Transfer Utility - reduce influence of arms/hands or remove them entirely
clivewil2
Posts: 129
hello all.
is there any way of reducing the distance of how far a specific body part's influence ends in the Transfer Util?
in this example you can see some of the polys are incorrectly being weighted to the left hand, even though the hand is (in my opinion) very far away from those polys
is there any dials i can tweak to reduce the cut-off distance so the hand doesn't affect those polys? (sorry, i don't know the correct terms for this that DS uses)
top pic shows the original state, middle pic shows Trans Util default settings, and bottom pic shows what happens if i adjust any of the Near Vertices or Projection controls - trying either higher or lower values, it didn't make a difference, it still gave the same result each time
OR ALTERNATIVELY
is it possible for me to make a new figure without arms/hands specifically for fitting clothing?
i currently use a very ugly and brutal system where i separate e.g. a dress into a top and skirt. - i fit the top the usual way, BUT i fit the skrt using a special figure that i have baked its rotations into a X pose*** (both arms up) - which only kinda works, because the rib cage distorts with the arms raised, so when the skirt is fitted to a normal default figure, the skirt droops slightly in the center stomach area where the top does not (er - did that make any sense? happy to provide a pic if it was unclear)
*** another common situation where this is an issue is a skirt that is essentially a flat round disc, that i then apply dForce to. the hands are almost always intersecting with the disc, throwing it out of whack.
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You can do the latter - any rigged figure can act as the Source for Transfer Utility - but remember that using a figure derived from a Genesis iss till subject to the same license terms as using the original Genesis.
i actually did do a new figure*** between now and the original post, in default pose her upper arms are twisted and forearms raised, which gets them out of the problem area - the first instance i saved it as a subset, which didn't work as it just seemed to decide to refer back to the basic G8F when autofitting, even with source/target set to Current and Reverse Source Shape checked
SO, i saved it as a character preset instead, which does work keeping the hands out of the way, but now none of the autofit templates are available, e.g. knee-length dress, SY's templates etc. - the drop down list just greys out.
a quick look at the scene ID shows that nothing appears to be missing when compared to a vanilla G8F, so not sure what is amiss here.
if this doesn't work i might do another morph, keeping the original bone orientation this time but with teeny little T-Rex sized arms and see if that works better. if i can't bend them out of the way, i'll shrink them out of the way.
*** (pose figure, export, import with morph loader pro, adjust rigging to shape, ERC freeze, save as morph asset, save figure)
Try setting the Source Shape to Current if you have applied a morph (sorry, I'm not quite following).
thanks for helping Richard.
yep i did do that for the 'scene subset' saved figure and the target too, along with trying Reverse Source Shape From Target, which is normally what i set if i want to autofit something to any figure that's not a standard G8, but in this case it still seemed to be using the vanilla G8F bones - e.g. after autofitting the bad polys appeared in the same position that came from bending the forearms up and outward, and if i manually moved my figure's arms to what would be the default G8F pose, then the polys were back in their original (good) positions
what if i baked the scale somehow on my tiny-arms figure, would that solve it while still letting me use the autofit templates? does baking apply to scale as well as rotate? - for many of the clothing items i need to fix, tiny arms is the only way i can go - simply bending the forearms doesn't give me enough clearance, and i don't want the shoulders or the upper arms to distort the torso by bending them upwards out of the way - i need the entire torso to be 100% unchanged pose-wise.
i was curious as to why you mentioned licensing before - i thought that was only an issue if i was going to release or distribute something? i have made much more intense/destructive changes when i've used a body or face morph kit, and the Daz store openly sells these kits, along with Face Transfer and FaceGen which i also bought and use
---> added pic just to clarify - with either of these body-morph figures i'm using - Arms Up and TRex (tiny arms) - this is what i get if i select 'Restore Figure Pose' - not the vanilla G8F shape.
you could try fitting it to genesis 3 then changing the scene identification
thanks Wendy, i might give that a try too, it might work with some of the basic skirts,
some of the stuff i've made or modified are e.g. babydoll-style nightgowns etc. where the skirt portion begins immediately under the breast, which is why the arm positions are so critical.
also, because i have made some of them myself i don't have a previous G2 or G3 versions to draw from, i'd have to remake the entire things again as G3 then fool them into thinking they are G8 via Scene ID.
if i can hack a G8 figure into being a pseudo 'clothes horse' or dressmaker's mannequin, then i should be able to use it for all the other clothing items too and fix them just by auto-fitting again.
