Separating the arms from the body?

dudeness

Hello! This might be a stupid question but I can't seem to find a soluation after some days of browsing arround. 

What I wanted to do was to "remove" the arms from G8 figure and paste them into another one. (creating a 4 arms monster like Goro from mortal kombat :)

Now I know I can as well load 2 G8 figures and make one of them invisible except the arms, then parent it to the other figure. But that's not the cleanest way and it'll eventually increase the redudancy in the scene.

Can someone kindly point out the direction to go? 

Richard Haseltine

That's pretty much the only way to do it if you want both sets of arms coming from the shoulder. If you wanted them coming off the chest below the existing arms you could create a GeoGraft, but that would be largely working from scratch.

Syrus_Dante

Activate the Geoemtry Editor, open the Tool Settings pane and scroll the Surfaces Group list there, then press the plus icons behind all arm surfaces to get a polygon selection. Next viewport right-click menu Geometry Visibility > Hide Unselected Faces, then in the viewport right-click menu Geometry Editing > Delete Hidden Faces. Careful I've heared that DS can crash by deleting a huge ammount of faces. Almost done, now you need to save your custom G8 figure without arms to the library to have the benefit of less recources once you laod it again. There are two ways of doing so one is to use File>Save As>Support Asset>Figure/Prop Asset. But this will save a new figure, in your case I would just save a Scen Subset. Open the Content Library pane and save a Scene Subset with only the G8 figure without arms selected. Before that you may want to rename the figure to identify it easier lateron. Now start a new scene or load another to add the Subset G8 figure without arms to the scene from the library.

dudeness

Many thanks for both of the replies. ^^

The Geometry editor trick works like a charm! I managed to removed all the other parts except the arm! thanks a lot!

Unfortunately i got stuck at the last step > when i was trying to save a Scene Subset, i cannot select anything other than the whole G8 figure. There was no expanding option to just select the arm.

I tried saving it anyway and the next time it was loaded, the whole G8 figure was loaded with only the arm avaible. Although the rest of the polygon were deleted, all the joints still seems to be linked. Have i missed some steps during the saving?

 

 

dudeness

would problably be easiest if there's a way to just un-parent the left collar from the G8 Figure.. 

Syrus_Dante

me.eat.rice_13928bca93 said:

Unfortunately i got stuck at the last step > when i was trying to save a Scene Subset, i cannot select anything other than the whole G8 figure. There was no expanding option to just select the arm.

What you select in the Subset Save dialog is simply your arms only figure version. If you don't have renamed the figure it will still be called Genesis 8 Male. You can't unparent the figure node hierarchy to seperate parts. So now you have deleted the geomety but I would also keep the Joints at least all nodes between hip and arms.

You can delete the head and the leg joints/bones with the Joint Editor tool. It's a bit fumbeling because you can only delete one joint at a time, no multible selections possible. Therefore I would select for example if you want to delete the leg joints one of the toes first. Then press Shift+Del that is at least for me the shortcut for deleting a bone. The selection will jump to the next upper bone in the hierarchy and you can quickly repeat pressing Shift+Del, be careful you don't want to delete too much and there is no undo for this action, so save your scene often best increamentaly.

It may be possible to fit the arms to the original genesis figure with the remaining joints in your "arms only" figure. You would need to rename (Joint Editor viewport right-click Rename Node) all of the joints of the arms so they no longer follow the poses of the original figure. Next you could also lower the arms into position with a morph, Adjust Rigging to Shape with the Joint Editor.

The seams of the extra arms will be visible and not merged to the genesis figure but at least you could have a second pair of arms as a conforming figure if you manage to fit it to genesis 8 male. Then save the arms with File>Save As>Support Asset>Figure/Prop Asset careful not to overwrite the original genesis 8 male you need to enter another Item Name in the save dialog.

dudeness

Thanks a lot Syrus! The joint editor works perfectly! I as well set the shortcut as Shfit+Del and it speeded up a lot the removal process :)

one last question, with only the arm remaining as the only children of the G8M, is it possible to set the center of rotation to the Arm instead of G8M? currently it's a bit akward when the separated arm is to be rotating a bit (not a deal killer as one can still use the universal tool to post it to the scene directly..)

once again thanks a million! :)

dudeness

OH, i have that figured out:)

in the Joint Editor, Tool settings, one can set the initial and end position of the center of origin. Which would be able to make the arm as the center instead of the hip.

Once again thanks for all the helps!