Comments on: Skinny: Automatic Mesh Generation, Rigging and UV-Mapping

By: feeblemind

feeblemind — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 22:55:46 +0000

Around 600 mocapad data sets on mocapdata.com

You can take a look at the Mocapadata.com website. You would probably be amazed to discover that it offers the opportunity to download hundreds of motion capture data sets made by up to three different real actors. The data sets have been splitted in…

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:13:57 +0000

http://terrymorgan.net/screenshotscurrent.htm

The two shots at the bottom are my Skinny cave, I had to put it in Blender 242a
and remove 423 verts to get an Ogre mesh out of it, nice job, Leif!

Quote:
You guys are just trying to skip the whole modeling step in the character process and go on to the
armature step instead. How lazy!

Unquote

I'd like it to automatically generate vertex groups and UV coordinates and then produce a set of reusable animations, that's how lazy I am!

By: Leif

Leif — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:09:30 +0000

kaeru:

I did not know about Bbones before. Apparently, the skinny generated mesh deforms well with the Bbone adjustments without any further tweaking. It appears to me, that you ask for replacing the usual mesh that is generated by skinny with cubes based on the Bbones. I could not find a way to extract the positions of the Bbone cube objects through python, so I would not know how that could be done.

By: kaeru

kaeru — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:44:37 +0000

@igor:
too late already done some time ago :

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Requests/EditingFeatures#modeling_tool_based_on_armature

But you're welcome to add idea …

@Leif :

First thanks for your nice script , that i'm sure have a great potential , why not a future real integration :-P …

And a simple question :

Is it possible to add an option that replace bone by cube based on Bbone ?

that's all .

Peace :-).

By: MeiaLua

MeiaLua — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:38:30 +0000

cool script!

this could be very useful for artificial life sims in blender.

I'll make a lame feature request :) .. I'd love to see automatic muscle approximation in the mesh generation, ie: maybe bulge the mesh out near intersections of large bones, and take into account rotation contraints on the bones to decide how to model the muscle. Could be very powerful i think, for generating arbitrary, realistic creatures from just bones.

By: Leif

Leif — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:24:31 +0000

Igor: there are restrictions to the armature setup, but as long as the basic rules are followed, armatures of any complexity should be possible. I did not test this exhaustively, but I do not think that there is any specific restriction on bone number. IK targets and constrains should not affect the script at all. But there are limits to the setup: 1) only one bone without parent, only simple connections, T-sections and X-crossings, i.e. no junctions with >4 bones connected to one junction. But, most practical armatures should be possible to make – like trees or bilateral symmetrical, segmented animals.

By: Igor

Igor — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:10:44 +0000

Great Idea! I wanted to publish this as request feature (to edit bones as mesh) while ago. I didn't tried this script yet, but I wonder if it can be used also with more complex armatures too, like Mancandys with IK targets and constraints?

By: Leif

Leif — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:50:21 +0000

Eelko: You need to be careful in which direction you make the branch. If you start of from a straight line of two connected bones, a branching bone can either be oriented towards the right or left side of this connecting line. If the script produces an artifact, you can correct this by editing the bone properties using the Edit Bone button and assigning the letter 'R' for right in the orientation property. The default orientation is 'L' for left. The same applies for X-crossings, in which the first branching bone should branch of to the left side.

By: Leif

Leif — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:41:24 +0000

Flurp: I looked at your armature and found a few things that are not compatible with the current version of Skinny. There are a number of restrictions for how the armature has to be set. At first you might think that few armatures could be made based on these restrictions, but if you think and plan carefully, you can generate almost any type of armature. Check out the example file to see, how a mesh can be setup optimally for working with Skinny. In your particular case I noticed one major problem:

The 3 central bones called 'Bone', 'Bone.007' and 'Bone.010' did not have any parent. I did not state this explicitly in the tutorial, but if you follow the rules set out in it, you would never arrive at such a constellation. Your Armature should only have one single bone, which does not have any parent ,which I refer to as the 'origin' bone. For any armature to be made with Skinny, you should start with the origin bone, and then add new bones only to the pointy part of the bone (in octahedron mode). If you want, you can assign the the name 'origin' to this first bone, which will tell the script, that no mesh segments should be made for this bone. Another way to describe what is wrong with this constellation, is that a connection between three bones can only have the shape of a straight connection (two bones with their pointed ends pointing in the same direction) and a branch from this straight connection to either the left or right side.

You should also note that your armature could only be skinned with automatic mode, which is an inferior method considering the quality of the resulting mesh. You could setup this armature easily for the normal mode, if you restrict the armature setup to the x-y plane. You can rotate the bones afterwards using pose mode to get the constellation the you setup in this example.

By: The Troll

The Troll — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:40:47 +0000

The Troll is back!

This is a nice script,perhap it could be key for mucsel rig to
mech? need to test more.

Again good work!