Making a boot

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  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Created a morph for the boots last night and was happy. Got up this AM to start on some other morphs for the boots before work and this is what I found......

    Bones show in the Joint Editor.

    The Polygon Group Editor though is blank.

    I'm thinking the obj reference to the boots must have gotten borked but not sure how that happened.

    Anyone know how to get this fixed or will I need to reimport the obj and set up everything again??

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  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,905
    edited December 1969

    Has you saved the morph (and boots) as an asset before saving the scene? A scene should save anything that hasn't been saved as an asset itself, but several people have seen this sort of thing - I think you should make a bug report, with the scene attached. Did you save the morph as a ztl file, or an OBJ? I fear if not it may be lost.

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited February 2013

    Ah, so that's what happened. No, I just finished up the scene and was too tired/lazy to save out the boots as an asset so I saved and went to bed. It's OK.. I opened up ZBrush and redid the shape I liked, turned out even better and brought them into DS and applied my shader and Transferred them and then saved them as new Asset. Tested everything and it's solid at this point. That will teach me! lol

    Joe mentioned how to get parts to show up separately in the Surfaces tab. That's the next thing I need to do for the boots. Add in a few additional morphs and they will be a very useful Super Hero boot! :-)

    From Joe: Creating surface groups:

    In studio, the grouping tool is the one that looks like a pen floating over four boxes. Make sure you have your boots selected in the scene tab, select the grouping tool from the various tools at the top of your screen, and then find tool settings tab.

    Select a face group, press the plus button in the menu, then right click on the word surfaces and select “create surface from selected”. give it a name. next, make sure to unselect the face groups faces you selected (by pressing the minus button) and repeat the previous procedure for any other groups.

    Post edited by RAMWolff on
  • JoeQuickJoeQuick Posts: 1,704
    edited December 1969

    RAMWolff said:
    Ah, so that's what happened. No, I just finished up the scene and was too tired/lazy to save out the boots as an asset so I saved and went to bed. It's OK.. I opened up ZBrush and redid the shape I liked, turned out even better and brought them into DS and applied my shader and Transferred them and then saved them as new Asset. Tested everything and it's solid at this point. That will teach me! lol

    Joe mentioned how to get parts to show up separately in the Surfaces tab. That's the next thing I need to do for the boots. Add in a few additional morphs and they will be a very useful Super Hero boot! :-)

    From Joe: Creating surface groups:

    In studio, the grouping tool is the one that looks like a pen floating over four boxes. Make sure you have your boots selected in the scene tab, select the grouping tool from the various tools at the top of your screen, and then find tool settings tab.

    Select a face group, press the plus button in the menu, then right click on the word surfaces and select “create surface from selected”. give it a name. next, make sure to unselect the face groups faces you selected (by pressing the minus button) and repeat the previous procedure for any other groups.

    Do the surface groups before you rig, otherwise they will be lost.

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Ah, good to know. So when I do the surface groups I'll have to re rig. No biggie.

    While I got you here Joe. Do you know of a way to paint out part of a clothing item to keep them from overly conforming to the figure? The vest I made, first from scratch, looks awesome when it's conformed to Genesis with no morphs. When I morph it up to Chameleon Boy, every curve of the muscles has it following and well, it's vest so it looks kinda strange to me. I tried using the Weight brush but didn't seem to change things. Worked on keeping the tips of the vest from following the arms, esp when they are down but can't seem to get the front of the vest looking more loose, less clingy

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,905
    edited December 1969

    A rigidity map will do that, but it locks the mesh solid (well, it scales with the reference polygon). This is always the draw back of auto-morphs, in anything (though a smoothing control could be nice) - for a good morph you often have no choice but to make a custom morph (though you should be able to use the auto-morph as a starting point).

