G2F Skirt Rigging
marble
Posts: 7,500
I've recently had cause to complain about the apparent inability to pose G2F clothing effectively, especially dresses and skirts.
Someone in another thread pointed me to a tutorial about adding ghost bones which looks very interesting and I'll try to work my way through it. However, when I go into the joint editor tool and look at the actual rigging, things make less sense than they do in that tutorial (which starts with an unrigged dress, I think).
Here are some screen shots to illustrate what I mean. In one skirt, the bones are not aligned with the figure bones and in the other there is only one bone to handle both legs. Surely this is why the skirts don't pose nicely? Or am I understanding the concept badly?
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Comments
Interestingly, if I go down the hierarchy and select the Left Thigh on the EmoSkirt and then bend it in the parameter sliders, it seems to bend but as soon as I release the mouse button, it snaps back to its initial pose.
On the F40 Skirt the bend stays after releasing the mouse but the skirt somehow balloons out of proportion. I've used a different texture here to highlight the distortion. I should add that the other screen shot shows that the included "sitting" morph does do a better job (if both legs are bent equally).
Some skirts use the figure rig - they are fully conforming, which is good for following the pose but can easily look unrealistic. Other skirts have independent rigs, which mean that the skirt has to be manually posed to match the figure but can make for a more plausible behaviour - the bones on a manual skirt needn't match the placement, or even the number, of bones on the wearer (and indeed, the whole point of not copying the rigging is to have a different set up on the skirt). Ghost bones are just bones without any geometry, they are the same as body handles except that there's usually some geometry on those, set not to render, that you can use to select them.
The Emo skirt has the bones from G2F, presumably for better conforming, but doesn't actually have them set to control the mesh - I'm not sure why, given that, there's an visible effect when adjusting them though I see it too.
When you say "use the figure rig", does that mean that if the skirt is selected in joint editor, the bones will not be visible? Is that what auto-follow means? That the garment follows the bones of the figure?
The skirt does not actually use the rig of the figure, it has its own rig which is identical to that of the figure because it was rigged using Transfer Utility. When running tight skirts like this through Transfer Utility, it copies the rig of the figure (or a part of it) and applies it to the new mesh.
Sorry, I'm still not quite with you. What I see in the above images of the Joint Editor are different bones for the skirt and the figure. When you say it has its own rig which is "identical" to that of the figure, why is it that those images don't show that? They are certainly not identical.
Yep you are right. The only thing that comes to my mind about why they wouldn´t be identical is that the creator for whatever reason, adjusted the position of the bones. (Maybe for better fit?)
By default after running transfer utility, the skeleton on the new mesh is identical to the figure´s skeleton. It is identical even after dialing in body shapes like V6 so they must have adjusted the bone size.
That's clever actually. I never thought of having the skirt bones bend differently from the thighs to make bending better, but it's a very valid idea, especially considering those pesky crease areas at the tops of the thighs and the middle of the buttocks (the ones I always have to do JCM for and the JCM always used to be manual because I only learned to do automatic ones in the last couple of years).
If you can bend both thighs without a triangular divot appearing at the top center, though, almost certainly there are JCM. I don't think anyone can do that with just rigging (although I'd be very impressed if they could).
Hey there Sickle!!!
I kinda wonder, does adjusting the bone size and position really matter? Because, the bone already has geometry assigned to it it is supposed to influence and I think I remember after an fbx import of Daz Studio rigged genesis to Maya, the skeleton with the bones was not inside the figure yet it still influence the rigged figure.
So, could the bones be anywhere in the scene and the figure would still work the same way? Are they inside the figure just for orientation? Or did I get this completely wrong and scaling/repositioning the bone also changes the area of influence?
I still don´t know as much about rigging as I´d like to : )
As for the triangular divot, does it appear on long dresses only when posing the figure or does it also appear on tight short skirts? I´m not quite sure what you mean here because I am currently working on a mini skirt and I dont remember having any problems in the top center of the skirt.
With the way DS handles bones they do need to be as close as possible to the geometry they influence, so bone size and position does matter. If you displace a bone the bending will change. With bones that match the base figure's, DS will adjust them properly to each morph itself. Ones that don't have matching names won't adjust. Sometimes this is a problem. Sometimes it doesn't really matter. It depends on the bone, the morph and the outfit. I've done custom bone adjustments for this situation before when it was a concern.