Andrew thanks for the reply.  I actually really like the direction that the pose tools were taken in .  The interactive feedback as you draw each joint is very responsive, easy to read and manipulating the joints is intuitive.

What I feel is a slight oversight is that although you have mirroring on joint creation there isn’t any mirroring while posing the joints.  Unless there’s something I’ve missed of course.  Of course you can make a full skeleton in, say maya, and pose it there but I really like the feedback of tweaking pose and sculpting on the fly within Mudbox.

Also.. what is the workflow for rigging and posing multiple object setups?  Would you recommend doing this in another app or will we get this function in Mudbox?

Thanks for your time.

Here’s an example of when I wanted to pose symmetrically.

I sculpted a character in a neutral standing pose as a study in cloth. But then I wanted to make a game model out of him, but the arms were too close to the body and the legs too close to skin, so I wanted to move them both out into a more usable A pose. I couldn’t do this symmetrically so the left and right sides were never perfectly matched up. That made setting up the bones problematic as I couldn’t just mirror them.

Another example. I recently made a monster head and needed to adjust the eyes. They were both parts of the same mesh. I couldn’t use posing to move them symmetrically and nor could I use mirroring as they weren’t connected geometry. I had to adjust them individually eyeballing the result.

Just wanted to add, like Andrew says.. If I ever need to pose anything, its done in Softimage, not in Mudbox.

I still dont quite feel comfortable with the joint tools in mudbox. If I use them, its 1 joint at a time.

Andrew, one thing I would like:

Lets say I need to open a characters mouth. I build a crude skel in softimage to do it, because its easier than doing it in mud.

I import as layer and morph the mouth open. Now the problem is the teeth and gum models need their own morph layer to open.

Right now, we have to go in and slide the morph layer on each object into the right pose we want. and we unfortunately have to go down in subD levels to do it.

It would be nice if we could either have slider linking, or a stored pose menu for sliders similar to how photoshop can store compositions of layers. This way you can store slider states for groups of objects and jump through various stored states for groups of objects such as the head and teeth/gums.

I also the feel the interface needs a bit of an update to grow with these more complex features. Pose and skeleton stuff seem a bit stuffed in.

Interesting suggestions to the pose tool.  I have been using the pose tool but find the weighting could use some changes to work more effective and faster.:)