...ok i just did a quick test with a G3F and it worked great for that particular dress
unfortunately it doesn't work for my other stuff, for the same reason as before - the arms have too much influence even though they are 10,000 miles away** from the skirt disc.
made a quick demo using a hacked version of Biscuit's nice Bad Girl Good Girl dress. yes the skirt is super short but it's just a a quick hack for this demo.
pic 1, G3F before sim. flatter disc, very promising.
pic 2, G3F after sim. dforce needs tweaking but could be usable.
pic 3, G8F after fitting. badly mangled due to arm position.
there is no pic 4. G8F sim was a complete failure.
** a close estimate, accurate enough for our purposes.
you can rotate arms and legs and bake rotations before autofitting
then unfit, unparent the clothes, rotate and bake on those
thanks Wendy
as mentioned before, i have already made two baked figures with the arms way up (referred to as X and Y poses as Y has the legs closed together) and it does work except that lifting the arms up distorts the torso and there is a noticable droop where the skirt meets the top when fitted back onto a normal figure.
what i need is to remove the arms/hands influence without distorting the torso in any way, hence the poor misshapen figures further up the page.
i haven't tried it yet, BUT if baking rotations also bakes scale, i'll try the mini-armed TRex config as that is still in a basic pose, whereas the arms-up one is not.
---> another demo which hopefully shows the issue i am trying to solve. apologies for the kludged image, i removed the textures as the existing UVs weren't perfect and would only serve to confuse. i maxed out the levels in photoshop so you could see the mesh's own contours.
you can see that the top and 'belt' waistband curve very slightly upwards but the skirt waist section is curving slightly downwards. this is not perspective distortion, it is a result of fitting the skirt onto a figure that has the arms raised.
even though the top and skirt share a common line of vertices, they will never meet until they are both fitted to figure with the same torso pose. until then, i have to add that horrible waistband belt thingy to every top to cover the split.
After making the clothing and saving it. Then we make pJCMs to deal with the issues caused by the projected morphs into the clothing. And then also one can adjust the weight mapping of the clothing. We do not make a mess out of the main figure hoping to fix the clothing 'cause as you saw, that won't work. Sometimes though we make adjustments to our clothing model in the first place esp. if only a polygon or two gone will enable a miss on fitting troubles.
This is but one of several videos on the topic:
thanks Catherine,
i have a case of military-spec, olympic-gold-medal-winning tinnitus and i won't get anything much from videos unfortunately. (imagine being in a room with 500 people all running around spraying aerosol cans. it sounds like that, a very loud swirling hiss. makes most conversations impossible if you can't lip-read the speaker.)
after blowing a couple of hundred bucks on several clothing and figure rigging tutorials from the Daz store (including one series that supposedly has subtitles, but doesn't) i find they are no better than the freebies on YT.
i think i won't be learning to rig in the proper way anytime soon, so until i do i am going to try various ways to flog and flay the Transfer Util with awkward-looking figures and see if i can get roughly what i want.
after all, i see people adding extra bones etc. to fit tails and horns to figures, so surely there must be a neat way of lopping a couple of bones off.
Keep in mind that the transfer utility can't always work fine in all cases. Usually it gives you a good start but then you may need to fix some weightmaps yourself, as Catherine also notes. Especially where the outfit surface is far from the figure.
Also, if you don't have to sell on the daz shop, you may consider isolating the "floating" parts of the dress to dforce only, as skirts and mantles for example. That's much easier to handle.
Then perhaps some of my .pdf tutorials would be of interest.
My tutorial basket at DA: Click here.
May be some duplication but here are the locations for a few of my tutorials as well. I think it's the one Those Pesky Sleeves that may be most of interest. Whether the solution is a real pJCM or simply another morph that you make and hook up to a particular pose is your call. Any morph made can also be dialed in manually.
Google Drive links
Those Pesky Sleeves
Making pJCMs
Making Clothing, an introd
Making Clothing pt2
Making Clothing pt 3
great! and thanks. i did watch the video you suggested, and i kinda sorta knew what he was doing by following his mouse movements, but i'm always going to do better by having something in text that i can alt-tab to while in DS.
i grabbed a couple of your pdf's and bookmarked your page.
i'd still like to know though - given that even with G3F's T pose, the arms still influenced and mangled everything, how did this PA create the skirt for this item? it looks like it was originally a flat disc (i bought it and the UVs seem to confirm this) they must have had some way of getting around the humps created by the arms
https://www.daz3d.com/h-c-school-uniforms-a-for-genesis-3-female-s
it was actually this product that made me think, "hey let's just make a skirt from a flat disc and dforce it into shape, that'll be easy and painless" ...and here we are.
You're welcome.
In an empty scene load the clothing.
