Digital Art Zone

I Want to revisit one of my old animation projects. Originally I was going to make every individual character one after another Then go in and do all the Morphs for emotions and talking and eyes ect!

Starting to work it out in my head and It’s going to take DECADES to do all this for say a dozen highly animatable characters.

SO lets consider the HEAD. UHMMM HEAD… OPPS Where was I?

Anyways… I have one of my first guys all done and took 2 days to do target Morphs for everything from Blinking eyes, a smile ,frawn, excited, mad, eyes wide open, and all the VOWLS and other mouth movement. and on and on and on UGH!

IS it possible to make a generic HEAD do all the Target Morphs THEN Adjust the models geometry to more represent specific individuals I wish to emulate, Fatter, thinner, rounder, squarer, old, young, male, Female BUT still have the MORPH work WITH THE NEW GEOMETRY?

Say I make the generic head! Then do all the morphs, THEN make a real thin long face guy then a Short round fat guy head. I cant imagine the TARGET MORPH at 100% Would look right! Wont the MOPRH at 100% go back to the original MORPH POSITION of those polys? of the generic setting. so the FAT GUYS SMILE would look like the GENERIC head smile at 100%??? then go back to FAT guy at 0%

V4, M4 etc. all do that, so it’s possible. You’ll need morphs you want for shapes, and morphs you want for expressions. I have no idea how to do it, but couldn’t you bring in one of DAZ’s people to look and see how it’s arranged or set-up?

Carrara only lets you use one morph target using the same vertices from what I have experienced.
studio lets you do as many as you like
esp via the send to Hexagon bridge
or simply loading each variation of the obj with morth loader
since you are proficient in Hexagon, this is prob your best bet.
then try FBX or collada exporting the result with morphs enabled from studio to Carrara.
or as I do, save it as a Poser prop or figure with morphs.
(need a few free DS scripts)
or do it in Poser, you can load multiple morph targets there too and then save as a prop or figure too!
imports or opens in Carrara or put it in your runtime folder if you have one!
(got a feeling you don’t though given your avoidance of Daz dolllies!!!)

I’ve just tested this on a sphere and it is certainly do-able in Carrara.  Although you can only use the same vertices as a morph area, you can do as many morph targets in that area as you want and they work.  Seems it must be done in Carrara - when I import morph targets done in Hexagon, they are horribly distorted.

In this case, the whole head would be a morph area, with the different configurations as targets.  Used one sphere, did a bunch of targets, then copied the sphere in the ass room.  Each copy has the morph sliders and they mix and match nicely.

Doing it via Studio means you would have to make your figure into a .cr2, with Studio rigging.  Daz Collada hasn’t worked since DS3.

If you are going to use a generic head on a bunch of different figures, you won’t be able to attach the morphed heads, because that would make them new figures and the morphs won’t work - you’d need to parent the heads in such a way as to make them seem attached.

Good luck - this is one heck of an undertaking.

Just for a laugh - one head, three morphs

Could he make a complete figure, select the head vertices, and make multiple, separate morphs for them, and the torso vertices and make multiple, separate morphs, etc. etc. ?

Yes, no technical reason not to.  Only he said that he’d made the head and already done the morphs for that.

You know how Carrara doesn’t allow you to make morphs on .cr2 figures in areas that aren’t pre-defined, like the nose?  A clever way to get around that is to send the whole figure from Studio to Hex via the bridge and bring it back without changing anything and define the whole body as a morph area.  You can then make morphs in Carrara on any part to your heart’s content.

Roygee - 11 August 2012 11:58 PM

Yes, no technical reason not to.  Only he said that he’d made the head and already done the morphs for that.

You know how Carrara doesn’t allow you to make morphs on .cr2 figures in areas that aren’t pre-defined, like the nose?  A clever way to get around that is to send the whole figure from Studio to Hex via the bridge and bring it back without changing anything and define the whole body as a morph area.  You can then make morphs in Carrara on any part to your heart’s content.

The head in Question I made in HEX and imported to carrara so they are carrara objects.

I have been looking into this and it looks like to do what I want you HAVE to RE-TARGTE-MORPH every head as a new one IF you wants say an guy head with a large chin like a body builder or a squares head ect!