Luiz Elias releases Mush3D 3.0
Luiz Elias has released Mush3D 3.0, the latest version of his GPU-based tool for sculpting corrective shapes or adding secondary deformation to animation caches from other software.
The release adds a new Tetrahedral Deformation solver for mimicking the motion of soft tissues, and a Pose Trainer, for training corrective shapes on sets of custom reference poses.
Sculpt corrections or add secondary motion to existing animation caches
First released in 2018, and originally named Shot Sculpt, Mush3D can be used to edit geometry caches generated in other DCC software, usually imported in Alembic format.
Users can sculpt on top of the cache on a per-frame basis using standard ZBrush-like brushes, then keyframe the intensity of the corrective shape across the timeline.
That makes it possible to fix the kind of artifacts common in character animation, particularly around shoulders and elbows, without having to rebuild the entire character rig.
As well as sculpting corrective shapes manually, Mush3D users can also mask out a part of the mesh and apply a Delta Mush, jiggle or cloth deformation effect.
The workflow provides a quick way to generate plausible-looking surface deformation for 3D characters and creatures without having to run a full tissue simulation.
New Tetrahedral Simulation deformer mimics secondary motion of soft tissues
Mush3D 3.0 takes that approach to a new level with the new Tetrahedral Simulation deformer.
Tetrahdedral simulation is used in tissue simulation tools like ZivaVFX and, more recently, AdonisFX, to mimic the motion of muscles and soft tissues.
The new solver generates a tetrahedral volume beneath the region an artist masks out on a character or creature’s surface, generating realistic secondary motion for that region.
In the video at the top of the story, you can see it used in combination with the existing Wrinkle deformer to generate the motion of the dewlap beneath the creature’s neck.
Train custom corrective shapes using the Pose Trainer
Another major addition is the Pose Trainer deformer, a new example-based deformation solver.
Users can train it on a set of existing poses for a character – either sculpted manually, or based on 3D scans – then apply the resulting corrections automatically across an animation cache.
Training is done locally, and takes very little time – less than a second in the video above.
As well as full-body animations, the Pose Trainer can be used on faces, helping to improve the quality of the results when transferring facial animation from one character to another.
Price and system requirements
Mush3D 3.0 is available for Windows, Linux and macOS. It is now available rental-only, with a Pro subscription costing $980/year.
The free edition of the software includes the sculpting tools, but not the new Pose Trainer or tetrahedral simulation, and is limited to OBJ import and export.
Read more about Mush3D 3.0 on the the product website
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