I really love the effects of the Corrective Smooth modifier on rigged characters, but there is one tiny problem: it also smoothes out the corrective / detail shape keys, some of which I don’t want to be smoothed.
I know I can mitigate the effect using vertex groups but it’s not optimal. It may sound naïve but is there any way to either make the shape displace the vertices after the Corrective Smooth took effect (like it would be under it in the modifier stack), or turn the whole shape key into some kind of displace modifier via geo nodes or something like that so I could literally place it at the bottom of the modifier stack ? Would it even resolve my initial issue ?
It’d be so cool if it were possible, I could maybe also use it with a multires.
The only way I thought of (but didn’t test yet) is bake a height map out of the shape key and use it in a Displace modifier but I’m not sure about it, especially since it would mean a map per shape key.
Just thinking out loud here, as I’ve not tested/tried it, but doesn’t creating the shape key in sculpt mode mean one is basically making it based on the current corrective smooth look (along with any other modifiers/deformed mesh).
So any detail in the shape key should remain whatever you sculpt it to, tho I guess the mesh density may have a bit of an impact on that, possible you may need a couple more edge loops around the area you are shape keying.
That’s what I initially thought too, but it turns out it doesn’t work that way. Shape key deformation seems to come after the smoothing. I tried playing with the bind coord setting but it doesn’t cut it for corrective shape keys that are used dynamically, it messes the mesh up when the shape key value is lowered.
Unless there is a setting in the modifier that I missed/did not understand correctly?
Preserves most of the shape keys details, but this is intended behavior- corrective smooth is designed to smooth a posed mesh, and a pose includes shape keys.
If you want a non-posed smooth, use the Smooth modifier instead:
You can try creating a geometry node graph to do the morphing (instead of shapekeys) that is added after the corrective smooth modifier. You will need to have the shapekeys as real objects as the morph targets. This would be a complex setup to do since you need to morph it on top of the deformed geometry. However there could be additional ways to ease the setup depending on if you have finalized animation or not.
Alas it doesn’t suffice, especially for tiny deformations
Corrective smooth can ignore any deformation that comes after it though, and the simple smooth doesn’t really fit my needs either
With a shrinkwrap modifier on a spiky sphere for example, when placed after it, details are kept :
You mean I’d have to make a copy of the character with the shape key applied for each and every key ? That could be a solution, yes ! I’m just a little bit worried about overall perfomance and file size
Could it work with the upper levels of the multires modifier, too ? That’d be top-notch
Because the details from the original sculpt of the model are stored in the multires. Can’t do that nor sculpt additional details with a simple subdivision modifier. If you don’t need details then yes, it could be useless in that case
I’m still figuring the whole process out for models that are not game assets, for now I’ve not encountered problems with the multires (I turn it off when animating), I’d planned to only bake the fine details of the highest levels
The way I do things will probably change with the experience anyway
