is rigidity in armor possible?
DigitalSteam
Posts: 299
I often see things like this in armor clothing objects - where the steel plates are conforming to the bicep
Am I right to assume that it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to get the rigid parts of an outfit actually rigid, and still have them conform properly, and that's why you don't see any literally realistic plate armour?
Is there anything that can be done for a render like this, short of postwork - which I'm perfectly ok with, btw - I just need to know to stop fussing with it and accept my fate. :)
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Comments
AFAIK the only way to get truly "rigid" armor peices is with
smart propped objects that make up the sections but you are limited
to the morph/shape around which the peices were modeled.
There is a function in Daz satudio called "rigdity groups"
But I have not yet been able to quite figure them out
perhaps others have.
It would be very hard, since the figure won't compress in response to the rigid armour (though a GeoGraft could be used to hide the flesh) but giving each piece a uniform weight would make it rigid for posing purposes.
I figured it must have to do with that - I also figured if it were easy (or maybe, if it were possible) someone would have done it. Faveral's armory with the perfect medieval plate as props, but never as armor, kind of seals it, I guess.
I thought maybe you could hide the body part that's under the plate, and model the joints - like the back of the knee, with the padding and strapping - but then, again, if that were a good solution, someone would have done it by now, right?
Let's see... dForce leather straps with lames over the hips and such dangling from them... Is it just that you're getting into so much work that nobody would pay what it ended up costing?
Here's the thing, if you hide the body parts, you then STILL have the issue of any leather or other outfit the person is wearing is also going to clip through the armor.
This, along with their typical goal of wanting to create versatile outfits, is why Aeon Soul's The Legend Armor for G3F and G8F set is divided into so many pieces. It allows for more focused morphs and movements. But it would still suffer from some of the same "flexible steel" issues in more extreme movements.
And this is the common problem when posing armored figures - ignoring the limits that such things place on movement.
You cannot play basketball in full plate, nor are you going to be doing a lot of crouching, regardless of whatever you've seen in a video game.
However, to get an accurate representation, the armor plating would almost have to be a separate figure that had smaller rotation limits, possibly parented to nulls parented to the figure to prevent deforming but maintain some level of movement when the body part moved.
How about what I've seen while wearing full plate? :) Yeah, you can do both those things. Not quickly or well, of course. But your point is well taken and agreed with.
Good point, of course...
I picked that one up to study... Amazingly impressive work, but then, that's not unusual for Aeon Soul.
Depends how authentic the armour is; it was meant to stop the wearer getting injured, and (rarely only for show), and as such was thick and heavy. Whilst different armour types vary in the amount of movement they allow, it depends on how many pieces they are made from and how close together they fit including over-lapping parts to prevent the opponent sliding a sword through gaps.
You know, regarding the changing in joint limits... that's an interesting thought.
If you change the limits on joints, you can save that information if you save the figure as a Character Preset. (I figured that out when I was working on Oolong and desperately needed to radically change the limits and rotations of the hands)
So I could envision a cool plate armor set where you actually load it all in as a character preset.
This is one reason for re-rigging figures in Blender. But, depending on how the armor is designed, there may be workarounds in DS. For example adding extra bones may help.
Also, if the armor is simple, it may be done as props parented to a bone. Then, in this case, scaling the pieces may be enough to fit different character sizes and proportions.
But in general having rigid pieces trying to adapt to any possible character morph is of course troublesome.
Well... I mean... Depends on what you consider "heavy" or "thick", I suppose. It's not paper mache or anything, but it's also not all that heavy compared to lots of other things people wear - one of the more famous examples being a fireman's kit, which can easily weigh almost twice as much as full medieval plate, but also just regular modern military gear, which can easily weigh more than full plate. (I was Military Police, and we get to drive rather a lot, but we still had marches, and I was more weighed down in that than I have been in full plate for fighting.)
You're not really trying to prevent a sword slipping between the lames of your armour as much as you're protecting against cutting, chopping, bashing damage (unless you're talking about the kinds of swords that came later, like the Estoc, rapier, epee, etc., which were absolutely designed for just that, and most plate is nowhere near tight enough to stop them) and the stabbing of spears or arrows, of course. The kind of plate we think of as "knightly" is heavy, sure, by modern clothing standards, but still pretty well distributed and wieldy enough for a foot soldier.
But I digress. A somewhat favored subject with decades of lay study invested will do that to you :)
I like this... I was wondering if something like that would be possible.
Once a character was in full plate, you really don't need their skin any more anyway, right? If it were partial, could you make it so that the expose areas used the same skin map, but with a transparency map as well (I'm probably not using the right words - does it make sense?) Sickleyield made this amazing skin suit that is textured like leather or gambeson or mail, and I thought "Why did I not think of that?" so could you just invis any parts that don't show through?
Or maybe as geografted bits? I still have a lot to learn about that, too, but it seems like that might be the way to go? I just really want the metal to not bend.
I imagine Unreal can use those Blender set-ups as well, right? Before I re-discovered DAZ, I was thinking unreal was probably the best tool to do the animation I wanted to do, and it seems I mostly see material about rigging those bones in either Maya or Blender. (Which isn't to say I don't think that now - I just... My brain wants to make it work in Studio. ;)
AFAIK unreal is great with Blender though I never used it. With 2.8 you also have the EEVEE option that's good as well. Real-time PBR has some limitations though but if you're not after absolute photorealism then it saves you a huge amount of render time. So it's definitely worth it.
The diffeomorphic plugin also gets a good automatic conversion of materials, you rarely have to fix something.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/