Questioning my rigged mesh workflow

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

I've been toying around with creating rigged mesh clothing for second life based of my own self taught methods and I'm beginning to think I'm overly complicating things.

First I use a cloth simulation program to create my initial shape on all standard size models. So I end up with an object for each standard size. I then import them into blender each on their own file (medium is a different file from large etc). I copy bone weights (obviously) I begin editing the weight paints by hand. I do this for each side... left leg... right leg... etc and for each and every size.

I'm starting to wonder if there is an 'easier' way. I use blender 2.63 and here are my questions:

1) Is there a way to mirror your weight paints.... so that I don't have to do BOTH the left and right arm. I believe at some point I found there was a way but if I remember correctly the method didn't work for me.

2) Is there a way to copy the weights from one size of mesh clothing to another? Eg: Once I finished the medium can I simply "copy" weight paints to the small, extra small (etc).

3) I'm beginning to wonder if Maya has superiority in rigging to blender. I've downloaded the Maya trial but while I can find loads of tutorials for modeling and some for rigging there isn't much out there relating Maya to Second Life rigging. Since I use a separate program for the 'creation' I really only need Maya for rigging only... and those tutorials are hard to come by. The ones I have seen jump around and aren't all that informative.

 

I've become pretty comfortable with weight painting but have a sneaky suspicion that I'm making wayy more work for myself then I should.

 

Ty in advanced!

[Chosen Few]

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Pheonix Mistwallow wrote:

I3) I'm beginning to wonder if Maya has superiority in rigging to blender. I've downloaded the Maya trial but while I can find loads of tutorials for modeling and some for rigging there isn't much out there relating Maya to Second Life rigging. Since I use a separate program for the 'creation' I really only need Maya for rigging only... and those tutorials are hard to come by. The ones I have seen jump around and aren't all that informative.

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I'll leave the Blender questions to Blender users.

 

Maya does indeed have a mirror skin weights command.  In the Animation menu set, hit Skin -> Edit Smooth Skin -> Mirror Skin Weights -> options box.  Take a good look at the options, and then hit the Help at the top of the options box, for a complete explanation of what they're all for.

You can also paint on both sides of the model at once, while you're painting weights (just as you can with any other brush in Maya).  Go to the Animation tab in the shelf, and double-click on the Paint Weights Tool, to open its attributes.  Expand the Stroke secton, and you'll see an opton for Reflection.  You can reflect across any axis, and you can choose whether to reflect across the object's center, or the world origin.

 

As for SL-specific ttorials, don't bother searching for those.  Rigging is riigging, is rigging.  Just learn the subject itself.  You'll follow the same procedures whether your target platform is SL or any other game engine.

The best place to begin when learning Maya is the help documentation that comes with it.  That's how every single Maya user starts.  Go through all the tutorials in the Getting Started section, in order.  Don't skip over any, even if you don't yet understand how it's relevant to what you're looking to do.  It's all relevant, whether you realize it or not.

Once you've been through all of those, you'll have a really solid working mastery of the basics of Maya.  From there, you can begin to specialize, and expand your knowledge toward specfic areas.  The general basics absolutely have to come first.  There's no other way.

The reason the other tutorials you found may have appeared to skip around, or to assume a certain knowledge level, is because literally every single Maya user on the planet started the same way, with those Getting Started tutorials in the help.  Anyone creating additional tutorials will naturally and automatically assume that the user has already been through those.

 

That said, if you're going to spend the money to purchase Maya, I do hope you'll use it for more than just rigging.  $3750 for a rigging program is pretty steep!

For starters, I'd suggest you use it to retopologize those cloth sim models.  By definition, cloth simulators never produce content that is optimized for usage in real time.   The poly counts are always excessively high, the topology is always unlclean, etc.  Anything produced from a cloth sim should be considered concept art, not game-ready product.  That's just the nature of the beast.

By the way, if cloth sim is your thing, you'll find that Maya's tools in that regard are quite good.  I don't know what other program you're used to, but since you're diving into Maya anyway, probably should check it out.  Save it for after you've learned all the basics, though, of course.

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

Hi Chosen Few! I was hoping you'd see my post as I've often seen your replies and find them most informative. I've seen several users post that there needs to be more Maya - Second Life tutorials. Have you ever thought of putting together a series? I'm sure I speak for several that would be happy to purchase such a thing from you.

