Friendlyskies AoI Forum

Hi,

Mayid is right. Posing the model using bones causes unintentional deformations of the mesh - mostly on legs, arms and neck etc. You will only see this effect, if you use the same model for several different poses and move the bones again and again.

Have a look at my bird. It is the same here. Legs and neck became thin over the time. Weighting doesn't help and the tips in the manual are only for animation purposes and not able to prevent these deformations.





... I have no idea how to avoid this. I've repaired the model from time to time.

Kind regards
Siri

Last edited by Siri (January 14, 2010, 2:53 pm)

Have you made a pose that can overcome the situation?
It doesn´t help with no extra pose I guess (though I have zero experience here).

Have you made a pose that can overcome the situation?
It doesn´t help with no extra pose I guess (though I have zero experience here).

When i add the pose track, character is converted to actor. Then i just add a new pose, and i apply it to a keyframe. With no luck (because of the distortion).

About the IK weight... i want to try. But why my "Color surface by" option is disabled? (not trying to do this with an actor. Just with a PM mesh).

Ough! I have a problem with eyes and hat. For some reason the get out of their place each time i open the file. I think this happened to me before and we talked about it, but i don't remember if there's a solution or not. Maybe the file is corrupted because of the red alerts and crashes?

Last edited by mayid (February 9, 2010, 8:10 am)

I'm not too fond of the bones in AOI... seems very easy to get bones and meshes tangled, and not so easy to untangle.  Some of my difficulty is because I am still learning, but some is because AOI is not as good in this department as other editors (like Blender).  Just keep that in mind.  If you keep your bone movements simple, it should work.  Walking, gesturing, and even picking up objects should be okay.  Dancing, fighting, and wild complex movements will probably be very difficult.

The "Use Gestures" box, as I understand it, looks at poses to see examples of when bones are rotated.  It goes through the list of poses and says "oh, okay.  When bone 4 is rotated, the mesh verticies should be expanded out like this!"

To get the result needed for an elbow bend, or the dancing cucumber example in the manual, you need to make a pose by moving the bone and yes, manually modify the mesh.

My suggestion:
Make a pose for each bend that needs to be fixed.  Name them something easy to identify later, like "Left Elbow Bend", "Right Elbow Bend", etc.
In the pose, move the bone.  It will distort the mesh, so you have to fix this by hand.
Once your pose is set up, try using the IK track to make the character wave.  With the "Use Gestures" box checked, the mesh should be deformed correctly.

Hi!

I had already forgotten that video that Siri posted the link to.

But yes: Basically the mesh will keep from getting disfigured if each vertex can be ancored with 100% weight to a bone. That would work for insects and robots. To some extent it also works for "soft animals" with long legs, but that reguires guite a bit of attention to how the mesh is built. ..and how the skeleton is built.

So poses and gestures it shoud be. Though making poses is also a lot easier if it is possible to make the mesh behave logically to start with. Quite often that, would then mean manually setting the IK-weight for every vertex and it might still not work perfectly.

One thing that is worth testing is the "IK-Blend" value, that the editor asks when you attach the mesh to the skeleton. By default it is 0.5, though more natural results can often be obtained with a *way* lower value.

And btw it's possible to make poses for actors even without bones, but then the vertices travel through space on a linear track instead of following the natural looking tracks. That technique might work for some single cell aminals like amebas.

Last edited by peteihis (February 9, 2010, 10:46 am)