Delta Mush Modifier

I have been working on adding a new modifier to blender, Delta Mush. This modifier is based on a deformer used by Rhythm & Hues’ Voodoo framework (see the video on delta mush at: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/voodoo-magic/).

The purpose of this modifier is to smooth out the results of deformations without losing volume or destroying fine skinning detail.

The basic idea of this modifier is to smooth the mesh in a rest position, and record the changes in vertex position based on each vertex’s local surface orientation.
After this, each evaluation of the modifier applies the same smoothing and then the original surface detail is reconstructed by re-applying these rest pose changes in each vertex’s new local surface orientation. The effect of this is to smooth out deformations created by other modifiers etc (e.g. armature), while retaining fine surface detail.

usage:

  • add the modifier to the mesh, after whatever deform modifiers you which to smooth.
  • get the mesh into your desired rest shape (e.g get the armature into rest pose)
  • press bind on the delta mush modifier, this will store the rest positions of each vertex
  • pose the mesh, and tweak smoothing parameters as you wish

Patch ticket(see linked diff for an up to date code):
https://developer.blender.org/T43988 (note: the initial description is out of date)
Diff:
https://developer.blender.org/D1183

Windows 64 bit build:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6roST-R3IPJWVVmQmY0VFBUMTA&authuser=0

If anyone wants to make builds for other platforms etc it would be greatly appreciated.

1 Like

Demo video coming as soon as I have a few minutes to edit everything together.

Great addition to Blender, really looking forward to it. Keep it up!

Looks cool cant wait to try it :smiley:

Added a build, enjoy

It looks very usefull, I will test it soon

Great great news!! really looking forward to try it, thanks for your work! :slight_smile:

Interesting stuff! :slight_smile: will try as soon as I have time over

Might only be low res available at the moment, but it should be a good primer for people curious about the usage of the modifier. Doesn’t go into depth on vertex groups or creating corrective shapes, but those can be covered at a later time. Cheers!

Really nice! :slight_smile:

Wow, that looks really helpfull!

I’d still at least advise to have a competent looking weight map, but it does look like this will really speed things up and take a lot of the meticulous tuning out of the weighting process.

I hope this goes in real soon as a result.

Cant wait to get my hands on it :smiley:

Thanks for that video m9105826. On a very minor side note, one thing you can do when setting the bind shape is just disable the armature modifier temporarily, rather than clearing the pose.

For everyone trying this out, one thing I’d like to ask is do you guys prefer seeing the smoothing effect (with no re-projection) before it is bound, or you would you rather see the unchanged mesh until it is bound?

Bookmarked.

Brain lapse, that totally makes more sense than clearing poses. Thanks! Personally I’d rather just see the base shape before binding unless the Show Smoothing checkbox is ticked.

Is it currently possible to do the “Simulation clean up” stuff from the voodoo delta mush video? The one with the bull (?) body and there are moving folds/deformations in the mesh. I haven’t used it my self, but I guess it comes in handy when you have softbody simulations going on.

It wasn’t demonstrated in the video, but I guess that vertex groups works for this modifier? The option is there, but I don’t know if all the features are implemented yet.

BTW, m9105826, could you share the arm that you had in your video? It is way more detailed that any organic mesh that I have, so I would really like to fool around with it a bit too.

I agree with this.

Looks awesome…
what would be really helpful would be baking the skin weights achieved by delta mush on the mesh… to avoid the lag…
something like this video

Wow, I was just asking for this feature not long ago…blender community is awesome!

Awesome and big thanks for putting this together. Looking forward to it hitting trunk soon!