Realistic Animations&Deformations

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi there people!
As there is no introduction thread and this is my first thread to start, I’d also like to take the time and introduce myself: I am a student of Games Engineering, so most of the time I do programming tasks like GameLogic (AI, UI, Interfaces, etc), but in my spare time I’m more of an artist. Coming from 2D, both traditional and digital art, I discovered Blender over a year ago and started using it along with DAZ3D and 3DsMax (for those who don’t know: There is a free student version for 3ds Max). However, I decided to stick with Blender. Maybe I will talk about that in another thread :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, let’s jump to the topic:
After watching tons of educational videos, I decided to jump into it and started with modelling and simple animations in Blender. Everything was fine, until I started doing animations like a Roundhouse Kick. First of all, there are almost no reference videos for that, so I actually had to practice one myself, and then the real fun started: All those joint deformations made the model look like it wasn’t even remotely human. I went with shape keys for specific joints, ending up with 26 shape keys for arms, shoulders, hips, legs, knees, etc. but I discovered that while the limbs in the human body influence each other (like a two way relationship), this was not the case in my model and those shape keys did not play together very well, and I ended up, adding specific shape keys for the animations. Now I have over 40 shape keys and I haven’t even started doing facial animations (which I probably won’t, because the model will be exported into Unity and it will be a compromise of realism and performance), and it just doesn’t seem right. My armature is so cluttered with bones, at times I can’t even see the pose itself :confused:

Is there a way around it? I have seen so called “muscle systems” for Blender, but one of them is essentially 10 times the amount of bones, and more bones is something I really can’t have :smiley:

cheers,
Animal

2

With smart topology and good bone placement you can keep the joints somewhat clear, but if you need to simulate muscle movement on the cheap you can use constraints to place a bone near the muscle groups and abuse a transform to “fake-it”. I won’t lie the addons and other higher end systems that people are coming up with will most likely work far better.

You will need to rebake all the animations in blender (or another 3d software) if you intend to port this to a game engine, And my advice is to go easy with it. You will need to up your weight painting and topology game to the next level to pull this off.

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=46030

3

Well, unity supports shape keys used in blender, so blender animations work properly in unity with very little work … unlike 3ds max for example :stuck_out_tongue:

4

That is good, I’ve had good luck with getting blender shapekeys into UE4 as well, although setting up the rig and exporter so it did not add an extra bone and the joint rotations where all set properly was a pita.