Winning...

I have completely re-skinned my model form head to toe and it works again much better than before, I can literally see myself improving before my own eyes.

I will now apply some mocap to help with testing my skinning and applying and final adjustments

Phew... YAWN...

I have stayed up all night and worked for a straight 24 hours.  My morpher targets are now up and running again.  I have also neatened the reaction manager references which I originally did.

I just want to say how horribly buggy reaction manager is, it seems to be a topic of much discussion and frustration on the forums and this comes to no surprise after working with it for little over a month....

Looking to the bright side, the whole model and project is now much more improved, smoother and faster than previously, so it is actually a good thing I’ve re-done it as I believe I have a better quality project for it.

It has however taken more time from my schedule and left me thinking if I  am going to be able to complete this module on time.

Skinning Hell

It appears changing the morphers has affected the skinning I have done after doing a precautionary test.  I honestly can’t believe that I have to do yet another thing that I have already completed.  I is so degrading knowing I’ve wasted so many days because of these issues.

On the plus side, at least I can neaten my stack and have less lag... I hope...

Cracking on with it...

I have found the issue to be with the way i produced my morph targets.  I detached the head from the body and made clones of the head to save on the lag and overall polycount when creating the targets.  Once completed I re-attached the head and exported the morph targets into another max file.

This worked fine up until mocap was added and although nothing was found similar to mine on the internet, I believe it is to do with the fact that the skin and the morphers vertex counts are clashing and somehow casing the distortion.

I am going to have to keep my chin up and completely redo the moprh targets from scratch, this time using the entire mesh as a reference instead of just the head.

Morpher Hell

I don’t believe it...

I am at my lowest point in the project right now, I am closing in on deadline day and I have ran into yet another issue.  This time however, it is a HUGE problem.

I was finally done rigging my model with the morphers working (Still lagging like crazy!) so I decided to add some mocap files and test the rig in its entirety with both the bady and the morpher face rig in action together as required in my hand in.

 I have found that when applying motion capture data and moving my G.U.I face rig controls the entire mesh explodes and deforms into a huge mess of vertex resembling crumpled paper.

I honestly don’t know what to do here.  But I know it is going to take up a larger chunk of my time...

Modifier Stack Problem

Since my last update all has been going reasonably well, I have made some steady progress, working hard to ensure my morpher rig is done to a high standard.

I have ran into somewhat of a disastrous issue however...

My model is working with incredible lag and I have done a considerable amount of research as to why this is the case.  I need some level of fluidity to the frame-rate for the video capture process of the project, so I am labelling this high priority.

It appears that I have an overly cluttered stack after the issues I have had with normal’s etc earlier in the week.  I need to find a way if any to collapse areas of my stack.  This is all new to me so it is definitely a learn as I go project.

It turns out that the work I conducted during the research stage of my project didn't quite reveal quite the struggles that this project entails.

I am going to work relentlessly to get this modifier stack neat...  That is, if there is a way to do so without re-doing my morphers, I simply don't have the time...

Normal Bug

I have been working away on my model and noticed that when rendered; my head appears to have flipped normal’s.  After checking this is not the case.  I have again taken to the forums to uncover what my latest issue is.

It is hard to tell exactly what, but it appears to be a bug in max rather than a human error.  I have found a solution after hours of forum browsing...

I simply need to add to normal modifiers, one on top of the other into my stack; it has worked for some reason.  Although this has wasted yet more time on my project, I have finally resolved the issue.

Caricature Model weighted

I have finished the weighting process of my caricature model!  I am happy with the results and can now resume work on my realistic model.

Realistic Morpher Rig (Video Update 3)