Return of Bones

[Simon]

Curvy 2 had bones, and they are back in Curvy 4.0 as they are a handy tool for posing your characters.

These are the simplest bones I could imagine - you just draw the skeleton and start posing. This is best for gentle re-posing of your sculpt, and not intended to compete with the crazy rigs of full animation software... I had a look at some tutorials - one was 3 hours long and barely had a moving arm at the end of it all! Yep, no controllers, IK, influence mapping here - it's more like bending a rubber doll.



This example only has half the man's skeleton, so the right arm and leg squish around a bit. I've used 3 different meshes for each colour material and they share the same skeleton. You can add non-skinned meshes to the pose too and they will snap in and out of pose as it is toggled.

You don't even need bones to use the posing system. Every object has it's own posed and un-posed position, so if you like you can leave all your models in an easy to model front facing rotation, and place them into your scene using the pose mode.

Thanks to thebest3d for their bones tutorial - Helped remind me how it worked!

[mykyl]

That could be handy.

Mike

[Kato]

It's cool, i think your are right Simon basic bones are enough for curvy 3D just for posing, like you say no need IK or crazy rigs, maybe it's will be useful to have a library pose to store poses that we like and don't have only one unique pose, i know we can save with different file name with different poses, but library pose will be cool, nice work Simon.

[Simon]

The rig + pose is separate to the model, so you can save lost of poses into a file - then apply any of those poses to a model by dragging it onto the pose group in Curvy.

If you are careful with the rig, you will be able to reuse a pose on a different model with similar dimensions.

[weswes]

Hey,

In the tutorial posted above the diameter of either end of the bones can be changed in size. I can't seem to do that right now.

[Simon]

You change the Radius A and Radius B in Obj Props (Same place as Sphere Radius + Squash bars)

[weswes]

OH GOOODY !!!! THANK YOU

[Simon]

I'm updating Bones at the moment. I find that posing 1 million triangle models is such a pain that my design decisions are usually set in stone as soon as I stop sketching and start sculpting. That's not the way I like to work - I'd prefer to be able to experiment with poses and angles on my sculpted model.

So I've ripped out Curvy's old bone & skin system and am replacing it with a new one that should be able to pose multi-million triangle models in realtime with over a hundred bones (enough for facial expressions and finger movements).

No-one wants to rig and skin a multi-million tri mesh, so until I've got lo-poly baking working I'm relying on a new auto-rigger that aims to improve the look of the model at tricky joints. Should be a massive improvement on the existing Bones.

And as a bonus feature I'm adding a simple animation timeline - sufficient for my own gaming creation needs ie: Able to create basic animation loops like walk, run, idle, attack. Also suitable for quick vanity anims and flyarounds to show off your models from different angles or in action. But as usual I'm not doing animation the normal way - I find it is too slow and technical - so I'm using an approach without keyframes and seeing how that goes (Although you will be able to bake it out into keyframes to use in game engines/Blender etc).

[weswes]

your efforts are incredible. This is going to be so great.

[Simon]

Posing is going well - Not only removed keyframes, but also removing bone hierarchies too. If you want something to move you just move it. I recorded my first animation in the new realtime system (a blob with a head and an arm). Taking the skinning off the CPU and onto the GPU means it can run as fast on a million polies as it used to run on 10,000.

I'm now building a bigger human rig with working hands - if that goes well I'll add an expressive face, held objects, and secondary objects like bangles, belts, chains and ropes. And eventually try and get multiple characters posed in the same scene (Something that always amazes me from Classical Art how they can gracefully fit so many characters and so much action and emotion into a single painting/sculpture).

My focus is always on sculpting over animation - but having a feel for the bodies in motion with gravity, tension and balance makes for a better sculpture.

[weswes]

i can't wait to see it

[Simon]

Posing work is going well. It is now easy to pose a complex model by simply dragging the hands and feet into pose (rather than painstakingly rotating each limb into place in 3D). And, as requested, you can do good toon animation effects by over extending limbs on extreme poses (and in general moving all bones in all directions rather than having it all bolted in at the joints - good for things like shrugging shoulders and plenty more)

I've been adding a few extras too, easier ways to pose secondary objects like long ears or tails.

I've got some plans for facial expressions posing. Will be much easier to experiment with different looks while developing a piece - once again using the same basic tech as zombies and dragon scales, feel I'm at a happy nexus with tech from different areas sparking off each other. Definately going to try that normal map trick you inspired

[weswes]

That is great! animation will benefit greatly from having elasticy inbetween frames!

[Simon]

Revisiting bones - you can now have a heirarchy of objects hooked up to a skeleton so they all deform together without needing to flatten or join each part together.

[granada]

You’ve been busy again Simon , looking forward to playing with this