zBoneWarp

This is a warp deformer for bones. Bones are represented as Maya meshes. In contrast to the harmonic warp, the bone warp keeps the bones straight and avoids distorting the boneheads’ geometry. The user provides the source and target cage meshes (such as the skin of the source and target creatures), the bone meshes to warp, and a landmark map. Landmarks are important anatomical features on the bone whose relative positions need to be preserved by the warp. The landmark map can be painted on the bone mesh interactively. A landmark is then placed automatically at the center of each “blob” (connected region with non-zero map values) of the painted landmark map. For each blob, the landmark position is computed as the average position of vertices in the blob, weighted with the painted vertex weights. Landmarks can be visualized by selecting the zBoneWarp node.

For more details, see Bone Warp.

This node can be created with the zBoneWarp command.

Attribute Meaning
envelope Interpolates between no effect (0) and full effect (1). Note that the standard deformer weights can be painted and they multiply the envelope.
recompute When on, the node automatically recomputes whenever an input changes. When off, the node does not recompute. Useful if you need to adjust a few parameters and you don’t want the node to recompute after each individual change.
tetSize The tet mesh size for the harmonic warp, in scene units. No tets will be larger than this value.
maxResolution Interrupts the computation if the smallest tet would divide the object into more than this many tets per side. For example, if maxResolution=100, then the tet meshing will abort if the tets will be smaller than 1% of the width of the object. This does not affect the result (assuming the computation was not interrupted). This usage is the same as in the zTet node. It exists to guard against crashing the tet mesher if tetSize is set to a tiny value.
surfacePenalty Controls the tradeoff between the smoothness of the output, and how precisely the warp obeys the target cage. This value is given on a log scale, and can be negative, zero or positive. Smaller values increase the smoothness at the cost of the warp deviating more from the target cage.
showTetMesh Turns the display of the tet mesh on/off.
boneTetMeshResolution A tet mesh is computed for each bone, to aid with the bone warping. This parameter controls the resolution of this tet mesh: the size of the tets is the width of the bone divided by this value.
maxIterations Maximum number of iterations for computing the per-bone deformer.