mandarin.no

Having fiddled around with modo 401 and all its new features, I soon came to experiment with the animation features, including the new IK system. It works like a charm and when you’re used to working with modo, it just feels natural. It was very easy to rig a mechanical object that didn’t need to rely on deformations of the mesh to look convincing. But when working with organic shapes, the IK system got a bit trickier, that was until I figured out how to skin the IK.

My example doesn’t give you a perfect character rig, but it shows the basic principle. To make the mesh deform properly, you should look into using morph maps. I haven’t done so yet, but will most likely do it sometime soon.

I stumbled across a discussion on the Luxology forum (Bone deformations in Modo 302) that gave me a clue of how to do it. At first, I tried different ways of parenting the locators, deformers, channel linking and so on. But nothing seemed to do the trick. That was until I read a comment by Michael Blackbourn.

You dynamic parent the weightmap locators to a control structure.

After bending my mind around that rather minimalistic and somewhat cryptic comment, I suddenly realized what Michael was talking about. And it’s bloody simple!

Here’s how I did it:

1. Setup a chain of 3 locators, and apply IK to them.
2. Build a mesh with enough polygons to deform properly.
3. Setup 3 weight maps: one for each of the joints of the IK chain.
4. Add weight map deformers for each of the weight maps.
   And now comes the trick:
5. Hit the Compensation button (found under the Animation tab) to prevent the mesh from relocating.
6. Dynamically parent each of the weight map deformers to each of the locators of the IK chain.

That’s it!

Remember When dynamically linking an object to another you need to first select the child, and then the soon to be parent item.

I have made a short screen recording just to show how easy it is. Skinning IK in modo (About 20 Mb QuickTime) The example I show in the screen recording is not beautiful, but it shows the basic principle.

Happy animating!

As I was minding someone else’s business I felt the urge for a cup of coffee. Allthough I like regular coffee, I do prefere a nice cup of espresso. When I was in Berlin for the last Pictoplasma conference, I invested in a truly nice piece of a coffee making machinery – The Bialetti Grillo. Together with a Bialetti Creamer, you can reach a state of well being close to nirvana.

Anyway, I’ve always liked the Bialetti logo. The cute, but proud, little italian man. As I was waiting for the coffee to finish, I looked at the little man and realized it shouldn’t be difficult to make him in 3D. Not the smartest thought to get when you are trying to do some work, but it did appear anyway.

Trying to find the Bialetti logo in a resolution good enough to be used as a backdrop for the 3D model, I stumbled across a website where I learned this:

Between 1957 and 1977, Carosello [the Carousel] was a 10-minute spot of advertising broadcast every night on Italian national television immediately after the evening news. More like a variety show than hard-sell publicity, it was so popular that it became normal practice in Italian households that dopo Carosello, tutti a nanna (‘all the kids to bed after Carosello’). A familiar cartoon figure on Carosello was the ‘little man with a moustache’, who had his finger raised high in the air while his mouth formed the letters of the alphabet. He was a caricature of Alfonso Bialetti (1888-1970), founder of Bialetti Industrie S.p.A., the Italian cookware giant, and the inventor of the Moka Express coffee pot.

You can read the rest of the story at theflorentine.net.

I’m not the fastest modeller, but I wasn’t aiming for stress either, so I spent about 2 hours on the sketch. Still not finished though -Alfonso is missing his jacket and vest- but that’ll come sometime. With this sketch I wanted to catch the overall scale and feel of Alfonso. Later, I’ll use it as a template for a high resolution model.