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August 2001
Chicken Head Setup
by Kris Kapp -- page 5
(Your first dance
with the chicken? Get caught up with the first chicken scratch
here)
Continued from
page
4
Next paint the values for the rest of
the joints. The SkullJT is going to have the majority of influence on
the mesh. You want the neck of the mesh to deform smoothly when you
rotate the joints.
Painted weight
values for the NeckTwistJT
Now hide the head mesh and joints so we can concentrate on the beak. It
might seem that I am setting this up a little strange, but I have my
reasons. Once we have the beak bound to the joints and deformation
curves added we can attach the beak skeleton to the head skeleton.
Joints for the
beak.
I created the following joints for the beak: jawbone, JawboneMidJT,
JawboneEndJT, UpperBeakJT, and UpperBeakEndJT. Again, the naming is a
little wonky, I wasn’t at my best at when I was doing this step.
If you notice, the way the structure is setup, if you rotate the
Jawbone, the UpperBeakJT will rotate with it, which is what we don’t
want. But for the purposes of binding the mesh, it is OK for now.
Start painting the weight values for the beak. Flood the two end joints
with a value of 0. Toggle the hold option for these two joints and
continue painting. You might have to rotate the UpperBeakJt to get
access to the JawboneMidJT influene area. You also might find it helpful
to change the paint mode settings under the Misc. Tab from projective
paint to UV texture paint.
Weight values for JawBoneMidJT.
Creating the Defomers
I found out with my last project that blend shapes are awfully slow when
used with wrap deformers. So instead of using blend shapes to drive the
face, I’m going to use curves as influence objects to the bound skin. I
can still set up the controls using Set Driven Keys so it works the same
as blend shapes but it’s much faster. Hide the beak and jaw bones.
Display the poly head and head bones. Create a curve where the eyebrow
region is on the mesh. The easiest way to do this is to make a copy of
the head mesh and make it live so you can snap a curve to the vertices.
When you are done creating the curve you can just delete the copy of the
head. (I got this trick off of the face setup video from Alias.) Select
the curve and group it to itself then parent the group to the SkullJT.
Curve on live
surface.
Wireframe of curve
for eyebrow.
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