That being said. I agree, Maya is VERY expensive and that's why I figured I really need to take advantage of the trial process and figure out if it's really the program for me. I don't want to buy such a thing for pure rigging but honestly that seems to be more so what I'd need it for at this point in time.

So I have a Maya specific questions for you that I'm sure I'll learn in the future but I'd like to know before making a purchase...

Does Maya allow you to copy weights from one mesh to another? Or would I have to rig the medium separate from the small etc?

Also, from what I've seen in video's Maya does have a step up in weight paints then blender. Have you (Chosen Few) experimented with Blender to truly see the differences?

 

[Rahkis Andel]

I am not a Maya user, but I can answer your question: Yes. Maya does allow you to copy weights.

The thing about Blender is, if you don't like how it works today, wait a few months and check again. It progresses impressively fast and it can change based on user feedback instantaneously, unlike paid software.

Of course, that's best-case-senario. Often new functionality is someone's pet project that they can only work on in their spare time, and in that case certain new developments can take far longer than you'd expect in paid software.

As you can see, it's in the eye of the beholder.

I'm not trying to sell, Blender, of course. Maya is well worth the price if you are good enough to make money with it!

[Chosen Few]

Thanks for the kinds words, Phoenix.  Yes, I have thought about doing a tutorial series.  I've also been back-burning a Photoshop for SL users book, for years now.  These things are all on my "when I get around to it" list, which is not exactly a short list, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, yes, Rhakis is correct.  You can certainly copy weights from model to another.  There are a number of ways to do it, in fact. 

One way to do it is to export the weight maps from the source (Skin -> Edit Smooth Skins -> Export Skin Weightmaps), and then import them onto the target (Skin -> Edit Smooth Skinds -> Import Skin Weightmaps).  This requires the UV's be identical, of course.

Another other option is simply to use the Copy Weights command (Skin -> Edit Smooth Skins -> Copy Skin Weights). This will work whether the UV's are the same or not, and will even work on dissimilar geometries, as long as you use the right settings.  If the models are very different, you'll probably have to do some clanup afterward with hand painting, but even with radically different geometries, Copy Skin Weights will still usually provide a pretty decent starting point.

Like just about every other command in Maya, these commands have options boxes, so open them up, take a look at the options, and then click the help to learn what they all do.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

Hey Phoenix,

to chime in as well in that subject:

I am using both Maya and Blender (and also Max3DS).

Maya is truly a professional program and has - as you already noticed - a lot advantages when it comes to professional animation, rigging, weighting.

But we deal with SL here, which is a limited environment and many of these advantages you don't even need. And which of course make the workflow a step harder because you have to deal with the whole amount of functionalities.

And as Chosen already mentioned, if you seriously contemplate to buy it just for skinning SL stuff.. you should reconsider that thought and simply switch to Blender. Except you want to become a professional Animator at the movie or gaming industry. Why? because Blender free and doesn't cost almost 4 K US dollars. And it fullfills every task in regard to what you could possibly need or want for SL.

And here we come to the reason already why you just find little amounts of tutorials for Maya in combination with SL.

Most Maya users are aiming at professional usage and thus don't bother with tutorials for SL content. And as Chosen also mentioned, they consider their viewers to already know most of the 'basic' workflows.

Second reson: most SL creators don't have that money to afford Maya, nor do they really need it to create things for SL. Thus most of them actually use Blender or other free programs for that matter. And due to this fact, most tutorials (made by users for other users) will mostly contain these free programs.

And is also a reason for Blender having i.e. special DAE (Collada exporters directly for Second Life) Due to a huge commun ity of users requesting those or even writing those to ensure they would be natively integrated. And due to the fact that blender is open source, and everyone - capable - can write extentions and plugins for it.

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

Code warrior - as a blender & maya user I'd like to pick your brain.

As the others have stated, Maya is able to copy weights from one object to another. This feature is incredible to me as I have been hand painting each size of the same shirt which is mainly just a time consuming task and well... time is money right?

Does blender have this feature as well? I've tried to find it on the web and usually find some vague answer that leaves me with more questions.

I'm also having problems with the "mirror" feature for weight painting in blender. I realize my model needs to be facing a certain direction as I believe blender mirror's on the x axis but even then it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong or is that feature just bugged?

