Delta Mush like / better skin deformation in Blender

Hi,
it seems that you can already get some of the “Delta Mush” magic inside Blender. From my experience - this approach gives a more smooth and natural look to plain armature deformations (when compared to automatic weights) and is pretty fast to setup.


The workflow is as follows:

  1. Create mesh
  2. Create armature
  3. Parent mesh to armature (Ctrl+P, With Automatic Weights, change With Automatic Weights to Armature Deform in Make Parent panel in Tool Shelf. Or you may use Limit Total = 1 for all vertices in Weight Paint mode after Automatic skinning) and adjust skin weights.
  4. Add Smooth modifier to mesh (not the Laplacian Smooth) and adjust its parameters (Factor:1 and Repeat:30 worked nicely for me)
  5. Create displacement map between mesh before and after smoothing (I am using Zbrush for this step, if you know how to do it in Blender, please let us know in comments)
  6. Apply Displace modifier to smoothed mesh with displacement map from step 6

There are a few limitations:

  • Blender Smooth modifier gives rather different results for meshes with different density. To get sharper deformations for elbows etc. you need to smooth a rather dense mesh. Otherwise it will smooth too much - like the first model on the left side in this picture and all you will get is a bend-tube like appearance of the elbow area.


  • It seems, that the mesh has to be quite “relaxed” with almost square polygons to give good results.

  • The armature joint placement is as critical as always.

  • As this is a “manual” approach, you will have to create new displacement map every time you adjust the smooth modifier. Having some different way of “binding” vertices between the original and smoothed mesh would be much more flexible.

Other than that, it tends to work surprisingly well.


BTW: The first model on the right has a second displacement map applied. The first one is to get to the base shape from the smoothed shape, the second one is to get the full resolution shape.

If you can push it any further and let the community know about it - that would be great. It seems like there is a lot of potential in this approach.

Here you can find some more interesting information about Delta Mush:

Voodoo magic
Semi Auto Skinning Framework