Delta Mush like / better skin deformation in Blender

Hi,
it seems that you can already get some of the “Delta Mush” magic in Blender. From my experience - it is pretty fast to setup and usually gives a more smooth and natural look to armature deformations.


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
  6. Apply Displace modifier to smoothed mesh with displacement map from step 5

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.


  • 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 to 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.

Some more interesting information about Delta Mush:
Voodoo magic by Mike Seymour
Semi Auto Skinning Framework from Hans Godard

Thank you for this great post and workflow !!!

Hi rattle-snake,
it is always a pleasure. Thank you for your kind words and have a nice day!

Hi RC,
this is really interesting, thanks also for the links.

Would you mind to detail what exactly is the problem in obtainig a displacement map from the smoothed to the detailed mesh in Blender (I assume there is some problem, otherwise you wouldn’t need to use ZB)?

Hi EnV,
my only problem with displacement in Blender was that I have never used it before and in my case it was easier to do it in Zbrush as the source model was made in Zbrush. And Blender went all “Error: No objects or images found to bake to” on me when I tried. So while I assumed it was possible to do it in Blender, I unfortunately couldn’t have said “do it in Blender” as I had no experience with it and would not be able to help anybody who would run into problems.

However I tried to do it once more in Blender a few moments ago and it worked just fine. So there should be no problem to use this approach completely within Blender (I changed the first post to reflect this).

Thanks a lot and enjoy your day!

Ok, thanks a lot for the replay. :slight_smile:
All the best.

P.S.: I assume that at point 6 of your list you meant “from step 5” and not 6, right?

Hi EnV,
yes, I meant “from step 5”. Thanks a lot for pointing it out.
Have a nice day!

that’s a really interesting technique… I had some trouble with having a good displacement map to get the model back to normal shape, but the result was quite good.

Thanks for sharing!

Hi Bernardo,
thanks a lot for your comment. It really works wonders - kudos to the guys from Rhythm&Hues.

To all of you who are testing this approach - it would be great if you could post some pictures from your tests along with problems (and solutions to those problems) that you have discovered. So that we all can learn something more about the technique and its real world usage scenarios.

Thanks and have a nice day!