Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Mirroring Shape Keys in Softimage

I have been trying t0 figure out why so many 3D packages refuse to make tools that are easy and intuitive. Continued searching has just proven to me that most packages try to do the same things as the others, just in a different, but still overly difficult, way. So I moved one of my personal projects from Maya into Softimage. Making new morphs was a painful process in Maya, and I know that rigging is a lot better in XSI, so I thought I would give it a shot. So I started making shapes, and wanted to figure out a way to mirror them easily. So I went out on the net looking for some tutorials. The only ones I really found were using GATOR. Not a very easy thing to do. So I read about using weight maps to do the mirroring. Not very much info. so after testing and trying and reading and watching, I tried to put it all together and finally figured it out. This method may be widely known, but unfortunately, there's very little demonstration or documentation on it, so I thought I would do that so others don't have to go through what I did. Once you have the weight maps made, Softimage actually makes it really nice and easy to separate your symmetrical shapes. Here's a quick demo of how it works:

1 comment:

JonasKärn said...

Thank you for a great tutorial. I've used GATOR for this in the past but this seems mutch easier. Softimage is great and all but one of the downsides are the lack of free tutorials so thanks again!
/Jonas