Hey,
I’m looking for someone who would be open to writing a custom deformer that solves some issues that our studio is running into when using the ShrinkWrap deformer in Maya.
If you’re interested in this, please shoot me an email at [email protected]
Thanks so much,
Andy
If nobody’s contacted you to help yet, I would suggest letting us know what problems you’re having.
It’s entirely possible (even probable!) that somebody else in this community has had the same issue you have. And if you’re lucky, there may be an open source plugin out there that you can just use.
Oh okay, I didn’t know that was very common, haha.
Basically we’re running into an issue when using shrinkwraps to create a 2D mouth. Basically, we’re using a piece of geometry like a cage and trying to keep another piece of geometry inside of it. You can see what I’m talking about in a gif here, which also highlights the issue : Screen capture - 948a28bb1c7d5b5994c269197e93b98c - Gyazo
Shrinkwraps are grabbing the closest point after they fall outside of the original shape’s area, and it’s causing these ‘stretching’ artifacts that we don’t want. We can’t use a texture projection or a shader for a few different reasons, so we’re stuck with geometry.
Any help on this would be so very appreciated.
does it need to be a shrinkwrap?
you could probably do the same with a nurbs surface, a projected curve/cooky cutter surface and cutting the outside mesh (if it needs to be a polygon mesh the result could be converted with a conversion node)
Honestly, what you’re trying to do is HARD, and I don’t think there’s a general solution to containing the geo even with a custom c++ deformer. So I’m thinking of other options.
Could you project onto a surface like this, and hide the stuff on the backplane under the character’s skin?
I see. I would want to use some kind of deformer method, to make sure the output geo stays as close to the source geo as possible.
What tfox_TD suggested there works for some characters, but more often than not we have the mouth floating out in front of the character’s face, and the mouth falls down below where the bottom of the head would be. This is a good example from one of our other characters, which has a similar set up. He just doesn’t make as extreme poses as the other ones, which is why his is (mostly) fine with just using the shrinkwrap.
Yeah, that was the character style I was afraid of when I suggested it.
As much as deformer method would be nice, I really don’t think it’s feasible when you start getting crazy mouth shapes. You’re going to have to make a compromise somewhere.
Do you have access to Maya Falloffs? Is this for a games? Is there a reason you can’t use booleans? Is it possible to upgrade to a Maya version that has the new booleans and falloffs?
this is the setup with the projected curve on a nurbs surface that i had in mind
I was finding that the nurbs surface was inverting the cutout too often, I might be missing something as I’m not too familiar with the nurbs modeling tools.
I quickly whipped something up in bifrost-- What it’s doing is converting the mesh to a volume and culling out the faces that are outside of the volume. I’m then using a ShrinkWrap to snap the outside verts back onto the back plane. I get an effect like this, which is exactly what I’m looking for. : Screen capture - 049860749118e3f3b85f3069f47e0705 - Gyazo
Having something like this converted into a single node for performance would be ideal. We’re working closely with the Rumba developers to adopt their program into our animation pipeline, and we need this node in C++, so we can port it over.
