Dem Bones advice

Rigging
#1

My hopes here are for people to be able provide any helpful tips to others (myself included) that are looking to start working with Dem Bones for converting arbitrary deformations into a skinCluster.

  • Scene setup: Best practices? What pitfalls to look out for?
  • What arguments should be passed for certain scenarios? Good defaults to start with, best settings for higher accuracy(slower) and best settings for faster results (less accurate).
  • Example scenarios: Converting cloth simulation into joints/skinCluster or converting blendshape corrective into a joint driven skinCluster (adding to existing skeleton and skinCluster) .

I’ll report back after doing my own initial exploration. In the meantime, hopefully others are willing to weigh in on what they’ve found useful/helpful in getting successful results.
Cheers!

1 Like
#2

Well, I thought I’d share some info and ask a follow up question.

After downloading the github project and looking into the data folder, I got at the calls needed (in the run.bat file).

rem Skinning decompsition to generate bone transformations and skinning weights from input meshes sequence
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Geom.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" -b=5 -o="Decomposition_05.fbx"
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Geom.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" -b=10 -o="Decomposition_10.fbx"
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Geom.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" -b=20 -o="Decomposition_20.fbx"

rem Joint grouping 
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Geom.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" -b=20 --bindUpdate=2 -o="Decomposition_20_grouped.fbx"

rem Solve skinning weights from input meshes sequence and input bone transformations
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Trans.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" --nTransIters=0 -o="SolvedWeights.fbx"

rem Solve bone transformations from input meshes sequence and input skinning weights
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Skin.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" --nWeightsIters=0 -o="SolvedTransformations.fbx"

rem Optimize given bone transformations and skinning weights from input meshes sequence
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_All.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" --bindUpdate=1 -o="Optimized.fbx"

rem Only solve helper bones using demLock attribute of the joints
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_Helpers.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" --bindUpdate=1 -o="SolvedHelpers.fbx"

rem Partially solve skinning weights using per-vertex color attribute of the mesh
call "../bin/Windows/DemBones.exe" -i="Bone_PartiallySkinned.fbx" -a="Bone_Anim.abc" --nTransIters=0 -o="SolvedPartialWeights.fbx"

All super helpful examples.

Could use some helpful insights on the 3 args below as to what they do exactly. The --help only gives a bare amount of info on the args.

–transAffine=
bone translations affinity soft constraint

–transAffineNorm=
p-Norm for bone translations affinity

–weightsSmooth=
weights smoothness soft constraint (assuming falloff??))