Fitted mesh for male shapes

[Psistorm Voxel]

Hi again - I posted about this months ago, but sadly never got a solution to what seems to be a straightforward issue.

As part of my products, I'm building items rigged as fitted mesh, and while making them work on the female skeleton is easy and straightforward, whenever I try and make them work on a male shape/skeleton, there always are extra deformations happening that just don't occur on female rigs.

Basically what I do for the female is, I build the mesh to be nice and flush with the female body, then rig it to the female skeleton. once uploaded, everything behaves as expected. For the male setup, I instead make the mesh flush with the male body and rig it to the male skeleton, import, and lo and behold, the mesh doesn't fit.

I tried using female mesh with male rig, male mesh with male rig, male mesh with female rig, and female mesh with female rig, then switching to male shape. All of those just won't work as flawlessly as female rig/mesh/shape.

So here is the question: How do I rig a mesh so that these extra deforms don't happen? Surely someone here must've built some article of clothing that's somewhat tight fitting and has had to deal with those kinds of behaviour. For the record, using 3dsmax 2009 atm - mostly because while I own 2015, firestorm at least doesn't like any rigs imported from there.

 

Since I'm hoping to launch products for male and female - and already ran into big problems last time I want to avoid - I'm hoping that someone can help me out here and give me some pointers. And yes, I'm using the official source files LL provides for the rig and avatar mesh.

[Jake Koronikov]

Hi,

I know exactly how you feel. The male body fitted mesh rigging is not straightforward process. There is a couple of bad issues I have ran into. First: The Butt area can not be rigged perfectly with only one size. To make the garmet to fit every possible body shape, you just have to import at least 3 or 4 additional sizes. This is especially true when the mesh edge is on about pelvis area. (as an example: Trousers, jeans, shorts, quite long shirts that fall on your butt area).

Second: The arm/shoulder area volume bones do not work quite as expected. To get around of that issue, you have to weight arms/shoulders partly to volume bones and partly traditional bones. There is also some fuzzyness with HANDLE, LOWER_BACK and UPPER_BACK bones. Depending on your garmet behaviour you have to rig it with different methods. Tight fitting t-shirts for example require different rigging than loose fit leather jacket.

I have never found any document or tutorial about male body rigging. I have made a sort of a "template mesh" for myself, witch I can use for weight transferring to my meshes.

If you wish, I could share some weight paint photos in this thread.