I want to deform a part of a symmetrical humanoid mesh using a lattice. What’s the best way to do this? I’ve been trying to achieve this using the lattice modifier in combination with the mirror modifier, but not quite reached the result I wanted.
At first, I tried going with the lattice modifier before the mirror modifier. But there’s a problem with that. The vertices of the mesh at center x will move away from center position (they may move left or right of center depending on what you’re doing). One might argue that’s not an issue if you enable clipping in the mirror modifier, but even with clipping enabled, the vertices can still move away from center x, creating holes in the mesh.
I thought maybe adding the lattice modifier after the mirror modifier might be a good idea then. So I did that, and was thus also forced to increase the size of the lattice to cover both left and right side. Doing this and making use of scaling to move the vertices of the lattice (at both sides), it’s my opinion the result got a lot better. But there’s a problem with this too. If I want to rotate the vertices of the lattice, then how do I do that at both sides? i.e., if I rotate some lattice vertices at the left side clockwise, I would like the corresponding vertices on the right side to rotate counter clockwise. If I select the vertices I want to rotate, they will all rotate the same way.
Also, it feels stupid working with both sides at the same time. Just working with one side would be a lot nicer.
Perhaps I’m approching this the wrong way entirely. Any advice is most welcome.
Thanks, I think this solves it. By having a mirror modifier on the cage, I can just edit one side and the changes will take affect on the other side as well.
Just have to experiment a little bit with what these settings actually do (mainly the precision setting of the MeshDeform modifier).
How do you see through the deformer object without also seeing through the deformee object? Because I thought I would give the meshdeform a try and I spent an hour or so making the deformer object and trying to solve the afforementioned problem, but with no success, so I gave up and added a couple more lattice modifiers to the stack.
How do you see through the deformer object without also seeing through the deformee object?
Set the deformer object to wire display or for the deforming object select X-ray or go into wireframe view
You are using 2.5x in that picture. I am not yet able to use that version properly. I would like to, because it seems to have alot of cool features, but I already know how to use 2.49b properly, and 2.5x is giving me alot of weird, strange behaviour.
I tried it again, this time by deleting faces only. It took me 2 hours to setup the perfect cage, but no matter what I do, how I set it up or how I deform the mesh cage, there is absolutely no affect on the target.
Guy, I am not so stupid that it never occured to me. In fact, I tried a ton of different things, nothing worked. I am thinking that it is because my cage had no faces. I think I remember getting a very simple deform cage to affect a mesh, but that was a long time ago, and it was by accident. I have made three serious attempts, and I spent an hour longer on each one. I made a third attempt that ended just a few moments ago, and I am sure it would have worked, but as I approached the 3 hour mark, I realized that I still had to align this very complex deform cage (to the target object, with an offset) in yet another axis, and so I put it aside for now. I will just finish what I need to do with lattice modifiers. Maybe I will try meshdeform modifier in a different project. Don’t ask me why I don’t test a less complex version of the cage before I finish it in detail – all I will say is that I have been awake for almost 30 hours and I have too many stimulants in my system, and so my brain is just not working very well.
Why not just attach your blend so other users can see what you are trying to do rather than having to imagine what only you know. Or is that too stupid a thing to do ? If you don’t want help just say so and I can go and do something more useful.
Because I have given up on it for the moment. And besides, I am almost certain that the second attempt failed because the cage had no faces. If you want, I can test my third cage very briefly. Just give me a second and I will update this post.
EDIT: Nevermind, I guess I saved over the file. But I tested the modifier with a simple subdivided box as the cage and it worked like I thought it would.
So, now we know that a meshdeform cage must have faces.
