I got a lil' question.....

[FIREGIRL]

I currently use Lightwave 7.5. Now I was wondering whether this version or any other newer version of Lightwave has something such as morph maps for bone rotations; I'll try to describe:

When you choose a bone in the schematics (say an arm bone) and rotate that bone, the weight map of the arm's polygons also go along with that bone. However, the user has no control over the specific design of the look of the arm's muscles at its new rotational position. My question is, if there is a technique or a tool in the current Lightwave versions that would enable the user to specifically shape the muscle flex (morph maps) to specific bone rotations :question:

I tried using set driven keys, although I have had problems implementing it into the description above. I appreciate any help and thanks.

Rachel.

[Wade]

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/animation/smart-skin/index.html

A place to start

[Tiger]

Hi Rachel! I found this:
http://www.lwhub.com/musclebones/index.html

...and more links are here:
http://members.shaw.ca/LightWavetutorials/character_anime.htm#Bones

http://support.3dtrainingonline.com/mod/wiki/view.php?id=46&userid=0&groupid=0&wikipage=PageIndex

I wish you good luck!
/Tiger

[toby]

JointMorph would be the simple solution, you'll find it in the same list as Morph Mixer. Create a morph of the muscle bulge/tension, and set JointMorph to activate it. The only drawback being that it's the standard 'linear' morph -

[FIREGIRL]

Aight Wade and Tiger, I'll check out those links asap. Oh and Toby, the problem wid Joint Morph is that it doesn't give the user the ability to use specific expressions and it kinda forces one to rely heavily on joint compensation. Although I like Joint Morph for its speed because one doesn't need to switch back to Modeller, it is because modelling specific morphs for bone rotations themselves that I gotta rely on Modeller in my case.

So I'm thinking more along the lines of actually defining the muscle shapes themselves with specific expression. I believe I saw something in those links above that had "smart skinning" with expressions. Hopefully that could be the solution I'm looking for. Anyways, thanks again everyone for the help. 'Tis much appreciated and I'll see what I can do.


Cya, Rachel :)

[munky]

Hi there,

you might want to check out Pawel Olas's Smartmorph plugin and it's driven key option. You can download a demo. Also some example scenes.
www.polas.net

It's a very useful plugin.

regards

paul