HR - WIP - 045

HR - WIP - 045, originally uploaded by James D Thompson.

Via Flickr:
Early mesh test.

When creating this script i was also making a skeleton mesh. I was going to create a few more like a horse and bat but i decided not to so more time could be spent scripting.

However that didn't stop a few ideas floating around.

The main idea was that if its possible to blend between different limbs with Homology, then why couldn't this be adapted to the mesh aswell?

This early screenshot shows the human mesh being hooked to a human arm pre-rig, then blending to a bats wing. Obviously this will need more work (joints don't rotate) but you can see how quickly its get a new bone mesh with little effort.

With more time this could hopefully mean as you rig you also get a custom bone mesh. This might seem cool but quite useless as the bones are inside a character so never rendered. However these low-poly bones are designed for muscle skinning or any n-mesh skinning. Meaning that the end result could be used to drive maya c-mucles skinning.

This also ventures into the idea that if this is possible, then this could be used with a base mesh of a character, that way a low poly base mesh can be quickly created to aid in sculpting or quick reference for animation.

This could also reverse the was a character mesh is made. In traditional sculpting you would create a inner wire-frame with metal wires and start to build over them with clay, so your essentially making a simple skeleton and bulking the muscles ans skin on top. This workes well as your building a character on its bone structure, however in digital character creation we usually make a mesh and add the bones for rigging after... why? does it have to be done this way?

When you make a character you always pay attention to how it will animate/where the joints are but before there actually there. So wouldn't it be easier to get the skeleton in there so the sculptor knows exactly where things need to be instead of using 2D reference for the joints positions??

More research will be put into this but essentially, why cant we create a pre-rig of a character and mesh, so then this base mesh can be used for the sculpting of the character which is then already matched to its joints so that all its bones, muscles and rig can be procedurally built around the bone structure