Screwy Geometry Editor/ REALLY screwy rigging
JOdel
Posts: 6,288
DS Pro V. 4.9.2.70 64-bit. iMac running El Capitan.
I'm trying to get a workable version of a simple figure from a class that I am taking which uses Maya. It needs to be grouped and rigged. It doesn't need to be weight mapped. I need to render a bunch of thumbnails (we are NOT to use Maya for these thumbnails) and it should be simple enough to do them in Studio.
Or so I thought. I can import the .obj file from Maya, and get the pieces assigned to groups. But that red stain that shows up when a face group is selected in the geometry editor does not follow suit with where the polys are assigned. There are floating groups of red ghost polys still showing up after I've assigned the polys into their proper group. It should be noted that Studio crashes just about every time a group of polys has been selected and assigned (and saved). Also that turning off various face groups also takes the corners of the bounding box invisible with them.
So okay, the polys visibly show up when I turn on the correct group, so I thought that was solved.
I moved on to the rigging. I'm using Blondie9999's tutorial which was written for DS 4.0, so there are a few slight hitches while I look for where things have moved.
In the first place, once the bones are assigned and the joint rotation order have been set acto the tut, and I hit 'create', the bones created sho no resemblance to what they are supposed to be. The are going in all different drections and are attached in the wrong heierarchy (the hierarchy was correct, I don't know where this bone layout was coming from).
And what is more: the floating ghost polycons are now turning up in the scene and attached to their original groups rather than the ones to which they had been saved.
Where is this coming from?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
DS Pro V. 4.9.2.70 64-bit. iMac running El Capitan.
I'm trying to get a workable version of a simple figure from a class that I am taking which uses Maya. It needs to be grouped and rigged. It doesn't need to be weight mapped. I need to render a bunch of thumbnails (we are NOT to use Maya for these thumbnails) and it should be simple enough to do them in Studio.
Or so I thought. I can import the .obj file from Maya, and get the pieces assigned to groups. But that red stain that shows up when a face group is selected in the geometry editor does not follow suit with where the polys are assigned. There are floating groups of red ghost polys still showing up after I've assigned the polys into their proper group. It should be noted that Studio crashes just about every time a group of polys has been selected and assigned (and saved). Also that turning off various face groups also takes the corners of the bounding box invisible with them.
So okay, the polys visibly show up when I turn on the correct group, so I thought that was solved.
I moved on to the rigging. I'm using Blondie9999's tutorial which was written for DS 4.0, so there are a few slight hitches while I look for where things have moved. Although I don't need it weight-mapped, the figure setup would not let me bring it in unless I had that selected.
And that was a complete debacle.
In the first place, once the bones are assigned and the joint rotation order have been set acto the tut, and I hit 'create', the bones created sho no resemblance to what they are supposed to be. The are going in all different drections and are attached in the wrong heierarchy (the hierarchy was correct, I don't know where this bone layout was coming from).
And what is more: the floating ghost polycons are now turning up in the scene and attached to their original groups rather than the ones to which they had been saved.
Where is this coming from?
ETA: Further screwyness. The only selection mode in the geometry editor which works is the Marquee selection. But it doesn't work on groups of floating polygons. You have to click on each and every one in order to select them. At least the Comand key to select and the Option key to deselect still works. This does not seem to have any effect whatoever on the red ghosts.
Note: I do not know where this duplicate of the thread came from. The mods can delete it, if that can be done without losing the edited version which seems to be separate.
Working out of Maya introduces headaches all its own. The best Autodesk OBJ output is in 3DS. Maya's grasp of OBJ is tenuous at best. I use the Maya->3DS bridge then output OBJ from there. If that fails (and it does -- often) I just write out a .ma and use 3DXchange to do the job.
Kendall
Merged threads.
Well I managed to get the geometry fixed. But the rigging is still all over the map. And having the program quit on me every 5 minutes doesn't help.
