Hi, Working on a smooth transformation between human and werewolf and its working but isn’t as smooth as I’d like.
I’m lerping every vertex from human to werewolf vertex which is working perfectly. The issue is that I don’t know how to lerp the triangles in order for it to look smooth, at the moment I am just switching from the human triangles to the werewolf triangles which is a cheap workaround that gives me a blurry mess in the middle of the transformation rather than what I want which is a half werewolf half man creature.
Any ideas?
(May be useful to know: they have different skeletons and need it to work for animations)
[USER=“3140864”]MostHost LA[/USER] Thanks for your reply, I’ve started taking a look into this and am wondering if I’d need the same number of vertices on both the human mesh and werewolf mesh? I could definitely make the skeleton the same as long as the skeleton is dynamic and bones can get longer for example. Is that possible? Thanks again!
Bones can deform at runtime, the mesh has to have the same number of vertex to go from a to b.
thing is, if you need to add fur you can just add it as an additional mesh.
same thing with sectioning off the human parts, you can make them modular and include more verticis inside that aren’t visible when human. For instance. Its just a heck of a lengthy process to do it since you can’t just sculpt, you have to take what you have and modify it to taste without additions/subtraction of vertex.
I would focus on transforming a forearm first with 3 shape keys, one for nails, one for musculature, one for fingers. So you can activate them at different times and get some cool effects.
Also, UVs don’t change, keep that in mind. You won’t be able to have the transformed version use a different UV layout. Different texture, overt time, thats possible. But you need to build so that the geo looks good in both states with proper texel density, so I would unwrap the transformed version… and have the human texture be smeared/stretched.
You don’t mention if you are trying to do this in UE4 or using some kind of 3D app so as an idea seed this is how I would go about it using 3ds Max
First you need a master and it’s target. For the master we can use a rigged human and for the target the werewolf which was built off the human so it’s a valid target. Next we want the legs to be human and the torso to be werewolf.
Select the rigged human model and drop down the stack and add a morph modifier and select the werewolf as the target. When set to 100% the human should now transform to the werewolf.
To set it so that only the the torso morphs drop down further in the stack to the edit poly modifier and select the vertices that you want to morph, could be the other way around it’s been a while, and jump back up to the morph modifier and set it to 100% and you human torso should now morph to a werewolf torso leaving the selection alone.
To do a Werewolf in London type of transformation clone your human master with the morph set to 100% and make that a new target and jump back and forth between the master human and the base werewolf target making individual selection until the morpher has a full set of animated transforms and animate from human to werewolf and export to UE4 using the Alembic geometry cache exporter.
[USER=“3140864”]MostHost LA[/USER] Thanks again for your reply. Really going to struggle to keep vertices the same. I should have said that I’m only worried about shape as I already have a glow effect that will be constant during the entire transformation.
Transformation process:
Human starts to glow more and more
Glow is constant and Human gradually changes shape into Werewolf
Glow comes off Werewolf.
Trying to think of ideas to avoid vertices issue:
-I’m currently setting vertices max limit in LOD level to keep vertices the same but that won’t work for the new way that we are suggesting I imagine.
-Could set up 2 meshes just for transforming in Step 2 above, so a human mesh 2 that is almost identical to normal human mesh and same for werewolf. But the difference is that the human mesh 2 and Werewolf mesh 2 have same number of vertices?
If it doesn’t need to be perfect you could use something like the Blender shrink-wrap modifier to transform the warewolf model into the human model without changing the actual number of verticis.
Since you don’t need the material to actually work / the UV map doesn’t really matter too much with glowing effects, this would probably work OK.
The process would be to set up a shape key, add the modifier, and apply it with the key value maxed out.
At that point moving the slider should affect the transform.