Rigging always deforms the shoulders of my meshes

[Alexandra Barcelos]

Hello i use avastar to rig my meshes in blender but the shoulders and sometimes the back come out deformed once added to the avatar in second life ... i tried changing the pose of the avastar and rigging i also tried modifying the mesh .

I see developpers in the marketplace that also use garment maker to make their clothing meshes and the shoulders are perfect ...

Is there a trick or a fix for this ?

[Dilbert Dilweg]

That can happen if you dont apply your modifiers before rigging...  Any subsurf modifiers or any modeling modifiers should be applied before rigging...

[Alexandra Barcelos]

I never have any active modifiers on my meshes i wish it was that simple

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Alexandra Barcelos wrote:

Hello i use avastar to rig my meshes in blender but the shoulders and sometimes the back come out deformed once added to the avatar in second life ... i tried changing the pose of the avastar and rigging i also tried modifying the mesh .

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Are you saying that the deformation in SL is different so that you can't preview it in Blender? In that case your armature modifier may be misconfigured. The options "Bone Envelopes" and "Preserve Volume" should be disabled.

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I see developpers in the marketplace that also use garment maker to make their clothing meshes and the shoulders are perfect ...

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Garment maker is useful to simulate the physics of cloth, but it produces meshes not suitable for realtime rendering. Of course that doesn't stop many merchants from importing garment meshes to SL anyway, since we can always blame LL for the lag they cause.

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Is there a trick or a fix for this ?

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It depends. Volume loss due to bending or twisting can be reduced by inserting additional edge loops around the joints. But without any screenshots, we can only guess what's going on.

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Dilbert Dilweg wrote:

That can happen if you dont apply your modifiers before rigging...  Any subsurf modifiers or any modeling modifiers should be applied before rigging...

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Subdivision modifiers are usually not a problem because they interpolate vertex weights automatically. In fact you can save a lot of weight painting time by rigging a low-poly cage and subdividing it later.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Right on thats good to know. I have always had bad experiences with active modifers using avastar when trying to weight paint or rig..

[Gaia Clary]

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Dilbert Dilweg wrote:

Right on thats good to know. I have always had bad experiences with active modifers using avastar when trying to weight paint or rig..

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Hi, dilbert;

Could you specify in more detaiul what sort of problems you had with active modifiers and Avastar ? If there are any problems please let me know so we can fix them.

[Gaia Clary]

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Alexandra Barcelos wrote:

Hello i use avastar to rig my meshes in blender but the shoulders and sometimes the back come out deformed once added to the avatar in second life ...

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Hi, Alexandra.

Are you using the default T Pose for your rigging and weighting ? Or do you use the "bake T Pose" function of Avastar ? And does the mesh also look bad in Blender when you use the same pose as within SL ? Or does it look right in Blender and wrong in Second Life ?

If i'd know more details (screen shots...), then maybe i could give you a hint how to improve your mesh. And if it turns out to be a bug in Avastar then your description would help us to fix that issue...  :matte-motes-whistle:

[Coby Foden]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

 

Hi, Alexandra.

Are you using the default T Pose for your rigging and weighting ?

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Gaia, I have one question about T-pose.  Is it common practice to design clothes in T-pose?  If so, why so?

Avatars in SL hardly ever stand in T-pose.  More likely they are standing hands down.  Now if the a blouse was designed in T-pose the shoulders could look perfect in that pose.  But when the hands are down wouldn't there be stretching of textures on the soulders in hands down pose?  So why to use T-pose in designing instead of a more closer to the natural avatar's pose? Like for example A-pose (hands pointing about 45 degrees downward, leks spread a bit apart)?  There might be some reason what I don't understand, is there?

 

PS.

I have been watching Jonathan Williamson's videos "Modeling the Female Body in Blender Series".  He chose to use A-pose to model the body because the shoulders and areas close to them are more close to the natural pose in A-pose than they are in T-pose.  So those areas are easier to model in A-pose so that they look good also when the hands are down.

 

[Alexandra Barcelos]

I bake it on the T-Pose yes ... i also tried changing the avastar pose  .

 

The mesh looks absolutely normal BEFORE rigging in blender here take a look : 

http://i48.tinypic.com/2la58hc.jpg

 

Then when i rig it becomes an other story heh :

http://i47.tinypic.com/24etcg3.jpg

 

Then in secondlife ( im being generous this doesnt look this bad ... but all my models get deformed worse then this ):

http://i48.tinypic.com/35mikra.jpg

 

 P.s. Its just an example i did not add the solidify modifier yet to it so im not referring to the transparency but to the deformation .

 

I uninstalled avastar 2 times trying to get it to work fine ... no chance ... it rigs my sleeveless tops with ease but my sleeves ones never got 1 to fit right .

 Also i modified the mesh thinking it was the sleeves maybe they where to close to the sl avatars shoulder edges ... was not it either .