The bones point in all kinds of directions and aren't even slightly close to the actual model. The head, chest and pelvis bones should NOT be pointing horizontally. The thigh bones should not be pointing UP. They also ought not to be floating off in space. They are nowhere where they should be. And I can't see any way of getting them to point in the direction the limbs bend.
What is wrong with this program?
You need to change the rotation order on those bones...YXZ is typical for that group. The thigh bones probably need to be aligned
I got it sorted eventually. But it turns out that the geometry was still borked. I'd spent a couple of hours very carefully reassigning all the floating polys to their proper face groups, saved the file repeatedly (because the program was quitting on me left, right, and center). Finally had the geometry where it needed to be. Or so I thought.
Then I fought the rigging into submission, memorized the rig. Saved again, and went to test it, and bedamed if all of the floating polys weren't back in their original groups, screwing up everthing. I'd SAVED the damned file. The polys ought to have been where I'd put them. I'd turned the groups on and off. There were no ghosts. The groups were all intact. But once I'd rigged it, the damned polys were off and floating again.
If you select one of the floating polygons do others also light up? I'm wondering if there are (very) badly defined polygons which should really be several polygons - severely wrong mesh would also explain the frequent crashes (though those should still be reproted as bugs if you can make them happen on demand - ideally everything should throw a manageable error, not a crash).
Oh, I'm sure the mesh exported badly. The figure is mostly built up of NURBS, which don't export to .obj at all. There's a convert NURBS to polys command which creates a dublicate shape in polys (alarmingly high polys). And I was able to duplicate the figure with those, and export that, but it comes in with various groups of polys scattered all over the place insofar as where they are assigned. So the face groups are a mess.
Once I got that fixed, and started over with the rigging, there was noticable improvement in where the bones landed, and I got that done. I think that the problem was that no matter how much I had saved the corrected geometry, the figure setup was responding to the original, uncorrected version. I needed to re-export the corrected version and start over from that.
But now the join areas were folding in the middle, which is what they are designed to do, but I didn't want that, since it's kind of a tinkertoy sort of figure. I was also getting weird distortions to parts of the figure which were nowhere near the joints.
And then it all got really weird. I saved a new version, opened up the joint editor and tried moving where the bones ended to see if I could preserve the shabe a bit more. And the figure, which had been reasonably smooth went suddenly bumpy. THEN something even screwier happened. The bones were suddenly calling on vertexes and when I tried to bend a joint, a whole slew of the surface points would swarm out on the opposite side of the figure, and look like the figure was exploding.
I'm sure there is some way of doing what I want, but I've lost three days on this and have a midterm due on Wednesday. Maybe I'll deal with it later.
It's beginning to sound like there are multiple copies of each vertex/face stacked on top of each other and that when using the GeoEditor you are only grabbing one set...
Well, it didn't do that before I moved the ends of the bones. And when I went at it with the geometry editor there was only one layer of faces. Vertexes, I don't know. I didn't check those.
I was able to build a copy of the figure from primitives in Studio, but if there is a way to combine primitives into a single object, I don't know it. Unless exporting the whole thing as an .obj would have turned it into one object (I could try that, I won't be too disappointed if it doesn't do anything). All I can say is that there is no way to combine face groups of multiple objects in the geometry editor.
As to the folding ball joints; maybe I ought to just parent some spheres over the joint and let the limb just intersect them. The sphere would hide it and I'd have the tinkertoy effect I want. At least on those joints.
BTW, is there any way to set the level of subdivision? There seems to be an elipsis in the menu command, but selectig it doesn't bring up a dialog window to set levels.
The bones created by Figure setup are placed, along their twist axis, to occupy the bounding box of their selection group. Editing the group members after creating the figure will not move the bones, which I think you may have been expecting.
The Node Weight Map Brush tool has an option in its right-click menu to fill bones by selection set which, once the groups are right, will avoid the bending issue.
