Forums Rigging [APEX] Can animated characters be recycled?

[APEX] Can animated characters be recycled?

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Vivis
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Okay, so I'm almost ready with the initial setup for my character.

I set up the existing skull geometry using APEX and then used Scene Animate to re-proportion the whole thing, as shown in the image below.



Would it be possible to re-initialise and configure APEX with these changed joints and geometry?
I would like to extract the geometry of the joints that have changed since this scene animate.

In fact, at this point, it's probably better to just use a skeleton node to set it up again for the changed geometry, but I was hoping there was a more procedural way to do it.

I've used "APEX Scene Invoke" to get the geometry and original skeleton, but I'm not sure how to extract the Guides.skel.
Edited by Vivis - July 17, 2024 03:12:45

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sceneAnimate.jpg (437.8 KB)
sceneInvoke.png (524.7 KB)

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kodra
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I don't think you can "just" extract Guides.skel like this. The default bonedeform component doesn't output Guides.skel if I remember it correctly, so it gets "lost" after you invoke the APEX graph.

How to procedurally generate a new Guides.skel depends on your specific use case. If your Guides.skel and Base.skel have the same topology, you can just attribute transfer new Base.skel's transform and P to the old Guides.skel, for example. Or you can make a custom rig component that calls setpointtransforms on Guides.skel and output it.

Guides.skel is "ad-hoc" so I don't think there will be an universal way that works in every case.
Edited by kodra - July 17, 2024 04:56:21
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william_harley
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You can create another fktransform component at the end of your rig. and set the output skeleton to Guides.skel, then rename the pointtransform to something like guide_pointtranform. This will now output the guides and it will be deformed using a new point transform.

We are always updating the guides.skel whenever new controls are added to the rig
Edited by william_harley - July 17, 2024 12:11:30

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Max Rose
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Correct me if I’m wrong, it looks like you’re trying to recreate your apex rig after setting a new pose in the animate state.

If this is what you’re doing, it’s better to set this up within the skeleton creation, and pose your skeleton using a rig pose. You take the output of that rig pose, and pipe that into your pack folder. It’ll retain all of your joint information, so your rig will be set up automatically.

This allows you create something of a template rig that you can use anytime you want.
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Vivis
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I solved it by using the new fktransform with Guides.skel as output.

At first I was confused because I wasn't getting the output I wanted, but after changing the skeleton of the source to Guides.skel, I got the desired result.



Thank you so much William. I have a better understanding of APEX.
Kodra and MaxRose, thank you so much for your answers as well.
Edited by Vivis - July 17, 2024 21:22:10

Attachments:
get_guide_skeleton.png (244.0 KB)
source_guide_skel.png (8.7 KB)

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