[Spinell]

I've had problem with mesh deformation after riging around the shoulder area as well. Couldn't quite have a totally satisfying fix back to the original before-rigging look, but since it didn't look bad in SL, I let it slip.

The way I sort of fix it a little was by applying weight on the shoulder bits that got deformed and it looked much better then and worked well with avatarmovement. I also note that I don't use Avastar.

So... Have you tried messing a bit with the weights and check if it fixes the problem?

[Alexandra Barcelos]

Actually i did not i will give it a try once i get back from the grocery shop thank you for the tip 

[Gaia Clary]

OUch! This does not at all look correct to me. I believe that your issue is one of the following:

 

1. Your mesh might have rotations in object mode. These rotations could spoil the mesh when it gets parented to the Armature.
2. Your mesh might contain shape keys. In all current Avastar distributions this is a severe limitation (that shape keys are harmful when binding the mesh). The workaround is to remove all shape keys before binding (parenting) the mesh to the armature.
3. The same is true for extra vertex groups. They should be removed before binding. Note that we have meanwhile fixed most of these oddities and the next update of Avastar will be much more forgiving regarding shape keys and extra vertex groups.
4. Possibly you have added multiple armature modifiers to your mesh.
5. Possibly you have also added multiple armature modifiers to the Avastar default character.

Of course all that is guessing. But i can ensure you that what you see is nothing close to what you can expect to get from blender (and Avastar).

If you still can not get it right, please feel free to contact me or Freston Resident in Second life to get it sorted out.

[Gaia Clary]

Regarding the arms, the T-Pose (also named "Da vinci pose" as far as i know ) places the arms just in the middle of the entire range of thepossible movement of the arms (between straight up and straight down). So this is technically the ideal pose to allow for the least deformations over the ENTIRE pose range.

However in many animations the pose range is much more limited. So in the average the arms are moving between straight down and T-pose. So the middle of that is the A-Pose. And that is what makes also sense for Second life where the default pose is arms down and thats what avatars mostly do.

So although for Second Life it would make pretty much sense to use an A-Pose, they have chosen to use a T-Pose. Remind that this decision was made about 10 years ago. In that time maybe there was no good alternative ? i don't know and i do not judge

 

[Gaia Clary]

The Bake to T Pose function is designed to allow you to model your mesh in any pose you like. So you can select the ideal "natural rest pose" for your mesh on a case by case. Actually the "bake to T-Pose" function recalculates the vertex positions of the mesh such that it does not distort when the Avatar goes to the pose that you defined as "the natural rest pose".

But of course the backdraw is that when you now go to the other extreme position (T-Pose or hands straight up) then the distortions get bigger at the shoulders.

At the end you have to decide what is the most common usage of your mesh and what is the most common pose in which the mesh is used. That would give you a hint about what pose you should model.

Asha has mentioned a way how you can "manually bake to T Pose". That can be done with blender's standard tools but it measn you have to fiddle a bit. But you can manage to get this done even without any addon

[Alexandra Barcelos]

thank you for the support i will try everything written in this post <3

[Coby Foden]

Thank you for the clear good explanation Gaia. :smileyhappy:

[Alexandra Barcelos]

Good news is ... i played around a bit with the jacket mesh fowing this threads info and it worked

theres no bad news actually i dont know why i said that ... but i did not try it with other shirts will do in a bit *crosses fingers

[Alexandra Barcelos]

Did not work for my tank top ... shoulders all distorted

[Gaia Clary]

I am interested to take a look at your blend file for inspection.

[Alexandra Barcelos]

sent in private ) tysm

[Gaia Clary]

so, there are a few stray objects in your file.

- go to object mode
- press CTRL +h

Now you see some extra skirts and hair wigs.

- select only the armature
- go to the object data properties of the armature
- disable the visibility of the avastar mesh parts (all of them)

Now you should only see the armature itself and the stray objects.

- delete the now visible skirts and hair wigs (only the meshes, not the armature)

- now ctrl +h again. that will show the avastar mesh.
- you can hide the skirt and the hair wig if you like.

Now you should see your mesh and the default avastar mesh again.

- select your mesh and the armature
- in the tool shelf copy weights
- in the tool shelf bake T-pose

Now you have weighted your mesh

- select only the armature
- go to pose mode
- move the bones

Now the t-shirt should move along with the upper body.
There is no distortion anywhere beyond the "normal problems"
which need some fixing of the mesh itself and possible
the weights.but that is normal.

For example the part around the orange circle in the image
needs some fixing of the weights:

You can do that quickly with the weight paint tools available from Blender.
I was able to fix this particular problem by blurring the area a bit. I found some
more areas where you may want to tweek the weights. But that should be doable
with little effort.

And beware: there is no "press here and get perfect result" button. There will always be a bit of work left over for you

[Alexandra Barcelos]

Thank you so much !! i will try this