If you move the bones you ar emoving the pivot point - vertices with weight will rotate about that pivot point, so if they are "behind" the pivot they will swing out producing odd lumps where they meet the unweighted areas. This is one of the things that makes rigging loose clothing such a pain.
As I said above, Maya's understanding of OBJ is not good to start with. If your figure is NURBS then you're unfortunately hosed as far as getting anything out as OBJ from Maya that will be usable. You could probably try to download a trial version of 3DXchange from the reallusion site and use that to convert the .ma contents into something a bit more realistic for DS. That would probably get you where you need to be for your thumbnails. Other options are to use the bridges to send the scene from Maya to 3DS or Mudbox where you can output the mesh more easily. These should be available to you under the educational license.
Kendall
I was using legacy rigging. So I imagine that may have had something to do with it.
I did give a go to exporting the version built from primitives to .obj and it did come in as a grouped object with many surface groups (which could probably be combined) and a number of face groups which consisted of the bits that I'd brought in from the original .obj, and one single face group for a composite of all the primitives. I suspect that if I do attempt this again I probably will build an armature of simple cylinders, and parent boxes and spheres over the joint areas. But I'm not likely to make the attempt until after Wednesday.
That's worth investigating. I know that Mudbox runs on a Mac, but 3DS doesn't. Something to keep in mind, anyway.
You have this due on Wednesday? And I thought I liked to live dangerous....
How complex is your model? If this is a really pressing matter (and the model itself is not too complex like a whole humanoid figure) I could try to recreate it in Hexagon and rig it for you.
Otherwise, you have to somehow covert your NURBS model into planar, QUAD polygons.
Just out of curiousity... is your model subdivided when you are doing this grouping and regrouping? If it is, that might be your problem. I had similar issue recently when trying to assign faces to surface groups. It LOOKED like selecting one surface group (in geometry editor) was picking up polygons in other area, but in fact it was only like that in the UI... The actual surface group only contained what I originally wanted (this was verified by applying different diffuse colors to the surfaces in the Surface Tab. I could clearly see things were assigned properly). Then Mada told me that seems to happen when using Geometry Editor on a subdivided model. Try setting the model to Base and see if you still get the "ghost" polygons
If you are not working on a subd model, then I have no idea what to tell you
Yeah, it's due Wednesday. We only got a week to put into it, since he only assigned it *last* Wednesday. The main directon is that it's a storyboard, and we are NOT to use Maya. I thought I'd slip around the edges and use Studio. Well, THAT certainly didn't work out.
Meh. Photoshop is my friend. I'm stuck at showing things either in profile or full-front, but so be it. Once I built my source figure I had them done in rough in a day and a half. Tomorrow I'l go back and clean it up.
Yes, subdivision was active. The hands of the Maya figure are poly models, but really crude. In Maya 3 levels of subdivision smooths them out nicely. Exporting to .obj brings them into Studio as the original poly models. So to smooth them back out I applied subdivision. It worked. But, yeah, it probably borked everything else.
Of course, the convert NURBS to polys command in Maya is hardly efficient. But then the NURBS were not a great source to be using to base a model on, anywhere but Maya.
Like I say, if I do it again I'll probably be building from primatives in Studio in the first place, and then export the whole thing to .obj, bring it back in and go at it with the geometry editor. Can't duplicate some of the shapes in the original, but since it's mostly made up of spheres and cylanders, I can get about 80% there and fake the rest with rectangles or brought in components from my runtime libraries.
The reliance on NURBS is part of what causes the "Maya Look." In the vast majority of cases one can tell that Maya was used due to the "smooth, curvy" look of all of the models. Trying to animate in Maya with figures made of facet geometry is an exercise in frustration guaranteed to make the animators bald in record time.
Kendall
Well, that certainly makes sense. The class is the prerequsite for all of the classes in the whole track. So we're getting a taste of a lot of different things in Maya. Most of the class are people who want to be animators or game developers, so the assignments are slanted in that direction. But there are modeling clases available once I've got through this with a decent grade.