I agree that since Blender is a free program there is so much help out there for the beginner of the modeling world. This leaves me to lean towards it as I'm the type that likes to do a quick search when I run into a problem. And it is ever changing!

 

Chosen Few - ahhh the "to do list" how it is ever growing right? I think you've been such a big help to the SL creation community that when you're able to tackle the task you'll be an instant sensation... just saying

[Rahkis Andel]

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Pheonix Mistwallow wrote:

As the others have stated, Maya is able to copy weights from one object to another. This feature is incredible to me as I have been hand painting each size of the same shirt which is mainly just a time consuming task and well... time is money right?

Does blender have this feature as well? I've tried to find it on the web and usually find some vague answer that leaves me with more questions.

I'm also having problems with the "mirror" feature for weight painting in blender. I realize my model needs to be facing a certain direction as I believe blender mirror's on the x axis but even then it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong or is that feature just bugged?

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I keep answering questions you're asking of others! Oops.

 

Yes, blender allows you to transfer weights from one mesh to another as well. I can't really explain how to do it right this moment because I've only done it once or twice and haven't committed the keystrokes to memory.

As far as mirroring weights goes, you can set it to use any axis as the mirroring axis, so if your model is facing Y, just set it to Y.

 

If no one has explained by the time I get home tonight, I'll try to make a quick video or something to show you how to do these things. Then again, with the helpful folks here, I doubt I'll need to.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

Hey Phoenix,

to give you the good news: yes, yes and yes =)

all recent versions of blender up to 2.65a (latest version 2.66 can't - yet, but i'm sure it will be updated, plus it has some inbuild weight transform which i didnt test yet) can run this plugin callled Bone Weights Copy, which you can download here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/bone-weight-copy-in-blender-2-52-6/ (entry: space_view3d_copy_bone_weight_enhanced.py)


Blender 2.65a you can get here : http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.65/

To install Boneweight copy, simple open File - User Preferences - Addons - Install from file, choose the script, and after installing it set the checkmark in it's entry to activate it.

The Mirror Modifier is of course also existant. And it has an extra option called 'mirror vertex groups', if that one is checked / enabled it will perfectly also mirror the weights. I'm mostly doing it this way. And Blender is quite forgiving without messing up weights, even if you separate and delete mirror'ed halfs and make new ones, merge them etc.
And its even intelligent enough to let you pose both sides independently, even if its still just mirror'ed and mot merged.

Blenders Mirror Modifier (and your mesh) when facing the same direction as the default avatar. And in this case the Mirror Axis would be 'y'. (unless you have it rotated for the usage with the weightpaint X-mirror tool)

A default avatar workbench (including default male, female avatars with male and female armatures, completely weighted - thus able to copy the weights,  from them with the above mentioned scripts, and one avatar from makehuman) is available here: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/avatar-workbench-265.blend  (this is the correct file to use with the above linked Blender 5.65a)

The boneweights Copy will allways appear in the tool panel (right side, by default) as soon as you have any object selected that contains weights. To copy them to a mesh: select 'first' your new mesh (with right mousekey), then (while holding shift) the one you want to copy from, and do use the buttons from the copy bone weights in the tool panel to copy the weights.

Works like a charm and gives you a good starting point to refine the weights and make them fit to your mesh.
(If you mesh differs a lot from the topology of the default avatar it's sometimes better to parent it to the armature by using 'with automatic weights' and tweak it from there, instead of copying the weights)

I guess this should answer all of your questions =)'

Cheers.

[Gaia Clary]

Hi;

first of all what i write below applies to Blender 2.66. It mostly should also work on older versions of Blender, but i can not give any guarantees ;-)

Mirror weight Painting

Blender can do mirrored weight paiting. However your model should be mirror symmetric along the x-axis on vertex level. otherwise the painted mirrored weights tend to become a bit wrong. You enable x-mirror in the tool shelf (when you are in Weight Paint Mode:

optionally you can also enable the Spray mode, however that may be not what you want to use in all cases. its nice to use with a tablet though.

