Need some advice on character modeling and animati

[Stremik]

Hi everybody.

I want to model and animate my avatar. Courage.

As many of you know, Courage is very stretchy.

This poses a fiew questions. In particular, how would you guys go about a

character setup in the situation like this. I'm thinking there would be

lots of morphing, right? Should the character setup be some sort of a

hybrid of traditional bone setup and morph?

Another question is, what should I keep in mind when I model him?

Topologywise.

Thanks guys!

I'll ask more questions when I'm past modeling.

[tallkien]

i guess that would depend mainly on how you want to stretch him, If its along the body you might prefer to just scale the spine (or any other) bones and either add springs or blends to do the secondaries

Not sure if a complete morph solution would interfere with capture regions, If they're locked down at frame 0 i guess you'd have no problem but if it needs to cook at each frame you might find yourself in some trouble, I have no idea how this works under the hood so I'll leave that for someone else to answer

[Stremik]

I want to do to him all sorts of things.

For example, like this....

[calin_casian]

hi,

I think you can split the character in 2 pieces.

-one for the body and rig it with bones and use bone scale as tallkien said. you can also use latices and blend shapes but since the body would not be so stretchy bone scale should be enough.

-the second is the head. The head I recommand to do it entirely on blend shapes. Blend shapes gives you the flexibility that you want and it's easy to control it.

So in the end you will have one piece courage mesh (the one you render) and 2 pieces courage wrap deformers (a lattice with points option turned on)

take care

calin

[Stremik]

Cool. Thanks!