How does the Shape Manager highlight the affected points?

[Alan Fregtman]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if anyone knows what internal hidden flag or view
attribute the Shape Manager uses to highlight the shape-afffected
points in green. Any clues?

I've been thinking of making my own cause I don't like how it
force-adds a compound clip with ALL shapes... even after I remove
them. (Each time you open it it makes sure the compound clip exists
the way it wants it to, with all shapes.)

Worse yet, it uses the very first compound clip it finds in the Mixer
instead of making a fresh one so if you favour more "classic"
approaches (those used before Shape Manager existed) -- such as having
a compound clip with two half-shapes of a smile and using the compound
weight to blend both sides at once -- you might find a ton of shapes
in your first compound clip that you didn't ask for.

I wish there was a preference so it didn't do that. I like it
otherwise! (I tried removing the clips it added after it's open and it
still seemed to work just fine. Obviously for brand new shapes they'd
need to be in the mixer to affect the Result so I understand why it
would want to add them; I just wish it was smarter about it if they
were already there.)

Am I the only weirdo who doesn't like the Shape Manager's shenanigans?
:p I swear ICE Shape Combiners look more tentative every day; none of
this Mixer clip pollution.

-- Alan

[Bradley Gabe]

Not at all.

In a rigging context, I loathe the Shape Manager workflow. It adds too much rig pollution, overwrites things too easily, forces you to work in ways that may not be optimal. It's like a servant who is trying to be so overly helpful, you end up tripping over him when all you want is to be left alone.

Yet, in a production artist context, it's actually quite good. When you are neck-deep in a shot and the geometry is not deforming the way you need, you can turn on the shape manager, quickly sculpt a corrective solution and save the day.

I hate the Shape Manager and wish it would go away (when I'm rigging) but love the Shape Manager and never want to lose it (when I'm animating).

[Alan Fregtman]

I agree. Definitely shouldn't go away, but I wish it wasn't so eager
to help me, like you said.

[Jeremie Passerin]

I'm only seeing the rigging part so I guess that's why I'd like to get rid of it and replace it with an ICE tree... so tempting as you said Alan.

[David Gallagher]

I hate the Shape Manager.

But I haven't found a good replacement for working in the Mixer. In the mixer I can solo/mute the shapes I want quickly and apply expressions.

Is there an ICE workflow that would allow that kind of flexibility?

Thanks,
Dave

[Gene Crucean]

Using ICE for this is extremely easy. And there are a couple ways to do it.

One easy way is to dup your model, tweak the geo and load it into your master mesh's ICE tree. Get those point positions and blend into master mesh. It really is as easy as that.

Of course you can keep it all on the same mesh too, but that requires a bit more complex of an ICE tree. Even so, it still is nothing too crazy. You just need to perform your modeling in ICE and set attributes to blend back in later.

--
[Gene Crucean] - [VFX & CG Supervisor/Generalist]
** Freelance for hire **

[Bradley Gabe]

There is little to no flexibility working with the Mixer and expressions.
You are limited to a handful of relationships, mostly 1:1 thinking, it takes forever to tune anything, and portability and expandability is limited.

With an ICE-based setup, you can copy/pase enormous branches and complex logic and do string replacements, which enables rapid symmetry as well as moving setups from A to B. You can delete and replace nodes, and the dangling reference hooks will pick them right up and keep going, unlike expressions which disappear if any of their dependencies are deleted.

Just this morning I was able to transfer a complex facial setup from one character to another by GATORing shapes & weight maps, and then doing a copy/paste on the entire ICE tree (see image below).



As far as soloing or muting shapes goes, I typically use a simple switch setup where I can toggle between my full deformation effect, and the specific shape I am checking. The ability to solo/mute test any number of combinations or setups quickly is actually far more flexible in the ICE environment, since you can rewire existing nodes into as many temporary, alternate setups as you think up.

[David Gallagher]

Sounds really nice! I guess I'll try to figure that out.

Maybe you can give a hint if I get stuck?

Thanks,
Dave

[Steven Caron]

maybe a DisplayCallback would work for you. remember the ScriptedSequencer by Andrea (http://www.softimageblog.com/archives/69)

s

[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

Wow, looking forward to a nice Vimeo video of how to setup a workflow like that. J

[Alan Fregtman]

Have you figured out a straightforward trick for using an ICE string for a Name input? Strangely, ICE won't allow strings in there.

[Dan Yargici]

Isn't that going to be a new feature in 2012?  I thought I read that somewhere....

