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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
MOCCA also includes three very powerful tools: Morph, Vamp and Visual Selector.
Like the PoseMixer tool, the Morph tag lets you create various facial expressions for your characters and morph
between them. The difference is that with Morph, you no longer need to work with copies of the original mesh,
as was required in Posemixer for R9. Your polygon object acts as the reference and a “base morph” (starting
position for all following morphs) and “target morph” are created in the Morph tag. You select the morph target
in the Morph tag and change the mesh...finished!
You create another morph target for each additional pose and model the poses one after the other. All the
expressions are stored in a single tag. Also, when using the Morph tool, there’s no need to worry if you have
to make changes to the mesh after creating the poses. The poses will still work! Suppose you’ve created all the
poses for your character, but decide it would look much better with a second nose. The Morph tool will still
happily morph between the poses.
Vamp gives you the possibility to transfer data from object to another, including selection information, Texture
tags, vertex maps and UVs. You can even transfer facial poses from one character to another!
Visual Selector is a great help with day-to-day animation. You load a render of your character into Visual
Selector‘s background (or use Visual Selector‘s default character picture) and place your character‘s controllers
onto the picture in the appropriate places. Visual Selector removes the need to keep looking for your character‘s
controls in the Object hierarchy. Everything is now represented visually and you can, for example, select the
foot controller by clicking on it directly in the picture. You want to move the eyes? No problem. Click on the
controller for the eyes directly in the picture.
You‘ll find the MOCCA commands in the main menu under “Character”, or you may prefer to integrate the
MOCCA toolbar into the layout (as described for the Dynamics toolbar in the “Dynamics” chapter).
If you’re new to the process of rigging characters, the following overview may help.
As with a real human, your character needs a skeleton of bones (or in our case, joints) in order to be able to
move around in the world. You place the joints inside the character’s mesh. The joints are linked to the mesh
via a Weight tag and Skin deformer so that each joint knows which part of the geometry to affect.
You can weight joints by selecting them and painting directly onto the mesh using the Weight tool. While the
Weight tool is active, the mesh is displayed black and the currently painted weighting is shown in white. The
joint now knows it should affect the white painted parts of the mesh only. In the active Weight tool mode,
weighting is shown for the selected joints. Each joint has its own weighting.
The joints must be arranged into a hierarchy in the Object Manager in a similar structure to the bones in your
own body. In real life, when you move your upper arm, the lower arm and hand move with it because they are
effectively children of the upper arm.
Likewise, in CINEMA 4D’s Object Manager, the elbow and wrist joints must be children of the shoulder joint.
If you move the shoulder joint, the child joints will move with it together with the mesh weighted to the child
joints — even though the shoulder joint is weighted to the upper arm only.
As previously mentioned, each child joint has its own weighting and moves the parts of the mesh not weighted
to the shoulder joint.
Don’t worry if this seems complex. All will be explained in the rest of this chapter.