I just finished wrapping up pCageDeform and now it is ready for release. Again, no documentation, but there is demo available. If you’ve been drooling over those nice cage deformers for other packages, you’ll definitely going to love this one.
I made a simple scene file where I applied pCageDeformer and while I was at it, I give it the finishing touch with LocalRelax. Download the mpj here. If you’re using demo versions of plugins you need to setup some stuff to get the same results. Just follow the pictures and text below. If you have bought both plugins, all you need to do is calculate pCageDeform weights.
Let us begin!
Here is the target mesh and the cage in rest position
- Load the mpj
- Go to setup tab and select pCageDeform
- Select right geometry as cage: “shoulder_cage”
- Up the samples to something like 256
- Hit Calculate and wait it to finish
This is how it looks with arm down. Good enough for our little example
Arm forward pose. Not perfect but it’ll do!
Arm up is just plain hideous. This is not within tolerance at all!!!
For next phase you need to up the iterations for LocalRelax effect that is applied to our target mesh “shoulder_subdivided”. Make it about 25. Let’s see what we get.
A lot better
Looking good eh? We could have done a lot better cage, but I felt this was good place to demonstrate what LocalRelax can do for you. Now let’s see what it looks if we add a collision to it. Select LocalRelax effect that is applied to “shoulder_subdivided”, in it’s UI locate “Collisions” and beneath that popup control called “New”, search for item named “Collision” and select it via the popup. Hit “Add” to add it to the collision list. You can remove collision from the list by locating it via “Current” popup and pushing “Del”.
Here’s collision shape visualized, not yet active
Collision result
As we can see, that gives us pretty nice deformation on shoulder. There is another LocalRelax applied to the cage, it has default settings, so you don’t have to do anything about it. It makes the areas look more connected to each other when they stretch. The difference isn’t that obvious in still image, but for the sake of it, here is a picture of what it looks like.
LocalRelax on cage
Well, thats it for now. Hope you liked it and learned something. The cage is pretty basic and by modifying it we could make the deformation even better. And obviously you’d need to define lot more collisions to make such a realistic character believable, but you get the idea.
Thanks for reading!
-peksi