I'm James Taylor, and this is my MAYA 2016 DELTA MUSH character skinning tutorial
if you're looking to simplify the whole character skinning process, you're in luck,
Delta Mush is basically a one-click solution! I'll start the usual way -
I select my base mesh, shift click to select my root node, and then just do
Skin > Bind Skin. And this is just a default GEODESIC VOXEL bind, so we
know it's not going to work so great. And like usual, we can see the exact same
errors that we usually get, the second we start rotating things around.
Instead of painting skin weights, I'll select my mesh, go to the Deformer
menu, and choose Delta Mush. And now when I move my joints, I see that I get a much
better result! In fact, it almost looks perfect at first glance. However, if I
switch over to some poses that I have already created, we see that in more
extreme poses, the Delta Mush modifier causes some weird errors. For example, the
elbow is all wrong. And if I look at the head, we see that none of the weighting
on the head matches up to the
the weighting on our accessories. So what I have to do in this case is use my
Paint Skin Weights tool to correct the Delta Mush modifier. So I can go in and I
can try and add weighting using Paint Skin Weights, but in the case of the head it's
often easier to just use the Component Editor as we saw in the example earlier
in the video (this video is an excerpt from a longer video!)
Alternately, once we have those verts selected, we can activate the Paint Weights
Weights tool and just flood the weights so that those verts are set 100% to the
head joint. With the elbow I can do basically the same thing - I can go to vertex mode,
select the verts on the centerline of the elbow; select the elbow as the
influence, and then just flood it, to set the verts to the correct joint.
Then I can do the exact same thing for the row of verts above the elbow - just
weight them 100% to the bicep roll bone. And with the row of verts below the elbow,
I select those and the verts in the forearm, and flood them 100% to the elbow joint.
So we can certainly fix things manually
using the Delta mush modifier. But there are also settings for the tool itself that can
make things a little bit easier. So I'm going to switch over to a more extreme
pose, that will really test the deformation of character. I'll select
the mesh, and then click on my Delta Mush modifier over in my Channel Box, and the
first thing I look at is ENVELOPE. And ENVELOPE usually toggles between 0
and 1. Envelope just turns the modifier on and off. When I turn the envelope off,
I see that I lose volume in certain areas, like under the arms, and in the body, and
around the knee. So I'm going to leave my Envelope at 1, because I do want
Delta Mush to be turned on. What I'll look at next is SMOOTHING ITERATIONS.
With SMOOTHING ITERATIONS, the higher the number, the more Smoothing Iterations
it's going to perform. And that means that the smoothing effect is going to
become more and more noticeable with higher numbers. Now when I turn on and off the Delta Mush
modifier, we see I'm losing even more volume because of those Smoothing Iterations. So I'll set that
back to 5. What I'm really going to adjust is the SMOOTHING STEP. The higher
the number of the Smoothing Step, the faster the Delta Mush modifier will
perform. Unfortunately reducing this means it's going to give us less accurate results, which usually
means we're gonna be losing a lot of volume. The default value is 0.1, and I
tend to set it below 0.1. So: 0.5 or 0.01, and then we can combine that
with adding more SMOOTHING ITERATIONS, until we get something that smooths the
areas where we need it to be smooth, and still maintains volume. So changing these
parameters can help with the problem areas that we are seeing in the chest
and hip region, but if I tumble around, I see that I'm losing a lot of volume in
other areas - like having problems in the chest and in the knees. So in order to fix that,
we're going to have to take a slightly different approach. We're going to add a
set of helper bones to the chest, so that when the character deforms, the breasts
hold their shape. First things first: I go to the Skeleton menu and choose Create Joints, and I place a
joint in the chest, and these helper joints are just here to hold the position of
the vertices. Once that's positioned, I select that bone, and then select the
chest, and parent it to the chest. Once it's parented, now I can use my Mirror
Joints tool to flip it over the axis and make it symmetrical. Now the joints
have been added to the hierarchy, but they're not affecting the skin at all
yet. So I have to select the skin, and then shift click both of the new joints,
and then go to my Skin menu, and all the way at the bottom there's a menu for EDIT INFLUENCES
I need to select EDIT INFLUENCES, and then ADD INFLUENCE. And
in theory, this will add these new bones into my skin, and if I move, we see that
it does affect the skin, but we see that it affects it too much. It breaks our
skin weighting. So adding influences is one way to do it, but I usually do it in a
different way. What I'll do is, I'll select my skin, I'll make sure that it's
on it's own display layer (over down at the right hand side with the layer
manager), I'll hide it, and then I'll duplicate it and add that duplicate to its own layer.
Then I'll bind that duplicate to my skeleton, and it will have the normal
default weights. Then I turn off the display later for the duplicate, and turn on the
display layer for the original. I select the original, I turn its display layer
off, and then I turn on the duplicate's display layer, and shift click the
duplicate. Then I just go to my Skin menu, and choose COPY SKIN WEIGHTS
And this process has taken the skin weighting from my original, and copied it onto
the duplicate. The big difference is, the duplicate is weighted to the skeleton with
the added helper bones on the breasts. So now I'll be able to paint skin
weights on that region, and lastly I reapply the Delta Mush modifier and
adjust the parameters to match the setup that I had before. This definitely sounds
complicated, but once you get the hang of it, it's super easy. Now I'll go to my
Skin menu and activate my Paint Skin Weights tool, and select the influence for
one of the breast helper bones. And I'll see that none of my verts are
being affected by that joint. And that's simply because we copied skin weighting
from a mesh that was not being influenced by those bones. What I'll do is I'll
select some verts in the breast region, and then reactivate my Paint Skin Weights
tool, and now I can use either the brush tool or the flood command to just
globally add weighting to those verts. from that bone. Once I've added the weighting I
can return to my Bind Pose and once I'm in the Bind Pose, I can go to my Skin
menu and use Mirror Skin Weights. Now I can move those joints around and test them,
and make sure that everything is functioning correctly. Once I'm satisfied
with that, I switch back into that more extreme pose, and now I can compare the
Delta Mush modifier to what was happening before. Because I have those
added joints in the chest, those verts are holding their position better, we're
losing less mass, things look more natural. OK, now this vid is just an
excerpt from my downloadable Extended Cut video on Maya 2016 Joints and Skinning. If you like
this vid, definitely check it out
I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching!