Hi everyone, I’m having a bit of an issue with migrating an stablished workflow at the studio to blender, to simplify our Rigs we animate and Cache the animation, after that we sculpt on animated shape keys to do the extra deformations, the issue I’m having is that I’m not finding a way to do this, I’ve tried looking for a “live” shape key to get the frame by frame animation from the cache and sculpt over that, and this does not seems to exist.
We’ve also tried what should be the simplest way, through the stack, getting the cached files and then stacking a multi-res modifier on top, but this also seems to not be possible.
I realize you can do it on top of the skinned mesh, but this is not a good practice, not only you can´t combine meshes this way and have the safety and speed of a cached file, is also bad for compatimentalizing tasks at the studio and work collaboratively, it also works poorly if you have some kind of corrective smooth over your armature.
Also, modifying deformations after caching dynamics is problematic this way.
Please, can anyone point me in the right direction with this?
I am not sure I fully understand exactly what you have done before and what you mean by “live shape keys”.
I do know that if you cache your files as LightWave Point Cache .mdd files and import (file menu import not modifier) on the mesh that it comes in as sequential keyframed shape keys. And they can be edited frame by frame in edit mode by cycling through with the arrow key in the shape key panel. Or alternatively you can cycle through as well as play the animation of the edit button is on.
Hi Richard, Thanks so much for your response, we’re getting a workflow with Mdds, the most solid one we’ve found is with Mdd cache and a clean action on top in the NLA editor, then we create new shape keys and filter them with k* so we don’t see the mdd ones anymore.
for anyone that wants to know what this workflow looks like, it’s the same principle that Chronosculpt uses.
What I mean with “live shape keys” are keys that evaluate their data constantly from a source target, on Houdini and Max you evaluate a stack of data that represents the geometry in one way or another, on the stack you can use a Morphing node to Morphs this points and keep stacking deformations on top of the morph. This morph can be “live”, so it takes the current state of the target (targets) and keeps applying the modifications on top of the deforming morphed mesh procedurally, this is really useful for a lot of things like facial rigging, where you car do separate rigs of mouth, eyes, nose, face, and then stack these over a rigged mesh, making a more complex Macro Rig.
Blender goes more on the way of Modo, which is not better or worse, it’s just different. On a side note, I don’t know if blender does what Modo can do with it’s morphs, Modo stores morphs as weight maps, and then can couple them with several set ups, like if you rigg the mouth in two positions you could use the same corrective Morph. I think this should be possible.
The Blender Workflow looks very promissing, and what blender lacks in proceduralism it makes up in artistic tools, thanks so much for the pointer.
Hey Richard, Thanks so much!, i had glazed over animation nodes and it looked fantastic, but because we use houdini for non character work we never really gave it too much attention, I’m definetly going to explore it a bit more now!