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Thanks guys. Glad to be here!
No, the mixer and manager don't play too nice :) We just recently
switched over to the Shape Manager, for no other reason than it seems
like it needs to be hammered on more. It doesn't seem to have gotten
much production attention yet. I doubt you are the only ones hitting
that wall as we have hit parts of hit here. All of these things need to
get fixed if we are to abandon the old mixer workflow for shapes. It
will be such a nice tool if the little stuff gets worked out better and
they seem anxious for the feedback on it.
-Jeff
Bradley Gabe wrote:
Hey Jeff-
Welcome aboard.
In this case, it's not the fact that I have shapes and envelopes
combined. I think it's because I have to pre-create all of my shape
sliders and link them to expressions before I hand off the rig to the
shape artist to do his corrective work.
Keep in mind, this artist is more of a classical sculptor, so getting
him to do CG modeling has been wonderful. I don't want to burden him
with setting up the relational links or doing any of the rigging work.
Incidentally, the Shape Manager automagically dropping in new shapes is
not helping the situation.
I tried to go old school by setting up additional shapes using Store
Shape Key and direct manipulation in the Mixer. Unfortunately we're
finding that attempts to leave the Shape Manager for goodies it doesn't
provide results in the Shape Manager crashing upon return (we call this
the "jealous lover syndrome"). I have logged these bugs with Softimage
and they have fixed a few for the latest patch, however still not enough
to get it working consistently.
If we are the only ones hitting this wall, I'll let it go, and we'll
figure out a different approach. Otherwise, we need to fix it.
Hey Brad. It should work with shapes on top of envelopes. We use
that method here on top of Face Robot which has all kinds of stuff
going on in the stack. You can also go old-school and model on top of
your result, zero out the sliders, select the cluster and do Animate >
Shape > Store Shape Key. This will have the side effect of adding two
copies of the new shape to Shape Manager, but you can delete one. The
first method should work fine though, although I'm sure I don't
understand the complexity of your setup.
I would also like to be able to organize the manager better. The one
thing I really want is to be able to exclude shapes altogether. With
the mixer, you could have 250 shapes, but only use 3 of them. Shape
Manager just shows you everything, like it or not.
btw, Hello everyone. I just finally subscribed :)
-Jeff
Bradley Gabe wrote:
Thanks George. So at least the concept is feasible!
I think our main problem is that we are linking our shape sliders to a
custom key panel. So a single slider, "LeftSmile" is pushing an envelope
AND corrective face shapes.
Unfortunately, the workflow of this workaround is not going to work for
a more complex shape rig.
I think the solution to this workflow issue might be something as simple
as an option to ignore Cluster Shape Combiner Ops when storing new
shapes.
We've found a work around to this, Brad......I'm not sure if it's a
loophole or what.....but we can model a new shape with the other shapes
applied on the object.
You can test it out if you want.
With the Shape Manager open and the "Animate" panel showing, (Make sure
you're in Shape Modeling Mode) you can tweak the model's geometry with
what ever shapes you have dialed in......once you've made the changes,
"Zero out" your sliders (with key all off, this should only reset the
sliders til you scroll thru the timeline) then go to the "Create Panel"
and then back to the "Animate Panel"...you should have a new slider with
only the change and not all the other shapes multiplied on top.
There you go, test it out and see if it works for your project.
George
Bradley Gabe wrote:
We've been using it quite extensively on a creature project (100+ facial
shapes). I have to say it's quite a nice improvement over the older way
of working.
However, the one major workflow issue we have been having is that you
cannot work on a new shape while any older shapes are applied. I'm
hoping this is only an error on our part and somebody knows how to do
this:
Model the left side of your creature smile. Next, try to model the right
side of the smile while the left smile is applied.
Using the Shape Manager, presently we can only get 1 of 2 results:
1- A new shape is generated that includes the results of the old shape,
so we get a left smile shape and a left+right smile shape.
2- We can model the right side shape while the left is turned off, but
then the middle points that are affected by both shapes don't look right
when both shapes are applied.
In the days before the Shape Manager, it was easy to do this kind of
work. You would build your first shape and set the weight to 1 and leave
it on while you build your second shape. Then you could reduce the
weight of the first shape to 0 and store the second shape.
As far as I can tell, the Shape Manager won't even let us do the old
style workaround! If we manipulate shape clips directly in the Mixer the
Shape Manager breaks. :-/
-Brad
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bradley Gabe" <withanar(at)stanwinston.com>
To: <xsi(at)Softimage.COM>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 11:46 AM
Subject: Shape Manager?
Just curious. Is anyone else out there using the Shape Manager
extensively for production work?
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