Need help with Rigid and Weight Maps for improving clothing items

wargis

Hello! I need some help with creating Rigid and weight maps to improve behaviour of some clothing items, which contain rigid and semi-rigid elements like buttons, clasps, eyelets and corset lacing. I use DS 4.6 and as an example I want to use Shorties for V4 (the laced tank top), converted to Genesis 2 Female. Like many items for Gen4, it looks pretty good on base G2F in zero pose, but after applying custom body morphs to G2F, this tank top is distorted and rigid elements like metal eyelets and semi-rigid like laces lost their original shape. Especially eyelets were badly distorted, following the breast morphs.
Here is that top on the zero-shaped and zero-posed G2F.

The original lacing

And the distortion of the lacing after morphs and posing

 I attempted to create a rigidity map for metal eyelets, following the info I found on the forum, and now eyelets keep the shape after auto-fitting but they do not follow their underlying polys, some of them fly over the fabric, some went deep inside, and seemingly do not rotate along with the tank. Here is an screenshot to illustrate the problem.

When I created them, I made each eyelet a separate rigid participant and four or more polygons under it became a rigid group reference, as shown in this picture. Red color shows that weight of rigidity on the rigid map is set to 100%.

But I don't know which options to set in Rigidity Group Editor to make eyelets follow the underlying polygons. I disabled all scaling and it works well but what to do with rotating? How to set reference bone - what is transform bone and which morphs to mask? Is there anywhere a comprehensive full manual on rigid and weight mapping in DAZ Studio? The wiki info I've found give us the basics but lacks full detailed knowledge. The forum threads help more, but need some explnation in most cases.
Someone has invented the way to keep rigidity after posing - how to make it exactly (mainly how to calculate the average weight of underlying polygons)?
And moreover, what is this mysterious Rigid Follow Node, can it be used for such cases with eyelets, buckles etc? I guess it's like a smartprop and I could make a set of buttons to be smartprops parented to a shirt. How to do it? I attempted to make this trick with eyelets in my case but did something wrong and it didn't help.

And the second problem is distortion of laces - they are distorted both after extreme morphing and after posing as well. How to avoid it by painting weight maps? Once I came across such distortion in some shoes after bending and managed to eliminate it by smoothing weights between parts of shoes and setting some bulge weights to zero. Here I have not found bulge maps to edit. How to paint weight map for such corset lacing to avoid its distortion after posing?
There must be a way to do it, because there is a lot of corset-like clothing for Genesis figures, which works pretty well with any morphs and poses. But I like some old pretty items, which look nice not only on Generation 4.  And this problem appears very often not only with corsets. I would be very grateful for sharing your experience and advice.

Richard Haseltine

For Rigidity Groups, give each eyelet its own group and set the references to be - say - either side of the eyelet on the fabric - the eyelet should then distort uniformly as morph following would affect the references, which oughtt o kep it in touch with the fabric.

A rigid Follow Node is a node to which you can parent an item (usually a button, say, isntanced from a single button geoemtry) that will move with the bone but not distort.

For the laces, you may need to manually edit the weight maps to make them smooth. Rigidity may help a bit, but you will need carefully selected references or the laces will lose contact with the holes they go through. Really,for soemthign like this custom morphs are going to be needed - and JCMs for posing.

mjc1016

Richard Haseltine said:

 

For the laces, you may need to manually edit the weight maps to make them smooth. Rigidity may help a bit, but you will need carefully selected references or the laces will lose contact with the holes they go through. Really,for soemthign like this custom morphs are going to be needed - and JCMs for posing.

Laces are always going to be a pain...

 

wargis

"For Rigidity Groups, give each eyelet its own group and set the references to be - say - either side of the eyelet on the fabric - the eyelet should then distort uniformly as morph following would affect the references, which oughtt o kep it in touch with the fabric.

A rigid Follow Node is a node to which you can parent an item (usually a button, say, isntanced from a single button geoemtry) that will move with the bone but not distort."

Thank you, Richard (sorry, but quoting doesn't work in my browser with the new forum for now, so I have to put in typographic quotes). I made each eyelet its own group but how to make right references - do you meah I should choose less polygons - only those right under the eyelets, true? And how to make rigid follow node from an eyelet or a button - I guess at first I must load all these buttons separately as objects, then select each button in Polygon Editor, then press Make Rigid Follow Node from selected and then select group of underlying polys on the clothing item and make them a reference for this Rigid Follow Node. Is it right or wrong? Last time I attempted to do it with eyelets without separating them from the shirt, so it didn't worked.

Richard Haseltine

Just pick a couple of polygons either side of the eyelet for the reference.

You need to add the ndoes to the skeleton, then attach the geometry (which, unless you ar wanting different shapes or materals, can be isntanced from a single item).