[Bradley Gabe]

Sadly, no.
But, I do have a number of custom tools for doing string replacement on selected ICE nodes, auto symmetry, etc.

I do have to wonder if the additional node and logic clutter of auto string processing would make up for the benefits. :-)

[Grahame Fuller]

No, it's the other way around: reference to string.

String to reference won't be happening any time soon because of the way ICE works. It gets all its inputs before doing any evaluation. However, string to reference would require evaluation before knowing what reference to get.

gray

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Dan Yargici
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 02:27 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: How does the Shape Manager highlight the affected points?

Isn't that going to be a new feature in 2012? I thought I read that somewhere....

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Alan Fregtman <alan.f...@gmail.com<mailto:alan.f...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Have you figured out a straightforward trick for using an ICE string for a Name input? Strangely, ICE won't allow strings in there.

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Bradley Gabe <with...@gmail.com<mailto:with...@gmail.com>> wrote:
There is little to no flexibility working with the Mixer and expressions.
You are limited to a handful of relationships, mostly 1:1 thinking, it takes forever to tune anything, and portability and expandability is limited.

With an ICE-based setup, you can copy/pase enormous branches and complex logic and do string replacements, which enables rapid symmetry as well as moving setups from A to B. You can delete and replace nodes, and the dangling reference hooks will pick them right up and keep going, unlike expressions which disappear if any of their dependencies are deleted.

Just this morning I was able to transfer a complex facial setup from one character to another by GATORing shapes & weight maps, and then doing a copy/paste on the entire ICE tree (see image below).

[facetree.jpg]

As far as soloing or muting shapes goes, I typically use a simple switch setup where I can toggle between my full deformation effect, and the specific shape I am checking. The ability to solo/mute test any number of combinations or setups quickly is actually far more flexible in the ICE environment, since you can rewire existing nodes into as many temporary, alternate setups as you think up.

I hate the Shape Manager.

But I haven't found a good replacement for working in the Mixer. In the mixer I can solo/mute the shapes I want quickly and apply expressions.

Is there an ICE workflow that would allow that kind of flexibility?

Thanks,
Dave

On 3/16/2011 12:41 PM, Jeremie Passerin wrote:
I'm only seeing the rigging part so I guess that's why I'd like to get rid of it and replace it with an ICE tree... so tempting as you said Alan.

On 16 March 2011 17:27, Alan Fregtman <alan.f...@gmail.com<mailto:alan.f...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I agree. Definitely shouldn't go away, but I wish it wasn't so eager
to help me, like you said.

[Alan Fregtman]

Speaking of selected ICE nodes... how do you query that? The Selection
object with some compounds selected just gets me the object selected.

It's not in .Subcomponent, is it?

[Steven Caron]

you get it from the view context attribute for the ice tree.

s

[Stephen Blair]

You'd go through the view.
http://xsisupport.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/getting-the-contents-of-docked-views/

Or add a custom menu to the ICE Tree view.

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Alan Fregtman
Sent: March-16-11 2:55 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: How does the Shape Manager highlight the affected points?

[Ciaran Moloney]

No, it depends how you select it. If you select the node in the explorer, then you can use Application.Selection.
But if you want the selected node in the ICE Tree viewer, then you need to query the view attributes for selected nodes. Unfortunately, since you can have multiple nodes selected in multiple ICE trees at once, there's no way to tell which ICE Tree viewer you're in. Maybe if you rely on the ViewManager, but who the heck puts their ICE viewer in that?

[Adam Sale]

If anyone interested, I built a bunch of shape rigging compounds to help with articulating the face. The compounds rely on shape point positions, and completely bypass the mixer and shape combiner . Whats nice, is I can still go back in and use the shape manager to add , or fix shapes using the cluster shape combiner, then blow the combiner away when I'm done with updating. I usually preserve the ICE tree in the animation stack as opposed to the shape modeling stack as it tends to get baked down if I use the shape manager. I've been meaning to put this up for the community for a while, but never gotten around to it.

Initially it was a huge monolithic compound that encompassed brow, eye, mouth and tongue, eventually it made sense to break into smaller compounds for manageability.

I will do a write up on usage at some point, but I figured the graph may be useful for people to pick apart. 

Adam

[Rob Wuijster]

Thanks for that Adam. Very generous! :-)

It's great to see people come up with these different workflows build with ICE.
I'm very curious of what will come out next, now we have even more possibilities with ICE in 2012.

Rob Wuijster
E ro...@casema.nl

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