Hi We use Species here for ease and speed. So the head and jaw have their deformers, and the facial expressions are done through Shapes on a FaceRig panel. For some time now the animator wants some additional Facial controls so he isn't restricted by the range of the shapes. And he wants something that does not turn into a cumbersome task given the revisions/iterations over an asset. I'm fairly new to Softimage and these were the approaches I went about:
Doritos I had it setup, just one thing that is dragging the process; Envelopes are generated by distance but there's always normalization. So if I want them to just have a straight spherical falloff into black I can't. Or even to falloff into another dummy null weight, I can't. So I had to paint, around the ears, on the top of the head and sides, neck, etc. I was trying to minimize paitings so iterations on a model's rig can be faster. I could put an inplicit per Derformer set on Bounding Volume > Limit. But it's an abrupt cut off. Deform by Spine Creates the falloff I want from the curve. I like the "drawn" deformations it does on mouth and eyes. I do an operator per curve, since the combined weights of several curves seems wonky. The downside seems to be that I can't transfer them with GATOR. How would you come about to transfer Deform by Spine between objects to save time? General Concerns. I come from Lightwave and Envelopes to me seem to be like a box of weights that are usually normalized. I see that deformers like Cage, Spine also generate such box of weights, but they don't seem to be handled as envelopes. How flexible and manipulated can be weights and the underlying connections of Softimage between the mesh object, the weight, the control null and the deforming operator?? Seems to me that such weights don't exist without the deformers. This Image<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/143766132/Forums/SI-Community/WeightMapsDeform.png>illustrates what I'me trying to do. Cheers probiner
