Rigging assistance or some other form of solution.

Jon 5head

Hey guys,

Before I get to the issue I'm having, let me just state for the record: I am in no way an advanced user of DS and only do it as somewhat of a hobby. To date I have pretty much just posed figures (usually with downloaded poses tweaked just tiny bits), put up pretty surroundings, and hit the render button. I can tweak small things here and there if I play around long enough, but like I said, I'm not an advanced user. Also for the record, I am doing this project merely for personal use, as I would like to make my own fan-art.

Now, I want to get an Unreal mesh WITH skeleton into DS. I've looked everywhere I can think of and can't find a way to do it. So, I started assigning the .obj polys to region and face groups and once I got the bones in place, I was going to start weight-mapping when DS crashed and I lost it all. Yeah... should've saved periodically... Didn't think about it, sadly.

Before I go through the painstaking process of that all over again, I wanted to ask if I just missed an easier way to do what I want. I should say I have tried importing into Blender then exporting as Collada and importing into DS. When I do, I see the main figure, the skeleton figure, but then there's tons of randomly places, skewed, and ultimately screwed up polys all over the place.

Any help you could provide would be appreciated and I thank you in advance for sharing your wisdom with me.

As a side note, if anyone knows of a place I can get other video game models, or figures modeled after characters from movies, tv shows, etc. that are compatible with DS and are already rigged (I'm not wanting to have to do all this again, lol), could you list them? Thanks!

WendyLuvsCatz

since you cannot redistribute the game figures anyway, only do renders, why not instead of rigging from scratch, just borrow Genesis rigging using the transfer utility treating the figure as a piece of clothing.
It will inherit Genesis bones and can be tidied up with the weight brush etc if needed.
Then you can pose your imported figures for renders.

Jon 5head

Hey! Thanks for the response!

I have tried the transfer utility. I tried it twice, actually. Once immediately after importing, when the figure only had the default 'hip' bone, and once after I had assigned all of the face groups and regions. Both times, the only thing that happened was that the hip bone disappeared. I thought maybe it was still using the sources location markers, so I adjusted the xyz on a couple bones (selectable in the Scene pane) and got no result. That's when I moved on to manually assigning everything.

Jon 5head

Just a small update. Wendy, you got me thinking about the transfer tool, and I realized what I was doing before was transferring the rigging. I tried the transfer utility, and the bones seem to be working so far. I just need to tweak them to the proper locations and weight-mapping and check to make sure the orientations are correct now. At least I think that's all I need to do.

Thanks for the help! Here's hoping I don't screw it up again. lol

Jon 5head

OK... So, now I've got somewhat of a new problem. The weight-mapping is giving me issues.

I've searched for answers for the past two days and can't find anything that works for me.

My bones are all set up where they need to be for my figure, and I can apply the weight maps, BUT when I go to pose, the arms are all kinds of crazy. I assume this is because my figure is not in a tpose, but rather the arms are lowered and somewhat curved forward. I'll post a pic if I can.

I've also looked to see if I can find anything about how to handle a model when it is not in tpose and maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, but I can't find anything.

I have tried 'Fill Weight to Selection Set(s)', I've tried Transfer Utility from other figures (only transfering the weight-maps), I even tried importing the original figure and checking it's weight-maps. They seem to be fine, so I tried transfering them and it didn't work. Everything else seems to work just fine. It's just the arms.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Image 1 : Bone Structure, showing that they are in the correct places.
Image 2 : My figure (Jack from ME) in the same pose as Genesis, showing that the weight maps are right in most places (aside from tweaking bits here and there), but the arms are WAY off base.

EDIT**** OK, I fooled around a bit with some of the weight mapping, and I think I'm getting it to look a little better. However, now I have polygons pulling away from the rest. For instance, her shoulder blades, when I smooth the weight-map on the collar to fix it, starts pulling away from the rest of the body, and now there's a gap between the entire line of polys. I think it has something to do with the original mesh, because it seems to be following the straps of her 'top'. Any ideas?

Richard Haseltine

How do the group boundaries relate to the bone centre points? If they are very different, especially if the group 9and so the non-zero weighting) extends above the centre point (that is, into the parent bone) then you can get some very odd results.

Jon 5head

I'm not certain if it's what you mean, but I tried my best to get the center/end points to line up as much as possible with the edge of the groups. So, if for instance the right index finger has 3 bones (tip-first knuckle, first knuckle-second, second-base of finger) I tried really hard to get the center point lining up to the mesh knuckles and base. I don't think that really explains it well, but I don't know how else to explain it.

I was making very little progress with the weight-mapping, so I took a short break when I had an idea. Maybe I can just load this figure as a morph? I know the vertex count is (WAY) off, but I am currently experimenting in Hexagon to see if I can increase that number. So far, I'e tesselated every poly, taking the number up from 8800 to 36000, which is a little more than half way to V4. I'm waiting on the second tesselation to finish to see where I'm at, but it's taking forever, and I feel like a crash is imminent.

Is there an easier way to increase the vertex count? Or another way to make this mesh compatible as a morph for either V4 or Genesis?

Richard Haseltine

It sounds as if you have the centres positioned sensibly, though another factor is where they are in relation to the thickness of the mesh at that point - on the knuckle are they near the knuckle, near the inner edge of the finger, or in the middle?

Unfortunately matching vertex count isn't all that's required for a morph - the vertices have to be in the same order. You aren't going to be able to achieve that, at least not on a realistic timescale. I don't think Hexagon has any way of shrink-wrapping or pushing one mesh to match the shape of another, I don't know if Blender does, or perhaps Sculptris. If you can find a tool that will do that You could try loading your mesh and the base Genesis base mesh (no sub-division), then pushing/pulling Genesis to match the shape of your figure and load that as a morph.

Jon 5head

Thanks for the idea, Richard. I downloaded Blender a while back to try something else, and it does have a shrink-wrapping tool. So, I'm going to give that a shot.

It just hit me that if I do it as a morph, I'm going to have to learn how to UV map, lol. This figure is definitely good for getting me acquainted with features I've never even thought about messing with before. lol

I'll update with any progress through the shrink-wrap tool. Thanks again!

Jon 5head

I also meant to say, the bones are as close to the middle as I could manage. When I was doing it I was referencing the bones of Genesis. So I tried to basically just transfer them manually. I'm thinking I got the bones portion of it right and the whole issue with the arms is with the weight-mapping, which I partially figured out. Then I was hit with the mesh pulling away from the rest of itself, so I started looking for other ways.

Again, I'll let you know what happens after the shrink-wrapping.

Jon 5head

Alright, I'm beginning to see the pattern here.

After shrink-wrapping (which failed), I think I am beginning to understand that this figure is one of two things; one, WAY outside my realm of possibilities, or 2, just plain impossible to use in DAZ.

The pattern I mentioned is, you guessed it, the arms. When I shrink-wrap in blender, the arms come out barely even there. I didn't look closely, but I'd say all of the polys in the arms got folded up so from front-to-back it's only 1 or 2 polys wide. The feet came out a little messed up, too.

I'm sorry to say it, but at this point I am calling it quits with Jack and moving onto a different project. If anyone out there has succeeded in making this figure compatible with DS, I am more than willing to download it or follow a rough tutorial, or if anyone in the community wants a challenge, let me know and I'll supply the files I have or you can download them from Foundation3d like I did (free, just sign up).

Wendy, Richard, thanks for all your help with this. It didn't pan out, but I really appreciate the assistance anyway.