Autex wrote:I am looking forward to that. I'll have to test if a bone from one MorphDials layer can be controlled with a bone from another MorphDials layer. (Maybe you already know if this works)
If that works, and the viewport update would play nice, one could split a basic facial rig into parts, for example eyes and mouth. Mouth and eye expressions each have their own MorphDials layer within the head layer, and then over everything outside of that is another MorphDials layer that controls actions within those two, allowing you to create complete expressions at once. For example, BoneDials mouth creates Sad mouth. Bone Dials eyes creates Sad eyes. Bone Dials main takes those two bones to create complete Sad expression. This would allow the animator to create complete expressions at will, or mix them up (Sad eyes with different mouth for ex.) by going back into the hierarchy. Or maybe I'm over complicating this. I know that when bones are all on one MD layer you can move them within the vicinity of another that controls them (Sad_mouth;Sad_eyes;) and achieve this as well... but if you have a lot of different expressions, that may be a lot of bones to organize on one layer.
Hehe, hierarchical MorphDials, eh? It is definitely theoretically possible, and I seem to remember referring to the possibility when I first introduced my MorphDials scripts at the start of this thread. I also remember saying that it hurt my brain to think about, and that certainly hasn't changed, lol.
It will definitely not work with the scripts as they are, though. For one thing, morph blending is automatically disabled on layers named "MorphDials". This is of course to stop a MorphDials layer from influencing itself.
The other issue is with scope. At the moment, a MoprhDials layer affects all of its siblings and all of their children. If another MorphDials layer was encountered, you would want the top MorphDials layer to affect it and then stop there without affecting not any of the new MorphDials layer's siblings. This new MorphDials layer would then sort of take over as the controlling MorphDials layer for the remaining layers in the hierarchy.
I can't see this going into the free standard version of MorphDials, but perhaps in the advanced version that I also intend to make available in my CP store, this time for $.