CGMan
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Because I am bored while rendering...
🕑 Added 2017-06-07 02:31:54 +0000 UTC Today I was chatting with another Lightwave user.. Lightwave 3D is the name of the 3D software I use, if you were unaware. This guy is a master of nodes. Nodes are bit of code you can wire up to create a flowchart-looking thing for custom surfaces, animation mechanisms and other such things.This same guy helped me get the original shrink-wrapped skin solution working. Anyway, I was asking him if I could make the shrink wrapping work backwards. While I was making Naomi I had to make the skin hover over the surface of the muscles so the shrink-wrap process can work. If the muscles poked out of the skin at any time, it would cause an unsightly crater in the skin. If the skin poked out too far away from the muscle, it would cause pinching or folding when the shrink-wrapping happens. So the trick was to keep the skin hovering in that "sweet spot" for the perfect shrink-wrap. Unfortunately keeping it in this sweet spot often required manual animating of the skin, adjusting it with each move. Very tedious.
So today I was asking him if he could help me make it work the opposite way. If I keep the skin UNDER the muscle, then the nodes would project outward to a fixed distance, and then trace back to find the outer-most surface of the muscle or fat. I believe this will be much easier to manage and require much less hand-tweaking.
He was nice enough to do this for me and it works. So for the next animation it's likely this will shave days off of the process.. Like maybe 4 or 5 days. So that's good news.
Comments
CGMan
We're not that close.. But we are "friendly" to each-other. I offered to pay him for his help but as he is out of the country it was difficult so I will have to pay him later.
Zander
You seem to have very good friends^^. That seems like a good idea. Kinda like setting up a net so it doesn't go further than it needs to. Pretty cool idea
CGMan
It all depends... I could crank up the quality settings and each frame would take 3 hours to render. It's all about finding that sweet spot (there's that sweet spot again) between quality and efficiency; esp. when dealing with animations of thousands of frames.
CJoe
That's very nice of him to help you with that. I would have thought that the calculation needed for each frame would have make the rendering time much longer, but manual tweaking is not as efficient as automatic processing. Your work flow will be almost perfect with all the technics you came up with 😊
