go and skin/rig/wheight a raw 3D scan mesh directly to bones.
What would be a typical scenario for this? The point count is adjustable
(at the expense of detail),
but the topology will aways be a mess unless properly retopo-ed, wouldn't
it?
I agree to the rigging paradigm needing some rethinking. I grew up with
black box systems like Character Studio and CAT. Creating a rig based on
those takes only minutes to hours, not days, but they lack
customizability. Yet, results were good enough that I was constantly
asking myself as to why anyone could possible want to use anything else
for 90% of the work you see being produced anywhere. It's such a huge cost
factor, both in terms of time it takes to create the rig and time it takes
to trouble shoot and maintain it if it breaks (which the black box systems
next to never do) or needs extensions. Autoriggers (Gear etc) reduce the
creation time factor at the expense of flexibility, yet the maintenance
aspect stays to a certain degree. What I also miss in them is the ability
to have a mesh enveloped to joints and just "put the rig on top", allowing
to test deformations directly by posing the envelope rig without having to
create a control rig - a given with the black box systems because the
control rig _is_ the envelope rig. The only thing I know that works in a
similar way is Motion Builder, in that you import your enveloped mesh and
joints and apply rigging solvers to it, again at the expense of
flexibility - it only supports humanoid and 4-legged creatures.
Fabric/Osirirs looks like it could deliver such a paradigm change - a
modular rigging system where the building blocks are encapsulated and the
asset that the user interacts with in the scene is light-weight, fast and
easy to manipulate, and hard to break. I'm really looking forward to that,
even though flexibility beyond a certain point will probably need to be
paid for with programming knowledge and -time again.
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 <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> 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 :).
--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at [email protected]
-- This email and its attachments are --
--confidential and for the recipient only--
