The Mesh Deform modifier has been introduced in Blender for the production of the short open movie Big Buck Bunny and it's a very easy and quick way to skin medium and high resolution characters' meshes. Although the utility of this modifier really shows the skinning of fat, chubby characters, it will be useful to see the way it works even if applied to a quite skinny character such as the Gidiosaurus.
First, we must prepare the deforming cage, which is a simplified low poly mesh totally enveloping the character's mesh; to do this, in our case, we can start from an already made object:
Gidiosaurus_skinning_03.blend
file.Gidiosaurus_base_mesh_02.blend
file. Then, click on the Object
folder and select the Gidiosaurus item.Now that the deforming cage is made, we can go on with the skinning:
Gidiosaurus_mesh_deform.blend
.The Gidiosaurus_cage is a very simple mesh. Therefore, it is very easily skinned to the Armature (we didn't do it in our case, but obviously, when necessary, the automatic weights assigned by the parenting can be easily edited as in the Editing the Weight Groups using the Weight Paint tool recipe) and is therefore deforming, through the binding of the Mesh Deform modifier, the more subdivided Gidiosaurus mesh.
In fact, if everything went right, now we should have the Gidiosaurus body correctly deformed by the cage only for the vertices that belong to the mdef vertex group, while the Armature, which also deforms the cage, is still taking care of the vertices outside the group; to check this, just try to pose the rig and alternatively disable, in the Object Modifiers window, the viewport visibility of the Armature and Mesh Deform modifiers for the mesh.
Note that even we didn't apply the Mirror modifier to the cage object; the Mesh Deform modifier works correctly anyway, exactly like the Armature one.
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