Bonus Tools Curve to Tube Mesh for Rigging Problem

[Anonymous]

Hi!

I'm trying to achieve a cartoon mouth with Curve to Tube Mesh tool, but apart from the first Control Vertex that is bound to the mesh it gives great result. However the first Control Vertex does not move the geometry as the others, it weirdly pushes the mesh further or closer which gives a terrible result. I played around with constraints that it creates but got no result.

I don't want to waste too much time with joints and clusters, I'm looking for a quick solution for a cartoon mouth. Is there any way to fix that?

The image is not the actual mouth, it is only for testing and I moved the mesh further to be more clear.

Thanks in advance!

[dinofiguera · Accepted solution]

I have never used this tool,   This is because I feel pretty comfortable with standard Maya tools in a case like this.
For your case the best solution is using the powerful  wire deformer.

1. go to main menu/deform/and click on "Wire".

2. select your geometry and press enter.
3. select your curve (which goes along the mesh) and press enter.
Now your curve will deform your mesh and the control vertices of the curve will be your deformation controls.
If you want to place this mouth on your rig, group geometry, curve and curve_base together. and parent this group to your rig.
If  you want to create cluster on the curve vertices to create animation controls, you can group all the clusters and parent the group to your mouth group but first you need to set each cluster to "relative" (via check Box on cluster properties) to avoid double transformations on the curve vertices.

Cheers,

D

[Anonymous]

This is amazing, never used Wire deformer before.

Just to add to your solution, I increased the Dropoff Distance quite a lot at the Input to make it work.

But yes worked perfectly, thanks a lot.