About skelegons

[allankiipli]

Hello LW community and Newtek! I like to tell about how modo and lw work together in creating characters in 3d. In modo there is Solid Sketch Tool. This was introduced long ago and was up to version 401 sp5 functional in terms of symmetry. Then something was screwed up, so that drawing palms became difficult. This is my experience also in mac and windows the same way. I wrote a punch of scripts that tracked the automatically generated polyparts that were generated along limbs. Solid Sketch Tool is a very nice and flexible addition in modeling process and i thought it is good to use this as a starting point in weighting and rigging. The rigging and animation in modo is also fully possible and very responsive. Only thing that is missing is the smoothness in weights. There is only so to say rigid binding, when expressed in Maya terms. This can be overcome through use of morph maps, that can be driven...
But my point is. That even if you dont use scripts to bind and weight in modo, you can save Solid Sketch object to lwo format and convert the SS lines into skelegons. This gives also a good starting point. Of course then it comes to the da vinci poses and such. But if you use technigue described above, you can intersect limbs, and no crossweighting, everything flows along limbs like in Zbrush with ZSpheres.

Now a threat to the already exsisting paradise is that developers overlook essentials and screw up features, that were introduced with care and thought. For example when converted to skelegons, these solid sketch lines arrange into hierarchy in a specific manner, so that you can assign generated weights automatically. Later you can export from LW 10 to FBX format and it opens up in a animation program like Maya.

This to the starters: The scripts i was talking about are found:
http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Perlscripts/RigSolidSketchGeometryWithLevelTwo.zip

http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Perlscripts/RigSolidSketchArmatures.zip

http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Perlscripts/DynamicParent.zip

http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Perlscripts/DynamicParent_SolidSketchGeometry_With_LevelTwoblo cktips.txt

(which is lux macro (replace txt with LXM))

And in Modeler extract and modify Lscript part from

http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Perlscripts/AssignSSNodePartsForSkelegons.html

:agree:

[allankiipli]

In Modo after macro run and posing

http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Images/Modo_SS_Figure_Rigged.PNG

same in Lightwave

http://www.summel.com/Modo3d/Images/Newtek_SS_Figure_Rigged.PNG

To the Modeler: after converting last layers lines to skelegons and renaming first bone Root,
and weight assigning in Layout with script, you may delete double SS lines from mesh object,
to get rid of these lines.

[lightmann]

interesting to know, thanks for the links