With the clothing selected, on the Parameters Tab - from the Hamburger menu {those little lines} - select to Show Hidden. Then you see all the various morphs that were made for the clothing piece.
I do not cover weight mapping issues for rigging purposes in my .pdf tutorials. What you can do with the video tutorials is have them full screen, HD playback, stop the video and take a screenshot. In Paint {or whichever program you want to use} paste the image to a new page and save that. If you have CC selected on the playback you may or not also be able to get some text in on the images.
there won't be any, i am importing an .obj and running the Transfer Util on it to fit it to my figure.
after the util has done its work those morphs will exist, but the damage will already have been done too - at some point during geometry assignment in the util's process, it is grabbing polys that are part of the skirt and assigning them to the hands/arms
i am already familiar with hidden properties, having tracked down and dealt with the FBMHeight bug that affects hair
that dress of Biscuits' (pink one with the white collar and flat disc skirt) is a fairly typical example of my main issue - it was exported to 3ds max, made a new collar, then it was sawn in half to make a separate top and skirt, then the separate parts are imported back into DS as .obj
the top part usually comes out relatively ok - previously i was using mesh grabber to fix the underarms, but now i'll look at trying using pJCMS to fix the armpits, which almost always require adjustment (exactly the same issue shown in the video you mentioned, in fact)
the skirt part however, that's where the problem lies - i need a way to stop it weighting some polys to the hands and leave them as Pelvis or Abdomen Lower or Thigh/Shin or whatever the surrounding ones are
i have tried SickleYield's 'big dress' template before but that just turns a massive glitch into a small glitch, e.g. instead of 20 polys moving with the hand it'll only be 3 or 4.
i need to get the hands out of the picture while doing the skirt part.
what you need is a clothing template
earlier generations of genesis have them, for some reason G8 doesn't
it's basically a shape of the garment you fit it to that only has the bones needed that appears under Autofit
I often get around it by fitting to an existing garment that only has the bones I want
your issue is largely you are doing a full garment with arms as well as a skirt so it will have arm bones
doing as separates is the simplest way to avoid this by fitting it to a template without arms, trying to do a whole garment is always going to have issues sadly
only way I have ever fixed this after removing all other weight influences is to create a corrective morph for the skirt or other parts bent by sending to Hexagon and smoothing then setting that morph as the default in parameters locking it and hiding that property
If this is a modified version of an existign dress why not just use the original dress as the source figure, then edit the Scene identification option (Edit>Figure menu) so it it fits to the correct target?
No, you had asked: how did this PA create the skirt for this item? This was my response.
thanks Wendy, you might be on to something there... i have been trying to modify figures, it didn't occur to me to try and fit the skirt to another clothing item instead of a figure. (and it darn well should have occurred to me! - because i have done exactly that when fitting neckties and collars and such to an existing shirt or jacket etc.)
i have a whole bunch of templates, i think i have all of SickleYield's including one called 'SY clothing morpher' which i never successfully used (always gives me a missing file error - missing UVs i think?) but could be an ideal starting point for what you describe. i've also got something called 'RSSY Ultimate Clothing Fixer' - i haven't looked at that yet, no idea if it would help or not...
i am thinking if i exported the clothing morpher and trimmed the arms off, then re-imported the armless one and fitted it to the original, i am *hoping* that it would give me a no-arm-bones version that still had all the other fancy pJCMs of the original morpher.
that would then become my standard template for doing skirts.
anyway, i am going to look at that and see if it works. can't hurt... thanks again.
----> SY included a test dress with the morpher package, an over-one-shoulder type thing, which i noticed still has bones for the arms, but on the side without the shoulder it has less. i might need to carve off a bit more than originally thought, but i'm thinking that this idea is the solution.
i'll use her original unmodified morpher for doing the top and the cut down one for the skirt, and because they both use the same mesh polys and midriff bones i should be able to get a seamless join. fingers crossed.
i do believe you've solved it Wendy.
on this custom hacked 'torso dress' (see pic) i had to trim back the skirt length too - it wouldn't give me any leg movement at all in any template while the skirt was ankle length, but as soon as it became knee length it worked instantly.
testing the disc type skirt on an actual G8F - after fitting it to the torso dress and Scene ID'ing it - selecting Fit To and it went onto the figure without distorting, and when running the dforce sim the sides stayed relatively even.
even chopped down as much as it is, the torso dress still has upper arm bones but the forearms and hands are gone and that is good enough to fix 90% of the clothes i needed this thing for.
nicely done Wendy. many thanks, i am very grateful.
thanks again also to Catherine3678ab for the pJCM + sleeve info, that is next on the list of things to tackle.