The caveat about weight painting (and why so many people think its broken): When you do the weighting for one bone, the weights for the mirrored bone are NOT(!) shown:

However when you select the opposite bone, then you see the mirrored weights. In the following picture i have copied the model so that you can see both parts side by side:

Blender supports a bunch of different brushes for weight painting. Hpwever when you are in mirror paint mode then you should only use the draw brush and the blur brush. Otherwise it can happen that your mirrored weights become different overtime. Especially when you have disabled mirror mode temporaly, then reenable it.

With Blender 2.67 we will get a new feature that allows to also see completely unweighted vertices (vertices which are not weighted to any bone). This tool shows unreferenced vertices in black by default. here is a blender development video for that feature (you can skip over the first minute as it is a boring introduction to the used skeleton)

The feature is already available in development versions of Blender (and since a couple of weeks you even can customize the color o unreferenced vertices).

More weight tools

Blender offers some embedded tools for weight copy, also in the tool shelf:

I must admit that i have not tested the Transfer Weight tool, but it should be a replacement for the old "Weight Copy Script that astonishingly worked up to 2.65. But it was reported to be broken in 2.66.

Besides that Blender provides a bunch of weight paint brushes, functions for cleaning up the weights, lilmiting the number of weighed bones per vertex, etc.

I have worked on some usability improvements on weight tools, which are currently available in one of our commercial addons. But hopefully we can push some of the ideas to Blender as well. Here is a reference video. The weight tools are explained starting at about minute 6:00

[Coby Foden]

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Chosen Few wrote:

... cloth simulators never produce content that is optimized for usage in real time.   The poly counts are always excessively high, the topology is always unlclean, etc.  Anything produced from a cloth sim should be considered concept art, not game-ready product.  That's just the nature of the beast.

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This might be the reason why we sometimes hear things like "mesh lags".  Some designers use those cloth simulation programs and they don't care to clean the mesh but leave it extremely high polygon count.

Just recently I was in a live concert in one SL venue.  My frame rate was rather poor there.  My friend had a real slide show, only some 3 fps.  I checked the sim performance; sim fps was good, time dilation was good, no packet losses.  Hmm.. what's going on here I wondered?

Then I started to check in wireframe what the avatars were wearing.  It was pretty shocking sight!  Lots of avatars wore mesh clothes which had been made with cloth simulation program (one can easily see that as the polygon layout is very strange).  Many of those clothes had very high polygon count.

Well, after the concert most of the avatars left - and the frame rates went up again for a smooth fluid experience.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

@ Coby and @ Chosen - regarding that heavy use of clothing designers: it makes me cringe every time i see it.

 

I assume it's just too tempting for them to feel able to 'create' soemthing within a few minutes without the need of real modeling skills and contemplating topology and edgeflow, polycount etc. Just clicking a few buttons, having something that looks neat on their canvas and then - no matter the topological mess - exporting it, wildly copying weights on it and importing that to SL.. 'as-is'.

It unfortunately defeats the whole purpose of mesh being introduced for the users. And if people will continiue this way.. i am sure all the peope shouting 'lag' will find a help in form of linden lab also introducing 'max. amount of tris/verts per upload. Which then would again restrict the 'reasonable' builders. 

I do hope deeply people keep running into those kind of comments, and overthink their process of 'creation', and learn that these clothings and their topology are rather for static renders, or tessellation processes then for the current SL environment (nor any other similar engine).

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

Hi there,

 

I just noticed the transfer weight tool when I was reading the comments at the script download page that said it wasn't working anymore.

That being said I can't figure out how to get it to work! When I hit it a new set of options appears down below as seen:

But I have no idea what to do from there! I don't see a sort of "make it happen button". What I found on the web said something about a different menu other then the one I'm seeing so what am I doing wrong? I tried selecting the source first and then the destination as well as doing it in reverse but both show the same menu.

As for the mirror option I think I'm going to have to play with it again and see. It's been awhile since I've tried and I just downloaded blender 2.65 as suggested so maybe my issue is gone.

[Gaia Clary]

Ok, so i took a look at the tool and here is how i think  it should be used:

 

• Go to object mode
• Parent your mesh to the armature (with empty groups).

By now your mesh is parented to the armature but is completely unweighted,

 

• Select all source meshes from where you want to get the weights.
• Finally select the Target mesh to where you want to copy the weights.
• Enter weight Paint mode (on the target object)
• Transfer weights

Now the weight transfer has already taken place. In the "magic buttons" below you can now select different methods for how the weights shall be copied. The settings apply instantly. there is no "GO" button.

