Tagged Mesh

I was feeling a little under the weather tonight, so I just properly tagged the Nancy model. Now if I need a model, I don't need to tag it again, I can just load this directly. It also only took me a half hour to do the tagging, proving how efficient this system can be despite its simplicity. My GUI, however, is still ugly.

As intelligently requested, here's the tagged model and the sketch which resulted in the figure. Minus the rotation pivot which is causing awkward translation of the limbs... this is right. I really like what it did on the ribcage-pelvis area.


I feel I need to, though, before anything, scale the figure down to match the sketch percentages before sketch-stylization since, right now it's rather large (say 40 world units while the sketch canvas is 10).

I then don't know if I should focus on wires (more proof of concept) or making the sketch system more robust (handling erasure, multiple strokes) or making the mesh distortions smoother.

I should make zombies.

The GUI is in this picture, and well, it seems to be working. This isn't properly tagged (so some vertices weren't recognized in the groups). I now need to fix the translation on the limb boxes.

Oh, god, it looks so gross.


I feel posts are a good way to tell myself waht to do next, so once I get this to be less horribly distorting: adding wires and adding bones. (And that, you know, shader and that SIMBICON implementation for my other classes.)

... so gross.

Scaling Issues

Joe says I blog in spurts. This is true. Anyhow, made a GUI (not pictured here), but it loads a model (default model if unspecified), the user tags different areas (if they are not tagged already, or they can re-tag areas), and manipulates it based on the sketch. The scale between the figure and the sketch is off...

Also, need to fix how it's putting each new lattice inside the previous one...

Multiple Set Selection

You can now define multiple sets on a single mesh and connect the FigureNode parameters to each set and distort each set. I have yet to focus on soft selection, though.


So far, I've been defining the sets by name manually. I plan to write a small GUI tonight which allows the user to load in an OBJ model and define the sets. I need to do this so that the set naming convention I've been using remains constant (or else the plug-in won't work, since Maya does selection by name). I hope to add a load/save aspect to the GUI as well, which lets you load an .ma file if you've already defined the sets. (Sets can also be defined through Maya's existing interface).

Problems I forsee in the future are - if a loaded mesh is edited in such a way to add vertices, the sets would have to re-defined to include these new vertices.

Set Selection

Now, a user loads in a model (any model). I need to write a GUI which allows the user to label regions of vertices with a "Set" that follows a certain naming convention ("skullSet" "ribcageSet"... etc). Then, a lattice deformer is applied to that region. The node with the figure data connects to that lattice deformer, translating, rotating, and scaling it appropriately.

I spent all day trying to do it in C++ to no avail (because Maya's default lattice deformers are actually a small network of nodes - I was able to do it to an entire object, not a labeled set region :( ), so I hooked it together mostly in MEL.

Invisible Progress

It doesn't look any different, so no screenshots for today, but here's a list of what I did:

Node structure now much much more manageable. Grouped floats into vectors.
Nodes link automatically, so no more need for MEL.
Rotations now take the signed angle into account.

Overall, I have a little better understanding of MDagPath and MDGModifier for node work in C++. I still need to, however, make it so that translations occur with the shoulder as the pivot point. After that, my tasks are now:

Load and segment the body mesh.
Attach wire deformers.
Generate a skeleton.

I also got 9 hours of sleep. How unheard of. But it means I can think again.

Now, with Vectors!

More of a reminder to myself as to what I need to do tomorrow, but I re-did everything with vectors, thus need to re-implement data connections to the plugs of my cube objects.

I also need to figure out how to co-ordinate the rotation and translation of the limbs. That was too much math for me just now.


During the review, Norm brought up that the cubes themselves could be treated as deforming controls for the artist. No duh, that's ingenious.