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Showing posts from February, 2010
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NCLOTH HEIRARCHY Always found it frustrating to have a character/creature with Ncloth imported into a scene then have to move the character away from 0,0,0. The ncloth would snap away like crazy and youd have to relax it etc etc while positioning. Here's a technique to have a fully positionable character have it's Ncloth solve as if it was on 0,0,0 anywhere you position it. Let's say you have a cloth scarf transform constrained to your character's neck 1. Grab the geo of the scarf and parent constrain it to the transform constraint. Now the scarf moves wherever the transform constraint goes AND solves from rest position anywhere you position the character.
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Basic Ncloth Hair Tutorial (CLICK ON IMAGE) Haven't done a tut in a while. Enjoy!
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Motion Blur + Constraints Here's a trick that I found on an old cgtalk post... Sometimes you have a character's hand constrained to a surface and in 1 frame you switch off the constraint. Well, since the renderer reads past and previous frames for motion blur you wind up with a crazy streaked motion blur on the frame where you turn the constraint off. 1. Grab the trans keyframes of your object (or say your character's arm control) on the frame BEFORE the constraint gets turned off. 2. Turn off snapping in your graph editor and drag the keys extremely close to the next keyframe (to the right) . Zoom in and drag them as close to the keyframe where the constraint turns off as you can. Voila, proper motion blur.
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Transferring UVs AFTER rigging.... This is a tough one, but here's the HACK. Lets say you've rigged up your amazing character and realize OH, I have to make a bunch of UV changes. You copy out your character's head, UV it up nicely, bring it back in and use the "transfer attributes" from your copied head to the rigged one. No deal. It's because your transfer attributes input comes after rigging and all UV inputs have to come before rigging. Same as in Ncloth. I don't understand why Autodesk doesn't put in a "before deformers" option or something similar to how you can insert blendshapes at certain parts of a deformer chain. ANYWAY Every object has a "shape orig" node which represents what an object was before it was deformed. We can apply a UV transfer to this no problem which will also transfer up the stack to your rigged object. I access it like this 1. Select your rigged object, in the hypergraph hit options/display/ hidden nodes