Serious question. Why is cross-generation of heels so hard?
AndrewJJP
Posts: 720
For me, the fact that the migration of heels isn't supported makes G9 a non-starter. It's a total 100% blocker. The same happened with G3->G8. I was a full two years before I could switch. Given that there as so many heels in the store, and even more on Rendo, I have to assume that they are popular products and they sell in quantity. I use heels in almost every render, they are essential, and of course the artists I speak to on DA are in a similar position, because they make similar pictures, and they cannot move to G9 either.
Today, we get the first tool to help users migrate to G9, and it has this comment:
"A note on high-heeled shoes: There's not really a way to fix these with a template. You have to AutoFit them, fit to nothing, pose the figure's feet in them, and transfer rigging. Detailed instructions are included as a bonus in the manual."
This makes the prospect of moving seem even more impossible. If SY could not provide this, then probably nobody can (?)
So my questions...
- For my own education, why is this so hard? People don't look at the feet so couldn't Daz have left that part of the body have been left alone so that the conversion is simple? Or is there more to it than that?
- Is there any realistic prospect that anyone will come up with an automatic conversion that works? It sounds like that's a no, but I wanted to check.
- Are the feet the same shape? Realistically, it it going to be possible to manually pose them into the shoes?
- I don't know how many heels I have but let's I have 20 I use frequently. How much work are we talking to get them all converted across to G9? Are we talking something like the video I linked because that is a lot of work and it requires artistic judgement, not just a simple set of steps to follow. I would rather save my artistic judgments for making pictures of G8.1!
Thanks!
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Comments
First, thank you for asking a simple question. The short answer is that the number of bones and the way they move changes each generation. Imagine if you had to make a set of gloves so you make a set with five fingers. The next generation ofkids come along and they all say why did you make five finger gloves when you could have made six finger gloves that both five fingered and six fingered people could use. You quickly cut holes to retrofit your gloves; the six fingered say that it isn't good enough. Their children, the third generation, has eight fingers.... you realize you are screwed because there is nothing stable here.
Roughly, a quarter of your bones are in your feet. They are almost a figure in themselves so it is exquisitely hard to make something that convincingly mimics even a single generation. They have roughly the same shape but have radically different bends plus you have to allow for toes which can have individual bends. You may not that most poses start with the feet on the ground so the pose is based from the ground up.
I suspect it's due to the complex geometry of shoes.
Cheers,
Alex.
Thanks to those that replies, this is all extremely informative!
I think what I'm going to do is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, and that is to try and make some clothes of my own. I'm no stranger to hard surface modelling, so shoes are more closely aligned with my modelling skills.
Unfortunately I know nothing about turning a model into a reusable, posable item of clothing, but at least if it's something I made, I won't feel I'm wasting my time by converting and rigging something that already works fine and I will learn a lot more. And if I succeed, then maybe I can even sell them for a nominal fee on my DA page, but I fear that may be some way off...
I suspect the problem is that most (all?) auto rigging tools are designed for clothing ( and shoes ) that fits close to the body. This will work for flat soled shoes because all of the shoe is close to the foot. A high heeled shoe has the projecting heel which ends some distance from the foot. While this can be accounted for on a specific shoe by modified rigging I don't think it's possible to create a conversion rig that would work on any shoe and produce pleasing results.
Most high heels are rigged by posing the feet to fit into the shoes position, and then baking the joint rotation of the figure's feet. After that you autofit the shoes, save them, delete everything and then load the shoes on an clean figure without joint rotations baked. There's really no way to do that with autofit, too many steps involved.
Video tutorial that takes you through the steps to fit high heel shoes to a figure
Thanks so much! I had realised I would need to model the shoes on pre-posed feet but was not sure of the process of getting them to fit.
As a user, I have an expectation that things will "just work" and I think that actually trying to create something is going to be very helpful for me to understand the real issues!
Thanks, I see that makes sense. It also fits with that product's comments about clothing that departs from the figure.
Where it attaches is a bit bendy and where things bend change from figure to figure. It's not like certain hairs or headwear that attach to a fixed object (the top of the head) that doesn't have bending parts