Smooth skinned characters

# 1 30-12-2004 , 11:00 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2004

Location: Boston, MA

Posts: 3

I'm a student at MIT working on my PhD in computer graphics. My
research area is animation, and I'm currently working on a project
where I can transfer rigging parameters such as vertex weights from
one character to another, even if the geometry or skeletons of the
two characters are different.

I'm planning to submit a research article about this work to the
Siggraph in January. The problem is, as a computer scientist, it's
hard for me to make any compelling examples to demonstrate my work.
I was writing to see if you had, perhaps, any characters that you've
animated in Maya using smooth skinning. Almost anything using Maya's
smooth skinning would be useful to me, as I don't have any examples
yet aside from a "bending cylinder" that I made myself.

Since it will be used in a publication, it would have to be something
that you have the rights too. (I couldn't use anything from a
commercial movie or video game, unless they signed over the rights.)

If anyone has any characters they've rigged with smooth
skinning and are willing to share them in the name of science
:) please let me know! I'll of course acknowledge your
contribution in the paper if it gets accepted.

Thanks,
Bob

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert W. Sumner sumner@csail.mit.edu
MIT Computer Science and https://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~sumner/

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# 2 31-12-2004 , 11:52 AM

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Join Date: Jun 2004

Location: London, England

Posts: 301

Hey there.

I'll let you use a little games character called Hank that I made for a Uni project (he's the guy in my avatar). The skinnings not absolutely brilliant, as he is a low-res character and I just skinned him for my needs, but he should be ok for what you want of him. I'll send a file of him to the e-mail address you supplied - he's done in Maya 5, hope thats ok.

Good luck with the paper,

LisaG user added image

When in doubt......smile!

https://www.x-menthelaststand.com/

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# 3 31-12-2004 , 04:58 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2004

Location: Boston, MA

Posts: 3

Hi Lisa,

Thanks so much for letting me use Hank! He's cute and is good for what I need. I wrote a plugin to export skinned characters from Maya into my own software, and I'm adding a few things to it that I skipped the first time around. I think he'll export fine once I'm finished.

Does anyone else have other characters -- human or animals or anything? One thing I'd like to try is to combine a skinned human and skinned horse to solve for the skinning weights of a centar.

-Bob

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# 4 31-12-2004 , 05:14 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2002

Posts: 18

female

you can use my ichigo model. which was smoothed skinned. you can find it in the upload section under anatomy. Ichigo model should be the title

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# 5 31-12-2004 , 08:03 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2004

Location: Boston, MA

Posts: 3

I tried Ichigo, but I had trouble with her. It seems that there are a few different smaller skeletons rather than one single skeleton to which everything is bound. When I export it, I see that several different joints
(rootJNT, joint1, pelvisJNT) have no parent and my code isn't smart enough to handle this.

If I wanted to have one single skeleton, is it as simple as just creating another joint and parenting those three to it? Or would it involve rebinding everything?

-Bob

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# 6 31-12-2004 , 10:32 PM

Technical Director
Join Date: Feb 2004

Posts: 2,988

Dont think so. Just parent the joints.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 7 01-01-2005 , 01:15 AM

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Join Date: Dec 2002

Posts: 18

you'll have to unparent some controls. the root from master but and then thepelvis form the master but you might have to do some rerigging and binding..maybe my model is not suitable for your experiment

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Smooth skinned characters

female

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