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Is there an "auto morph" tut you can direct me towards Richard? I'm not at all familiar with that. Or if I am I don't know the term off hand! lol

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,905
    edited December 1969

    Auto-morphs are the morphs DS creates - Transfer Active Morphs. I did a mini-tut on correcting moprhs for items with extra bones, using the Fantasy Wrap with the new teens, but most of it will cover amending any auto-morph...if I can find it again. Ah http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17277/

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Thanks so much Richard. I'll get coffee and make it my morning read! lol

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Hmm, reading through the tutorial, GREAT by the way, I don't see much on what I think I'm looking for. My needed morph would probably be something to do with painting out the front edges of the vest to help keep their original shape so they don't follow the body shape. With all the new control tech I would think there would be a way to do this by now. See the unmorphed and morphed version of the vest. Notice the edges of the vest pulling in and out along the body curvatures. If there was a way to paint the mapping to have it ignore the edges (and perhaps a few morph vertices in long the edges so stretching is not a major factor) that's what I'm looking to do if it's possible.

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  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Hmmm, I think I may have answered my own question. If I export the vest WITH the deformations and then take it into ZBrush and straighten it out and bring it in as a morph. Not the most elegant solution but I guess it will do.

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    OK... new question concerning the vest.

    I got my desired result in ZBrush. Looks awesome but here is the question.

    How does one make this an ERC for the vest. So it will kick in when the body is morphed and the vest is following along? I can deal with having this as a morph option but would love to make it an ERC and see if that's more desirable.

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  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,905
    edited March 2013

    What I was suggesting, and the tutorial was covering, was taking the vest into ZBrush (instead of exporting as an OBJ as in the tut), smoothing it out as you have, and then bringing that back into DS as a replacement for the wobbly morph - you would need to get the name of the morph before GoZing back to DS, as I did at the beginning of the tut, and then ion return you'd paste that into the name field for the returned morph and set the other options as in Morph Loader Pro in the tutorial. Then you don't add yet another morph, and you don't have to worry about ERC set-up. You would, however, want to make sure there was no scaling on the figure before using GoZ to send to ZBrush.

    Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited March 2013

    Ah, sorry Richard. It always takes me a few times asking before things become more clear to me.

    In any case as I was waiting for help to come once again to the rescue! :P I started looking over Cham's various vests on Google and found the Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell version that I really liked the most. So into ZBrush and started with the older vest and well, I actually frigging succeeded it, I can't believe it.

    Put in 5 Vest Tip morphs and created a FIX morph for when Cham is dialed up fully.

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    Post edited by RAMWolff on
  • JoeQuickJoeQuick Posts: 1,704
    edited December 1969

    RAMWolff said:
    Ah, sorry Richard. It always takes me a few times asking before things become more clear to me.

    In any case as I was waiting for help to come once again to the rescue! :P I started looking over Cham's various vests on Google and found the Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell version that I really liked the most. So into ZBrush and started with the older vest and well, I actually frigging succeeded it, I can't believe it.

    Put in 5 Vest Tip morphs and created a FIX morph for when Cham is dialed up fully.

    What Richard has tried to explain to you is that fix morphs aren't the way it should be done. It's not efficient to create additional morphs when they aren't needed. Best practice is to REPLACE the auto-generated morph with a hand made (or at least hand adjusted one) that isn't as vacuum packed. Richard has told you this as well as linked you to step by step tutorials on how to do it.

  • JoeQuickJoeQuick Posts: 1,704
    edited December 1969

    RAMWolff said:
    So ended up a few issues that were not acceptable. Perhaps in time I will understand Edge Loops better but when I was rendering in DAZ Studio every thing with Edgeloops would render as if it had a transmap on it. So I ended up with very noticeable gaps.

    This doesn't make any sense. All an edgeloop is is an additional row of polygons. There is no reason that one row of polygons would behave any different than any other unless you a) reversed their normals at some point or b) actually applied some kind of transparency to them in their surface settings.

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited March 2013

    Joequick said:
    RAMWolff said:
    Ah, sorry Richard. It always takes me a few times asking before things become more clear to me.

    In any case as I was waiting for help to come once again to the rescue! :P I started looking over Cham's various vests on Google and found the Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell version that I really liked the most. So into ZBrush and started with the older vest and well, I actually frigging succeeded it, I can't believe it.

