Hey Guillaume, go and skin/rig/wheight a raw 3D scan mesh directly to bones.
Look at what comes in terms of animation and skeleton recognition in the xbox kinect sdk and the xbox one. Cheers, tim On 09.01.2014 13:09, Guillaume Laforge wrote:
I didn't read every posts so maybe my understanding is wrong but based in last replies from Luc-Eric and Tim Leydecker, it sounds like point cloud scanning is a rigging feature. It is not, so lets return to the subject please :). That illustrate well that it is much more easy to put money on new techs (like point cloud scanning, web based applications, etc...) than to think about how to improve/re-design an existing workflow like character rigging ! We saw some new systems in modeling (ZBrush etc...) and rendering (Katana) some years ago, but still nothing in the rigging area. It make sense as rigging is really a different culture. You need to be a good character rigger to understand and build a good rigging system. But being a good character rigger means spend a lot of time on existing tools like Maya or XSI. At the end you think only through the proposed tools of your app. If you are a developer interested in designing a rigging system, it is the opposite problem, you can have a fresh new vision but you can miss important concepts of character rigging in your tool. Interesting subject, if you forget about Maya and XSI :) Cheers, Guillaume Laforge On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 4:18 AM, Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de <mailto:bauero...@gmx.de>> wrote: Autodesk is doing a lot of development in the area of 3D scan data handling. If you look into what is going on in the area of topology data aquisition for architecture, engineering and the military, there is a shift towards 3D pointcloud data which imho is compareable to what 2D tracking as a concept brought us in the 90s. (Facial recognition and finally image based modeling and camera positional data) It is at hand that the more complex, raw 3D point cloud data will need new and abstracted ways of handling and manipulation, filtering options and adaptive control layers for approximated data. The implication such data for 3D animation brings is that the concept of wheighting a fixed number of vertices to a bone may have to be extended beyond a fixed number of polygons. Unfortunately, taking fall-off based volume wheighting as in it´s current level of finesse may give worse results than before, especially if your shape options for the influence volume are limited to capsules, boxes or spheres. I am a bit worried that the process of rigging&wheighting an organic character will become even more frustrating and stiff or at least will need even more steps, like creating an extra controlsurface with a fixed number of points and wrapping it around the high-density data. Such a wrap-deformer takes away control. It´s always the rims and little caveats that need extra care. Cheers, tim On 09.01.2014 02:13, Guillaume Laforge wrote: On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:55 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <luceri...@gmail.com <mailto:luceri...@gmail.com> <mailto:luceri...@gmail.com <mailto:luceri...@gmail.com>>> wrote: In the new future ( not talking about autodesk here) I think workflows will standards will be Gator-like tools to deal with topo changes (point clouds tools as necessary also ptex-based workflows) and katana-like proceduralism for render passes-like workflow. I'm still wondering if a company ( not talking about Autodesk here ) will do anything new like that for our little world. Money for such large dev projects is just not in the animation/vfx world anymore. I'm not sarcastic, just realist. So lets embrace old techs like Maya or XSI. They won't evolve too much but won't disappear before many (many) years. Btw, Katana is not the futur, it is now :).
