Basically the guy took 24 minutes to explain a 2 minute concept. The main point is Modo can define the order in which deformers are evaluated to solve envelope weights, and envelope weights are assigned using 'weight containers' which are logical assignments of points to deformers. A different kind of weight map.
The example shows an arm enveloped over 2 bones (3 joints). In Softimage you'd normally place the bones into a hierarchy and assign the weights to the joints. as you rotate the shoulder, the elbow and wrist would tag along for the ride via inheritance of the shoulder's transformation. If you rotate the elbow, the shoulder is unaffected, but the wrist moves because it inherit's the elbow's transformation. The point being the deformer has to reside in the location of the envelope deformation, and this can be inconvenient for thinking/viewing certain problems such as wanting to only rotate a deformer by a few degrees. in the case of the elbow, it may already be rotated to some arbitrary angle making adding/subtracting a few degrees difficult to visualize. In Modo, the weights were assigned to the individual bones via 'weight containers' (their version of a weight map), but the bones were not placed into a hiearchy. they were scattered about wherever was convenient. This allowed the artist to work with the deformations in the local space of the deformer so if he wanted to say, limit envelope deformations to rotations of 10 degrees or less, the artist could easily see a 10 degree rotation and work with the deformer weights. think of it as compensation mode for vertices of an envelope. You apply the envelope to the defomers, but you can then offset the vertices where you want and maintain that relationship as metadata in the weight container. This allows the envelope to deform as desired, but not require the bones to be moving around with the envelope. Personally I don't find that useful in the general case, but maybe in a few rare niche cases it might have some benefit. The part I take issue with is not having bones in their usual places will make it difficult for animators to judge how the character is moving when adjusting keys. After all, you don't generally envelope a rig unless it's expected to be animated, so why disassociate the bones from the animator's perspective? The part of greater interest was pre-evaluation and post-evaluation events which gives the artist the opportunity to further modify the resulting deformation as each deformer is evaluated. The example given was not very good as it could be easily replicated using linked parameters to drive a lattice or some other easy control, but in more complex cases could be useful for sculpting the envelope deformation in very specific ways. You can replicate most of it in softimage using a different strategy than is typically used, but some of the more advanced stuff, such as compensation, would require a custom envelope operator or ICE. Matt ________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Steven Caron [car...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, April 12, 2013 6:53 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Modo's Deformation (Weight Containers) i want to watch it, but the speed is killing me... anyone care to summarize the feature(s)? On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Marco Peixoto <mpe...@gmail.com<mailto:mpe...@gmail.com>> wrote: This seems really interesting and a new way of dealing with Envelope Weights: http://vimeo.com/63720234
