I was just shown our correctives pipeline and it needs some help! It is quite rudimentary and contains a lot of hard-coded information, and I’m not sure what the best method of streamlining it is.
The current process is something like this:
[ul]
[li]A list of potential/supported poses is sent to a modeler
[/li][li]The modeler poses the model at the given values and sculpts+exports that pose if a corrective is needed (the full posed model is exported, not an ‘actual’ corrective of only the deltas).
[/li][li]In the rig build script, every potential pose is hard-coded in the script along with the joint rotations required to enable that pose. For single-axis correctives, which are driven by set driven keys, the values for the set driven key are hard-coded as well.
[/li][li]The rig is posed and the appropriate corrective pose is imported and an actual corrective is generated by comparing the deltas of the skinned meshed to the sculpted mesh.
[/li][/ul]
A couple of questions:
1 - How do you guys store corrective shapes? Do you store the fully deformed pose, and then generate the actual corrective when the rig is built? Or do the modelers export the actual (only deltas) corrective when they’ve finished sculpting it?
2 - How do you handle/keep track of poses? Do you store the full skeleton’s transformations for each pose (like in a dagPose node)? Just the necessary joint rotations? Do you store them in a module, or in a maya file with keyframes denoting different poses? Are your correctives dynamic so it’s up to the modeler to choose what is needed, and if so how do you keep track of what those should be driven by?
I’d like this to be set up in a way where it’s easy to add/remove poses on both the rigging and modeling end.
Any input is appreciated!