to your new lid mesh and see what it looks like. If that sounds too complicated I'll just add it to the pile and get to it when I can:)

Lindsey said...

Cool! Texture lashes sound like they'd work great and be a lot easier! I might try experimenting with some geo lashes, but I'm not very good at that kind of stuff, so I doubt I'll achieve anything usable, haha :) We'll see I guess! Thanks for the response.

Haripal Singh said...

Its looking awesome, nice reply to the Bishop 2_______but I have a problem, I didnt get the individual lip controls, please help me____

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