Rigging and Deformation necessities
Now that some devs will be focusing more on rigging "so I've heard anyways", it would be awsome do update a few of blenders features that are crucial in rigging and deforming high level VFX creatures/characters.
Blendshapes. Bleders shapekeys are not "live", meaning you can't apply a bledshape to an object and have it update its shape according to the source objects deformations. This is crucial if you have a face rig separate from the body, like most productions have it set up, FACS based/blendshapes for the face, and muscle based body.
Surface wrapping. The fact that blender has this as a modifier now is great, but you can't really rely on this to 100% because of the frequent "mesh contains concave faces" error. This needs to be a bit more solid so you can count on it when planning.
Transfer vertexorder and other mesh data. There is an addon available for this, but it works 80% of the time you use it, and this too is a crucial feature for creating characters and creatures for VFX. For example if you have a rig, and you get feedback that you need to tweak the model, and being able to do it without breaking the all ready made rig/textures or linked deformers.
Curves. Just being able to blendshape "again live blendshapes" between curves are also a must-have feature. I did a face rig with "sticky lips" in blender without this using dynamic painting and a bunch of wrapped meshes "like a chain of 3 heads or something" to get it to work, but its very hacky, and being able to do it properly with curves would be great! :)
Right now in order to make a rig with all the crucial features needed for big holly wood productions you need a software like Maya. I don't like Maya as a software, buggy and crashes a lot, but I cant deny that some features that it has are necessary for big productions, so I would like to have alternatives to those in blender, since I try to work using it on a daily basis instead of maya. These are some of the big features needed to either be replicated or solved in some other way in blender.
Thank you! :)
6 Comments
For Blendshapes, in Maya you can have two different topolgy from the same source in this example the head is duplicated & merged back to the body.....Maya doesn't change the vertex order when you do the merging & you can turn off topology check ,Blender can do similar of keeping the vertex order when merging but forces you to have the same topology ,of course no live editing of the blendshapes...removing this limitation or change of design is very needed for facial rigging workflow.
* @Pascal 0 * I don't really see why you need to do this on a separate mesh? If it is to avoid things like sims or other modifiers on the body like is mentioned in the OP, the blender way is to use vertex groups should to mask out areas.
* @jackwightonsimpson * There are many benefits to the live update but also better organization of Action Units & Corrective Shapes in rows instead of a long list and fiddling with sliders. FACS based method require thousands of blendshapes so the workflow is more of a layared approach with adding deformers,clusters and SDKs on top. Seprating the mesh gives more flexibility than having it all on the same mesh data.
I was a Maya rigger for years, I've just learning blender for past months and got stuck exactly at this part. We do really need more reliable 'Live Shape Key' in Blender in order to reach bigger production capabilities. Currently we might be able to do this with multiple armature modifier to separate body and face system, but we would stuck on these problem in wider workflow :
We usually would want to separate rig systems separately. This is crucial for wide workflow as we work with multiple rig artist, and we all need to have the same understanding of the rig construction in specific projects.
For example , Face rig setup consists of Face rig armature + Mesh + other additional rig component, would need to put under one collection/group. Currently you can't have another live rigged mesh that directly connects to later step (Main body) without Mesh/Surface Modifier, which still would have performance issues.
One rule of character rigging due to performances and flexibility is, you should not put facial rig under head bone AND interfering with main bone skinning weights. This should also help CPU to have separated evaluation. Having complex face rig under head bone would severely impacts the performance (this also a misconceptions among young rig artists, that controllers on face is directly constraining the bone), and animators will having hard time animating in huge scenes, even they're barely touch the facial controllers.
The reason why we need 'Live Shape key' is also related to have not only separated Vertex Group, but also Shape Keys as well as additional Modifiers.
This would also help rigging artist to not being confused with so many modifiers/vertex group/shape keys in one single mesh. Also when we dealing with crowds, we would also need to export-import rig systems, so having separated armature will help other rig artists to understand how it works.
IMAGINE that you would 3 Armature modifiers in Face Rig mesh alone, with 3 deform modifiers each, tons of different vertex groups and shape keys .
Rig artist also can quickly isolate certain Rig system collections for them to focus on what they're currently working, especially when they dealing with issues from animators and need to quickly narrow down where, how, and what part to fix.
With all of reasons mentioned above, it will also possible to have additional add-on for the face rig alone that independent from the main rig (Yes, we would likely delete the Rigify face rig due to a lot of flexibility and convenience issues). This would fix all rig workflow problems when dealing with a wide studio productions. This should not be a difficult issue to tackle, so i'm quite curious why it has not been implemented for many years.
I recently found out, you can combine objects by touching a part as the tip of an array this might be fine for writing head /
100% with you and please perform softimage as animation reference, not this 20year old Autodeath-Maya ;)