    Put in 5 Vest Tip morphs and created a FIX morph for when Cham is dialed up fully.

    What Richard has tried to explain to you is that fix morphs aren't the way it should be done. It's not efficient to create additional morphs when they aren't needed. Best practice is to REPLACE the auto-generated morph with a hand made (or at least hand adjusted one) that isn't as vacuum packed. Richard has told you this as well as linked you to step by step tutorials on how to do it.

    As I've stated I don't understand allot around all this. IF I had one of those brains that got along well with text tutorials I'd understand more but since I'm more of a visual learner just takes me longer to "get it".

    I'm happy with the results. The vest needs to be "Vacuum Packed" since that was the style that was illustrated for that era of Chameleon Boy.

    Also, I'm quite sure I must have done something wrong when creating the edge loops for the boots. They are long gone so I can't do some renders for you but they did indeed renders invisible.

    Post edited by RAMWolff on
  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    OK... new issue. Got most of the elements done at this point. Figured out, thanks to your info on how to create Surface groups the boots are done, added in some boot morphs for different looks. So then I was thinking "WOW, finally almost done with this one" but nope. Seems that there always has to be SOMETHING that says "keep going"

    As you can see with Genesis arms up.... one side of the vest looks fine, the other side some how managed to get crunched. I looked into the Polygon Group Editor and the Weight Map Brush but all efforts fail. Just another area I need to know more about.

    Any help?

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  • patience55patience55 Posts: 7,006
    edited December 1969

    Offhand I don't know but this was my first thought:

    Well this is no big help I'm sure ... when I had one outfit that just wouldn't work correctly for extreme actions I simply told people it doesn't work well with extreme motions, so don't do that. hehehe ... [running, ducking ... ]

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Hahaha... well he is a super hero so the over the head arms are kinda important for flying! lol

  • patience55patience55 Posts: 7,006
    edited December 1969

    RAMWolff said:
    Hahaha... well he is a super hero so the over the head arms are kinda important for flying! lol

    Sigh, okay ... :-) http://www.daz3d.com/epic-wings

    Any chance that's a border between bone areas and it's the other area that needs tweaking?

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    YAY... figured it out.

    Here are the steps.

    1) Select the area in the clothing item that's causing the issue. In my case it was the rCollar.
    2) Tools>Drop down Tools options>Weight Map Brush
    3) Select the ZBulgeRight (towards the bottom there)
    4) Using a mixture of Brushing and using the Ctrl and Alt keys on the keyboard to alternate between Soften and Erase like magic it just flows right out.

    I still had an issue with how the vest conformed though on that side. So not sure what caused that but again with those steps got it looking like the other side. No one will know any different about what ever mistake or lack of something I did or didn't do. Live and learn!

  • patience55patience55 Posts: 7,006
    edited December 1969

    Yeah! Congrats :-)

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Patience.

    Well one other small niggle I have with the vest is as you see in the render there is where the shoulder is pushing the shoulder cuff. Would adding in another bone on either side help it pose better? If so I guess I finally have to sit down and figure out how to add bones! lol

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  • Tramp GraphicsTramp Graphics Posts: 2,411
    edited December 1969

    RAMWolff said:
    Thanks Patience.

    Well one other small niggle I have with the vest is as you see in the render there is where the shoulder is pushing the shoulder cuff. Would adding in another bone on either side help it pose better? If so I guess I finally have to sit down and figure out how to add bones! lol

    I had that problem with two outfits I made. IT was caused by the weight maps being divided between the collar and the shoulder along the Z axis. I fixed it by transferring the weight maps for the Z axis from the shoulder bone entirely to the collar bone along that axis, as well as for the Bulge on that axis
  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Hmmmm. OK.. I'll try messing with it tomorrow. Thanks so much TG! :-)

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    edited December 1969

    Didn't get around to messing with the weight map brush but I did mess around in ZBrush on the texture side. Playing around with different ideas for finalizing the look of Cham.

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