Hi Jerome/Team,
I’m painting a mask on a blendshape map in Maya (for example, I don’t want the region around the eyes on a character to be affected by a blendshape)… I would like to control the mask by a float attribute on the rig so my animator could decide how much of the mask he want to “fade in/out”… is it possible? can I map the mask to a ramp so it can be faded in/out?
Basically I would like to control the mask… is that even possible?
Thanks
Navin
Hi Navin
You are indeed asking for something really interesting that I’ve been requesting to AD for quite a while. Short answer is no. I mean you can drive the weights of a blendshape with nodes but the problem is that the blendshape node stores the weights of the target per vertex and this is a single/unique attribute (one per vertex). There’s no way currently to drive all those (based on uv’s or other) directly from the blendshape node. Lets say you want to drive the weight of a region of your mesh. This will require you to create one ramp/remap node per vertex which can become quite heavy.
That been said now that there’s Bifrost board I could replicate a blendshape plugin node I did that actually allows that. Have you try Bifrost board on your side?
Thanks for the info Jerome… Yeah, that’s what I thought as well… but wanted to see if anyone had a better solution… (-:
I haven’t tried Bifrost yet… I’ll look into it.
I’ve never tried it, but this sounds like… possibly something that Brave Rabbit’s rampWeights tool could do? https://vimeo.com/311842397
Except it might only work on axis. I forget if it works with complex shapes or maps.
Thanks Chris… I’ll have a look soon. Appreciate it.
Isnt Ingo showing here what you are asking here?
It kind of is but not exactly because but it can do the trick if you use a non normalized skinning node so that you can paint each joint as if it was a mask and not a deformation thingy. Ideally it would be nice to have this a been a map because then you can provide animated masks as well or apply color transformations to increase or decrease the effects. I don’t recall if the weight driver node has amplitude/gradient attributes so that you can actually decrease the effect of the weight on the blendshape/per target
I hope the Maya devs does have something cooking.
MASH has a blendshape node that you can drive with a influencer object, might work?
this is the SHAPES tool, its called weights server:
http://www.braverabbit.com/shapes/video-documentation-blend-shape-weights/#weightsServer