However note that the results are not so good compared to the "old" weight copy script. I believe the tool misses an option "Project along normals" and a submesh interpolation to calculate average weights for areas where the source vertices and the target vertices differ.

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

Coby & Code - That is misuse of a simulation program. I've seen ridiculous poly counts on both simulation generated cloth as well as modeled (in maya...blender... etc). It all comes down to the creator. I've seen sweat shirts go for 100+ prim equivalent all the way down to 13 (with cloth simulation programs). I prefer using a cloth simulation program because I'm more familiar with sewing then I am with modeling as a whole. However I use the programs options to keep prim count down

 

Gaia - Ty, my mistake was that I wasn't first parenting the mesh first (not sure why not!). Thank you! How would you suggest the workflow in that aspect. I keep debating with myself and I'm driving myself mad (so please don't mind if I sound like I lost a few marbles along the way).

I really enjoy posing and checking my model in every aspect in blender prior to upload. So (for this particular model) I have the medium already painted and checked and ready to go. At first, while testing all this, I was importing the small size into the medium file (Oh btw, have I mentioned that I have a different file for all sizes with the corresponding standard size avatar... is that redundant and I should stop doing that and just rig on one model?) But of course now the small doesn't fit on the medium so testing is well...not as accurate.

So I'm debating if I should make a file with all the standard size models on their own layer. I'm not sure if this would be a heavy file or not and also I'm not sure if that's just a useless idea. Am I the only one who rigs the clothing literally to a standard size model? Is there a better (and more efficient) way I should be doing all this?

Sorry if I seem like I am rambling. I literally have worked at this all weekend after seeing a video that sparked the idea that my "cave woman ways" may be a bit out dated.

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

ok generally you are on the right way:

to rigg your default clothing item to the Default Avatar Model. this gives you a good 'medium' shape so to say.

If that one is rigged and all good to go. You can grab it to make maybe a slim size and a bigger size for it.
In case you don't really know what the standard sizes are most mesh creators use there are some offers for shapes on the marketplace as help (https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Standard-Sizing-Package-Updated-Male-Female/2894727  for free.)

 

I personally dislike sticking to any standards but that's me. and i don't aim at the casual clothing customers..at all. I make scifi stuff armors or full body suits or full custom avatars and creatures. It really depends on what customer group you are aiming at.

 

To keep the different sizes within the same file and just organized over several layers is the best practice. Since you rigged them to the skeleton in this file. And if you don't want to make (i find them rather annoying) links between files etc.

And no, the blender internal files don't grow too much. Since its mainly all just  plain 'txt / data'. The biggest file i have is like 50 KB and that conatains several versions of a full avatar and all it's LODs plus one animation skeleton and one rigging armature.

So even if you cluster it with 10 times the amount you are finally reaching 500 KB which is still tiny.

Regarding the topoloy of these clothing modeler meshes i still find them even on their lowest settings rather too dense. And they barely have any good edgeflow that suits well to the rather limited polygoncount and edges of default gaming models with around 5-7 K tris maximum.

Would be interesting to see you bustier's wireframe if you feel like sharing it =)

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

I should grab that and see what the prim equiv is in SL for ya so we can see.  I can't log in atm but I'll be sure to add that.

I agree standard sizing is quite standard. I've seen "Flexi Mesh" and "Fluid Mesh" which seems to stretch on more sliders then your standard mesh. That hurts my brain, is it coding or the way things are created? My guess is that's the direction mesh clothing is going to go so I should probably research that when I have more room for info in my head.

[Gaia Clary]

Flexi Mesh / Fluid Mesh both are as far as i understand directly related to the usage of the "20 collision volumes" which are special bones defined within the SL Avatar. The trick is that the collision volumes are directly influenced by some shape sliders which gives you a few more options for resizing your meshes.

The video i posted earlier today in this thread (about the weight tools) also contains a section about how to use the collision volumes. But beware, it is not at all a simple task to use these bones for customizing your meshes. And just to have mentioned it: collision volumes do not work for customizing your cleavage :matte-motes-dont-cry:

So your best option might still be to wait for the mesh deformer project to get released... or better not wait und go ahead with whatever you like to do.