Rigged jacket problem

[J4ckrabb1t]

Hi guys, I recently decided to start using blender to try and get this pre-made jacket I like into the game through blender I found from one of those free websites that lets you download them. I did a few tutorials first hand and got the basics of it and now im pretty okay with it...its just this jacket im having a problem with. For starters the jacket by default start of in a sort of relaxed position, arms sort of half way between completly resting and the T-pose. I immedietly though "Hmm, never ran into this before" but figured it was probably manageable. Turns out the jacket doesnt want to play ball or im doing something terribly wrong. I started off thinking for some reason that maybe when I copy the bone weights the jacket would automatically align with the avatars arms since ive never worked with an item of clothing thats not in the t-pose before. Turns out I was wrong...so i ended up changing the pose so the arms were inside the jacket but it was doing the same thing....the outer section of each of the jackets upper arm for some reason is the only section of the jacket that will actually move with the upper arm armature while the chest area actually connects itself to upperarm itself but stretches since the wrist area of the jacket is connected to the stomache bone and the arm hole itself is connected to the upper leg bone...this applies to both sides of the jacket by the way. The only things that work are the legs and the chest...they are all connected perfectly...its just the arms giving me some problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make it so each section of the jacket properly goes with the correct armature bone? Or is it impossible with a jacket like this? Thanks

[Rahkis Andel]

Wow, this sounds exactly like the problem I had when I was starting out in rigging a few weeks ago.

If I understand correctly, you tried changing the avatar's pose to fit the arms with the jacket correct? Unfortunately, that won't work. The only way to change the orientation of the bones and have that translate into second life is to actually change the bone positions in edit mode and doing that will break any arm animation that depend on those bones.

Your only choice is to move the jacket mesh itself into the T-Pose. That will give you the best results.

If that's what you did, I'm not sure what your problem is and I'll need to see some screenshots.

[Gaia Clary]

If that is the problem, then here is one possible solution here:

 

1. Temporaily modify the rest pose to match your attachment (you an do that in edit mode. And i believe there is a way to "Apply current pose as rest pose"
2. Rig your attachment to the new rest pose
3. weight your mesh
4. pose your attachment as T-Pose.
5. Then apply the armature modifier
6. Now rig the mesh to a "normal" armature.

For Avastar users: We have automated this process and added an option "Alter mesh to restpose" which basically does what i described above. However this method has its own issues and does not yet work as smoothly as i would like to get it. But it gives reasonable results (which however in most cases need some tweeking).

[J4ckrabb1t]

(Oh my frikkin god I have to re-write this because I lost connection as I was posting)

Yeah thats right, pretty much the second thing I tried...its been a sort of trial and error from this point...and quite frankly I dont know what the hell i'm doing anymore hahaha, cant fidn any tuts to help so its why im here.

I haven't tried actually manipulating the jacket itself yet because my "3DS MAX PRO" friend seems to think its not possible in blender...naturally as the more experienced one of the two of us I took his word for it. But if its possible id rather not be breaking my guys arms as you put it...id just kill to have the jacket working and into SL even if it takes a week to learn and do myself.

If you could point me in the direction of a tutorial on how to manipulate the jacket maybe or explain it here if it isnt a deathly long process to do if its possible?

Thanks again

[J4ckrabb1t]

I'll give that a blast thanks )

 

One thing I failed to point which I tried was actually changing the rest position of the bone to the pose but for some reason when I apply it my char jumps straight back into a T-pose while it clearly shows the armature/bone is actually in the rest position I set...got a little confused at this point...again why im here.

[Rahkis Andel]

If the jacket is pretty simple, you might want to just forcably move the arms into a T-Pose. That might be less trouble for you. If you do this, make use of proportional editing.

I really wish I had time to do a tutorial right now, but I really don't. If you are super stuck, I'd gladly re-pose it for you if you passed me the .blend file.

[J4ckrabb1t]

Not a problem at all I appreciate whatever help you have given me so far. Admittedly the main reason I decided to pick up blender and try it myself was solely because of this jacket simply because it doesn't exist in second life yet and id kill to get it for several reasons. Not afraid to admit I have pretty much hit a wall and I'm a little impatient with it already ha >_<

I'll see about putting up the file somewhere quick and sending the link to you via PM when I can so you can do your stuff whenever you're free

[Rahkis Andel]

Sure, I'll keep an eye on my messages.

[Deezy Abruzzo]

Cool, what sites have free mesh?

[Chosen Few]

---

Deezy Abruzzo wrote:

Cool, what sites have free mesh?

---

While I'm usually the last person to say, "Google is your friend," in response to a forum question, in this case, I have to say, seriously, Google is your friend.   Type in "free 3d models" and you'll get over 76 million results.  Take a look at some of them.

 

Do be aware that not everything you find will be suitabe for use in a realtime environment like SL.  The majority probably won't be, in fact.  Even the ones you do find that are game ready will probably still require some tweaking.  I would suggest you consider them to be concept art, not end product.  Use them for inspiration, to see how different 3D artists do different things, and then do similar things of your own.

[J4ckrabb1t]

Okay so thanks to the rapid responses from Rahkis I have been able to make ALLOT of progress on the jacket..I'm no longer having problems with the jacket clipping or stretching it flows perfectly, but now a new problem has risen and I didn't want to keep spamming Rahkis' inbox everytime I got stuck.

The new problem that has coming up is when im trying to actually copy the bone weight of the avatar to the jacket so I can finalise it to make sure it works for exporting. Somewhere along the line ive made a terrible mistake which I can only assume most experienced blender users will now laugh at me for explaining but here goes.

