Morphing in UDK 02

The past day I have worked to get the entire mesh into UDK and test the in-between blend shape deformation which I applied in Maya. I mentioned the in-between function of the blend shapes in "Block-Out Quadruped Werewolf Form".

Unfortunately I have come to a few conclusions which I will sum up:
* Wrap Deformer cannot be exported as FBX, FBX does no support this function
* A combined mesh from separate body parts (head, neck, torse, ect.) with blend shapes cannot be exported properly. This creates ‘mismatched morph target geometry’ in the exported file and breaks the blend shapes.

* Animations made on skeleton/rig which is skinned to the mesh does work with the blend shapes. Skinning is important as when done not appropriately it can break the mesh in the blend shape.

* A mesh consisting out of separate body parts skinned to a skeleton/rig gets combined in UDK into one Skeletal Mesh.
* Multiple blend shapes on one mesh get grouped into one ‘Morph Target’, the morphs/deformations are still selectable and get the name of the mesh with the title ‘Shape’. Example ‘BipedalWerewolfForm01_RightArmShape’.
This means that each body part getting its own morph, and when you have a lot of morphs the overview will become cluttered.
* An In-Between blend shape deformation applied in Maya does NOT work in UDK. UDK does not apply it, instead it increases the weight of the morph. So morphing from human form to bipedal werewolf form works, but then applying the third morph going to the quadruped werewolf form breaks the final result. See ‘UDK_FBS_Test02’ video which you can see below.

(The video below are the correct final morphed meshes. Do keep in mind that the morphing order is wrong. 

The human form transforms to the quadruped form, this should go from bipedal to quadruped)

The conclusions above basicly mean that most of the fixes that I mentioned in earlier notes, do not work in UDK. Wrapping, combining body parts and in-between blend shape deformations.
This means I will have to apply a different approach, which I have taken into account.


Concluding from the separate findings above I will describe the basic solution. Create a full body mesh which does not require any separate body parts, except for the ears, tail, teeth and tongue. This will minimize the amount of morph targets you will have to work with in UDK and create a more pleasant overview.

Begin creating the human form mesh. From this human form mesh you will create the bipedal werewolf form mesh and from the bipedal werewolf form mesh you will create the quadruped werewolf form mesh.

Apply the blend shape deformation on the human form mesh with the bipedal werewolf form mesh.
Keep a separate bipedal werewolf form mesh on which you will apply a different blend shape deformation with the quadruped werewolf form mesh.
Make sure you do this also with the separate ears, tail, teeth and tongue parts.

Create the skeletons/rigs for the for all three forms, skin this and test it with the blend shapes in Maya to see if it does not break. Animate the transformations. Export the human to bipedal form and bipedal to quadruped form separately to a FBX format.

This should give a result in which the body changes size and the topology of the character gets adjusted.

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The next step that I will research and test is the changing of the skin, or blending of the materials in UDK.
I will also try and see test the result of fur patches as planes growing out. Trying to get a nice blend with the transformations.

While I test this I will also continue to work and test my 'basic solution' creating solid meshes of the current block -outs, build out the rigs and create a simple animation for the transformation.