How can I avoid this with the mesh deform modifier?
with precision set to 7 it looks way better of course, but it takes forever to bind, and for testing purposes it is very far from ideal, almost unusable.
The rig only influences the deform cage, not the character mesh, as I think how it should be.
By the way Blender crashes when adding the ‘dynamic’ option to the binding. Anyone else with this problem? (using 2.6.1)
grtz,
Bart
Well, apparently it is an issue with Blender, not with the model… Re-binding JP-Bouza’s blenrig on gilgamesh showed exactly the same problem with precision 5. I don’t think it can be solved if the Master of Rigging has the same issues… I guess my working hours will only get longer…
thanks for reading anyway, if you’ve read it… perhaps it triggers some developer to work on it… :-p
Grtz,
Bart
Interesting, I remember the same problem back in 2.49. It seemed to improve with re-binding! IIRC part of the problem was a cage too close to the mesh as even a single vert penetrating the cage caused all sorts of nastiness.
As you can see in the image, the cage is hardly too close to the mesh… Blenrig’s cage is way closer to the mesh then in my example here.
Anyways… I continue building my deformation rig, studying the constraints to automate some deformation bones, and weightpainting the cage. I do think I’ll have to re-model some of the character too, but it’s a step by step process :-).
Forcing myself to take time for this, I might have found some sort of a solution for the deformation problem: split up your deform cage in several cages… so far it seems to work. Perhaps someone else is helped with this too… 
@Bartje: I was wondering… did you ever hear back from anyone about this issue? Because, IMHO, it makes the mesh deform pretty useless.
Also, what do you mean by splitting the deform cage up into several cages? DO you have an image that shows that?
MarkJoel60: No, I haven’t heard anything back, and sadly enough it is not on the developers ‘to do’ list as far as I know.
It’s not useless though, shoulderdeformation has been made way easier that way.
The documentation clearly says that the entire mesh must be inside the deform cage, but in my experiment, I simply split the deform cage at the loop just above the ellbow, seperated it, and then used that one as a second deform cage for the rest of the arm. The vertices of the point where they were seperated do have to remain on the exact same spot, as if they are connected to the mesh it comes from. Strangely enough, it did work… even though obviously not the entire mesh is inside that second deform cage. I did close both meshes.
Then again, I did not use that technique, since it’s about the upper arm. The hand needs to be excluded from the influence of the deform cage anyway. I now exclude that part of the arm, together with the hand from the influence of the deform cage by a vertice group, and deform it with the usual weightpainting tools. It is quite a task, making the weightpainting of the character at the arm match the weightpainting of the deform-cage.
And because I didn’t experiment any further… I of course have no images of it… I hope my explanation helped.
Yep. I understand. But it is definitely a limitation of the mesh deform. I guess its OK for keeping clothes or fur looking OK, but using it for bipeds is severely limited. Strangely this seems to be something wrong with the new builds, because I don’t think the older version squashed like that. Seems like a bug to me.