Animation

[#1]

I got a big fish with several fins. For the enveloping I'd like to envelope first the main body with the main bones and then envelope the fins with another group of bones. I'd like to work this way to prevent the small bones to influence the areas of the main body and vice versa. Is there a way to do this or how do I re-weight certain areas to prevent unwanted conflicts between certain bones. I do this for the first time, so I don't really have a clue.

Coming from LW I'd try to set up two envelopes (one with only the main bones, another with only the small area bones) and blend those together via a weight map into one.

Can somebody point out a way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

[#2]

First envelope the whole mesh to the main bones -- don't worry about the fins yet.

Next select the whole mesh, choose Envelope > Set Envelope again, and pick the fin bones. This adds the fin bones to the original envelope deformation. Make sure that Automatically Reassign Envelope When Adding Deformers is off or else the fin bones may affect the vertices of the main body.

So far the fin bones are part of the deformer list but nothing is weighted to them yet. Select the vertices of the fins, choose Envelope > Reassign Locally, and pick the fin bones. Now the vertices of the fins are assigned to fin bones and the rest of the mesh is still assigned to the main bones.

[#3]

Thanks so much!!!

[#4]

I have a couple of standard cgfx shaders which I created in Mental Mill that I’ve been using in Softimage’s realtime view for some time. Softimage 2011 switched the way it uses cgfx files from referencing a file via an FX Shader node to loading them from an application/bin directory. This is fine and dandy, but I’ve noticed some peculiar things now happening with my lights that render my shaders useless.
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[#5]

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