Cineversity

Hello

I’m trying to create a series of assets for import in software such as Unity.  I’m doing some very simple animations with joints, essentially bending a piece of geometry.
I realize that if I want to use PoseMorph, I have to put the posemorph tag on the joints.  However what I would like to do is store the animation states in the geometry rather than the bones.
Is that possible?  Does it make sense?
Here is my super simple project file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/a50uhm8xlm6hsim/PoseMorph_test_1.c4d?dl=0

Thanks!

Hi Alex,

The answer is somewhere between yes and no. Let’s have a look at the state of 0% and 100% of your PoseMorph example (Current State to Object). If you just use the 0% model and have the PoseMorph tag added to this object, then drag the 100% object into the PoseMorph, it would move all points from the 0% to the 100% in a straight line. Not nice, and that would be a “no”.

If you re-create the Joints influence inside of the PoseMoprh with a rotation and place the different axis where each Joint was, then I could see that. But you said, this is the simple model so My “yes” here would be uncertain.

What is the initial target?

Cheers

Hmm, basically I’m trying to create something like this : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fcbgu86xibiwuhe/AADBjXsWBn20s3x9-KD7INm7a?dl=0

I did this with bend deformers, but the type of animation I have to do next is more complex, where the bending continues all the way and I scale the “paper” down. 
I also started using bones because I have to bring this animation into some real-time software (TouchDesigner or Unity, still TBD) and I they both support bones.

However I’m having issues with the bones approach in both those packages (not sure why) and was asked to output blend shapes instead, i.e posemorph.

So that is the overall picture of the project, does it make sense?

Thanks Sassi!

Thanks again, Alex, for the files, it always helps me to understand the project more, and narrow the problem.

The Joints (bones) need to have their own keyframes to work.

In the initial file, you had sent to me, the “scale” of the joints were not done correctly, and I guess there was the problem to get any further step working.

Please explore the FBX file. I have baked the keyframes into the joints (rotation and position). Please do not use points in the PoseMorph for this.

At the moment the FBX works for you, I’m happy to share more details.

BTW, I’m not aware if there is any change in terms of visibility for planes (back-side, invisible).

Here is an entirely new version of your initial set up.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/Cb08r2XCJHZUoybWk0RsaM9x8A8DunVsFE603leChKH

It is my understanding that Deformers like the Bend deformer is not supported in Unity. No idea if that is correct.

The idea to use Blend-shapes for an animation like this will have huge shortcomings, as mentioned above. Except you use a lot of those. Besides exporting an Object-Sequence and use perhaps only a few of them, the Current State To Object command seems the only alternative. I checked the manual of Unity, and it doesn’t support PLA animation from Cinema 4D), perhaps there is a different way if so, I would reduce the mesh density.

For now, I would like to focus on getting the Joint based animation working, as it seems the best way, with little animation information and single information about the mesh, it should be more appropriate for real-time setups.

All the best

Hey Sassi!  Thanks for setting this up!  So how did you export this?  As a baked sequence in FBX?
The only issue I see with this approach is that in Unity the joints don’t appear as modifiable, and it is hard to tweak the speed of the animation.  From looking at some or Rick Barrett’s tutorials it seems like it is possible to bring in Joint animations in Unity, but somehow I haven’t figure out how to do that.

The advantage of the blend shapes is that Unity offers a lot of control over them, so maybe a different question would be to ask how to create a “curling” animation in C4d that uses blend shapes/pose morph instead of joints or bend deformers (which are, as you said, not supported).

What is the issue in your mind with blend shapes?

Thanks again!!

Alex, Blend-Shapes uses points with the same point ID as information. In Cinema 4D such files would move the points between to of them as a straight line. I’m not familiar enough with UNITY to tell if Unity has an option to interpolate among four or more to get a curved move.

The joints become visible at the moment you put the object into the scene and inspect the Hierarchy. The joints are visible after unfolding the object’s hierarchy.
Screenshot
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/wuCWSoTQOXaFkFA7LkzSLxDMIEYxgkZEkyIa8C7vbyq
The animation needs to be dragged on the parent.

More about animations in Unity is here: (No idea how far you went into the manual)
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-AnimationClip.html#ClipProperties
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/TimelineSection.html

A more significant number of tutorials is here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG08EqOAXJk_YXPDsAvReSg

FBX: I gave all Joints a Key Frame on frame zero, then I used the Timeline> Function> Bake Object. Since I had saved the file before, I didn’t create a copy, to keep the file small. Then I exported it as FBX.

Cheers