Finer character editing in C4D??

[djembeplay]

Hey again everyone...

Yup... me again... Mr. Full of Questions.

I recently dipped into full character animation. I completed a short film yesterday and the animation came out great... but it led me to wonder this:

How can finer details of a body be edited? Lets say, for example, I want the shoulder muscles of a character to ripple out when the shoulders are brought backwards. The 'Muscles' tool is too general for the specific shape of the muscles.

It seems you could do it using the Morph tag BUT... my character is a relatively simple mesh sitting under a HyperNurbs. You cannot edit points of a HyperNurbs object, only the points of the original polygon mesh lying underneath... sooo would the only way be to subdivide that region and edit it with a morph tag?

Now, I know that I can be creative with bump painting to get face wrinkles, veins, etc... but I don't see how this would work for something like wrinkles around the eyes that ONLY form when the character is smiling.

I guess I could blend the opacity of the texture in sync with the character smiling... but, that seems really... really tedious. There must be another way, right?

I don't know... how do you guys do it?

 

[TowerFan]

One way I'd do something like apply wrinkles while the character smiles is use expressions. For example, if you have a morph for a smile, and a displacement map for the wrinkles, you can say for every X% of morph applied, apply Y% of the displacement map.

Never used a muscle system like you describe but you could use a similar technique for muscle morphing. Say you bend a joint. Use an expression to apply X% of the morph for every degree of rotation on the joint.

 

[djembeplay]

That sounds like a good method.

To create an expression you would use Xpresso in C4D, right? Or is there another way that you know of?

 

[TowerFan]

I'm not a C4D user, I use LightWave, so I can't help you with the details. The theory should apply though.

 

[djembeplay]

Cool, thanks man.

I looked into it a bit more.... like anything I suppose, there are many ways to go about this. One cool one I saw was via a vertex map shader - it would contain information about what polys are compressed and when. You can use this map as a layer mask to any image you wish (such as a wrinkly texture) which could be applied to a bump or displacement channel.

I have yet to actually try it though...

 

[triplej96]

Hello, I don't have any answers for your CA questions but some people swear by these CA plugins for C4D

 

[djembeplay]

howdy triple-

Thanks for the tip. I've actually read a little about Cactus Dan before. It sounds like a great toolset. I read that the new Joints system in C4D is so good compared to the old system that many people find Cactus Dan to not be much of an improvement now.

Ok, I have another question now... maybe deserving of a new thread.

How do you animate floppy things on a character? For example, the ears of an elephant that would flop around but also collide with the elephant body as well. The Jiggle tool is nice, but no collision detection... I'm not really sure how people do this so well on characters.

 

[Gord.T]

howdy triple-

... I read that the new Joints system in C4D is so good compared to the old system that many people find Cactus Dan to not be much of an improvement now.

Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't Cactus Dan's character tools (formally plugins) integrated into C4D R11? I'm sure that's why it's redundant now.
(He hangs out at C4DCafe and Maxons 'Plugin Cafe' if anyone should care to ask him.
I can ask if you want? )

How do you animate floppy things on a character? For example, the ears of an elephant that would flop around but also collide with the elephant body as well. The Jiggle tool is nice, but no collision detection... I'm not really sure how people do this so well on characters.

Multiple joints, kind of like a snake/spline, with dynamics. There's a Spline IK you could have a look at.

Hey DJ. Feel free to start up your own progress thread here and post some grabs of your work if your inclined to. Most of us here have our own threads going. It's a cool way to keep track of what people are up to and lets us offer tips and crits and stuff. I'm only saying that because it sounds like you have a pretty good grip on things, so I'd be interested in seeing some of your renderings if and when your comfy with posting any ofcourse. (Longest Sentence Ever!)

 

[djembeplay]

Hey Raptor,

Long time no talk! I haven't been around the forum for a bit.

Thanks for the kind words. I will start my own thread soon - that's a good idea.

For some reason, up to his point I have completely sucked at doing anything having to do with posting my work, networking myself, creating a website, working on my resume, etc. Whenever I have free time, I seem to just start working on another project again, thus further procrastinating actually getting myself out there... which I need to do to find work now. More personal walls I suppose .

As for the animation, I ended up playing around with things until I did almost exactly as you suggested. I had this simple test object created that was just a cube with an extruded pole on top that was under a HN. I created an IK-spline with spline dynamics for the pole and edited the parameters to make them really floppy.

I also wanted the floppy 'pole' to bounce off of the body (the cube) when it would swing into it. So, for this I created an invisible proxy for the spline to collide with. To approximately match the width of the pole instead of having just the thin spline bounce off the side, I increased the 'radius' in the spline dynamics tag. This could probably be further tweaked in, but the rig was just for testing purposes.

For anyone who might be reading this and are looking to achieve a similar rig, you may run into the same problem as I did - the polygon object that is being deformed by the spline gets all twisted around and deformed. After some lengthy trial and error, I found a solution. There will be at least one point in your spline that is anchored... probably at the base or at least one of the ends. You need to put a 'handle' controller on the IK-spline that correlates to the same point that is your spline anchor. This keeps the axis of all the joints in the chain in line, and thus prevents the twisting and distortion.

If anyone is interested in having a look at the scene file, I've uploaded it Here. It may be of some help to study the hierarchy.