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One of Morph-O-Matic's most powerful features, is its ability to work with .mom files.
Within the Global Parameters section of Morph-O-Matic, there are 3 buttons related to this feature;
save to file, load from file and auto load.
Here is how they work.
Here we have a head, fully animated with Morph-O-Matic,
if you click save to file, Morph-O-Matic will open a window, where several saving options are displayed.
Firstly, you can choose which channels you want data to be saved for.
Then you can choose to save the geometry, the channel parameters, the animation, global parameters, group setup, markers and even the poses.
All of these options can be saved individually or in any combination to suit your specific needs.
I will simply click save, choose a folder and save the file to disk.
When reloading a .mom file, you have multiple options as well.
In context, if a scene is opened with the character but no animation is loaded,
you could simply choose a .mom file which will automatically map all of the previously saved channels to their corresponding channels.
In this specific case, you could choose to load everything but the geometry,
as it is already part of the scene.
This could be particularly useful if a character is sharing the same naming convention as another.
A bit like a bip file: you can save the animation and load it back at any time.
On another note, if you have a Morph-O-Matic modifier applied,
a .mom file gives you the ability to load all of the morph target’s settings.
In this case we have an empty Morph-O-Matic modifier, with your previously saved .mom file,
you could simply reload the setup with the geometry, ready to animate.
You can load all of the geometry, none of the animation and create channels
and, when you have picked your options, click load.
Doing so, all of the channels are populated, with the proper deformation, ready to be animated with the latest version of the morph targets.
When working with a complex morphing workflow in a character pipeline,
we strongly suggest using the "auto load" function.
Here’s how this works:
When you enable auto loading, you can select a .mom file to automatically be loaded every time you open the scene.
In this specific case we want to auto load the geometry of this file,
therefore whenever the modeler updates the morph targets and overwrites the .mom file,
we can open this scene and Morph-O-Matic will auto load the geometry to populate all of the morph channels.
This way, animators will always have the newest version of the morph targets.
As you can see here the auto load icon has switched to orange which means it is currently on.
So when you open this .max file you will have the latest version of the geometry.
Can your Morpher do that? With Morph-O-Matic it’s only a click away
You could also want to simply load the animation,
so you can always have the latest version of the character animation.
This is quite useful in the assembly stage of a production, where you would put together the various animations such as the facial and the body animations.
Mom files are ASCII based therefore you can open and edit them through any text editor and easily access the data contained in the file.
this includes morph targets and animation keyframes.
This allows several of our customers to use a .mom file directly in their game engine.
As you can see the various saving and loading options available in Morph-O-Matic allow you to manage custom animation files
including geometry and not limited to animation, usefully saved in one file as independently accessible data.
We thank you for watching this presentation on how to maximize your workflow with the help of Dio-O-Matic.
If you are not already using Morph-O-Matic, don’t hesitate to download the trial version
and to check out other Di-O-Matic products on our website at www.Di-O-Matic.com
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