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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
6. Quick Tutorial – Morph Tool
Now we‘ll turn our attention to the Morph tool. As previously mentioned, it is similar to the PoseMixer except
that it makes it easier to create poses. There’s no need to create copies of the original mesh when using the
Morph tool. A single tag is all that’s needed to store the poses (the Morph tag). Among other things, this means
file sizes are much smaller than when using PoseMixer.
In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at the Morph tool and on the way explore the joint driven morph function.
The basic principle when creating facial poses is simple: add a Morph tag to the mesh, create “morph targets”
and move the points around to model the emotions in the morph targets. Simple. But there’s more...
Open the file “QS_Morph_Start.c4d”. This file contains two animations for the same arm. The only difference
is that the left arm uses a joint driven morph to improve the deformation and simulate muscles. In this case,
the morphing is linked to the rotation of the second joint. Rotating this joint by -90 degrees around its X-axis
morphs the mesh to the morph target.
Once you’ve finished looking at the example, open the file “QS_Morph_Final.c4d”. This contains the animated
arm before it has been morph-optimized. We need to add a Morph tag before we can use the Morph function.
Create the tag by right-clicking on the “arm_mesh” in the Object Manager and choosing Character Tags/Morph.
Notice that the Morph tag already contains a base morph and morph target in the Attributes manager — they
were assigned automatically.
The base morph is our starting position and cannot be deleted. The morph target is the target pose you need
to model. Unlike the base morph, you can freely create and delete morph targets.
Choose Cameras/Top in the editor to view the arm from above. Select the Morph tag if it isn’t already selected
and enable the “Auto Joint Driven” option in the Attribute Manager (more about this option later on). Click on
the “Morph Target” in the Attribute Manager and select the Points tool. Select two points in the area of the
biceps and move them down a little.