Do you know about SIGGRAPH Dailies? Imagine the coolest image makers (moving and otherwise) you know talking about how they do what they do. It’s an awesome time, and Stoveghost wants to be there.
Great dailies stories are all about the unexpected. In our case, it was a rigging challenge with a surprise solution. We had a dress that exploded into a tangled mess of polygons instead of animating smoothly. Our TD Andrew predicted it would take a week to fix.
Not great.
But! Andrew recalled that but a few short days ago, he had created a prop distortion tool to save on modeling time. The tool uses a lattice and control points to allow us to squash and stretch any mesh with out rigging or remodeling. A few button clicks later, the lattice was applied to the dress. It now animates beautifully and saved Andrew and Patrick days of work. Check out the video below to see the tool in action.