The first thing I immedietly did was manually create an armature on the jacket layer and applied vertex groups for each section of the jacket to each bone which in a result make the jacket move nicely with the bones. After that I tried to find out if there was a way to like merge the bones at all but I felt this was wrong, I dont know...so i ended up removing the armature and since i now knew about vertex grouping I actually thought grouping the jacket to the avatar bones might help. A few more problems then rose which for a few moments i thought I had fixed when the mesh was actually moving faster than the armature itself, I parented the jacket and at first in its default position it suddenly worked like a charm. Naturally as a newbie to the programme I got dead excited and really chuffed with myself thinking I had cracked it.

Yeeeeah, so much for that. I've been at it all day and alot of things have happened so I cannot remember the exact details of what happened first but at present the position of the jackets arms are in their default down position in edit mode while having changed the pose mode position to that of the t-position. For some reason when I apply pose as rest pose the arms either drop back down into the jackets defaults mesh position or suddenly fly up like their cheering. The other thing which i mentioned earlier is when im trying to copy the bone weight of the avatar to the jacket it says 'more than 1 mesh has vertex weights, only select 1 mesh with weights, aborting' ...I tried unparenting the jacket from the armature and it just doesnt want to...the arms drop down into the jackets default pose but when i move the bones its STILL attached to the armature. Also the avatar mesh's arms are up in the air and only drop back down when unparenting.

I'm so damn confused I dont know what to do anymore and I just KNOW im doing something so wrong but i dont know...

[Rahkis Andel]

Like I said in my latest PM to you, weight painting is not a well understood process by most and there's a reason for that.

I don't think I can really make out what the problem is from what you've written, but you probably now have conflicting weights going on.

Let me know if this is accurate:

First you created your own armature to move the jacket into the T-pose. That went well. Keep in mind if you are going to be doing a vertex weight copy from the default avatar, you should fit your jacket to the avatar as well as physically possible before moving on to the next step.

At this point, you should have applied the armature modifier, thereby freezing the jacket in place. You should have also made sure that -all- vertex groups were deleted from the jacket to make sure it was a clean slate to skin to the SL armature.

Then with your "clean slate", you can finally do the vertex weight copy from the SL avatar.

Lastly, you parent your jacket to the armature as an object (as opposed to with empty weights or any of the other armature deform options)

You will no doubt need to clean up some of the vertex weights, too. The buttons and other attached objects will probably not be weighted fully to the right bones and the SL avatar has crappy weights to begin with so it's not going to be perfect.

[J4ckrabb1t]

I never have been very good at explaining more complicated situations like this but from what your saying here you make it sound like the first thing I did was pretty much in the right track, creating its own armature and t-posing the jacket...however I was very much unaware of this 'armature modifier' your talking about and I never even thought about deleting the vertex groups once id done that. Basically I didnt get past your first point because I ended up removing the armature I made myself for the jacket and rigging it to the avatars bones. I guess I should look into it some more...I feel like a pest truth be told but...i will conquer this and then youll never hear from me again, ha.

[Rahkis Andel]

No one is having their arm twisted to help you. Even someone demanding help wouldn't be a pest because it's easy enough to ignore them.

Someone like you who is asking nicely for help is of course, even less so.

But yes, when you parent a mesh to an armature using any of the deformation settings (where vertex groups are added automatically), what you are doing is the automatic equivalent of these manual steps:

 - Parent your mesh to the SL armature object

 - Give your mesh an armature modifier

 - Set the deformation armature object to your SL armature in the modifier settings

 - In the mesh, create vertex groups with corresponding names for every single bone in the skeleton

Depending on the option you choose, automatic weights may be assigned to each vertex as well.

Anyway, when we tell you to apply the armature, we mean to click the apply button of the armature modifier. In retrospect, that's why your mesh kept snapping back to it's original position; you were simply removing the armature altogether.

Keep in mind that if you make a change that you do not like and cannot undo it, Blender automatically keeps old saves, so it is sometimes possible to go back. Go to your save directory and you may see files with extensions .blend1 and .blend2. If you remove the 1 and 2 you will be able to open them and they will be previous saves.

Obviously, if you save very frequently, you may not get to a useful save, but it could potentially save you trouble. Assuming you are computer savvy, you probably also realize that you need to be able to see file extensions to do this as well.

[J4ckrabb1t]

Thats reassuring to hear hehe.

Anyway I think I might have hit the nail on the head and have now successfully rigged the jacket from what it seems...its all moving PERFECTLY with the avatar and armature. All im doing now is continuing with the tutorial from Asha on making alphas for the jacket and downloading a plugin called Python to export it. Fingers crossed it works...

One last thing I had concerns about but didn't seem relative at the time since no one said anything about it. Whats the business with the LOD's? Are they paramount for a successful rigged mesh upload in SL? On her tutorial Asha exports each LOD individually which she had from the beginning oh her third of fourth video but didnt explain how she got them. IS it something I should be concerned with?

[Rahkis Andel]

You probably already know what an LOD is, but it stands for Level of detail.

SL has 4 LODs. You can imagine them by picturing your item with 4 concentric rings representing the distances a viewer is standing from your object. As you cross the border defined by the ring you will see the LOD it represents; you see the highest LOD object when you are standing close to the object and the lowest LOD when you are standing far away from it. If you are outside of all of the rings, SL will derender the object, I believe. Some graphic settings can affect how and when a new LOD kicks in too, making this somewhat complicated of a subject, so I won't bother going into details that I don't even understand all that well.

The idea is to dial back the detail of your object as the viewer gets further from it to save on GPU processing power. From a distance, you wouldn't notice that the buttons weren't there, for example. From close up you want full detail. At a medium distance, you could probably remove much of the details without it being noticable.

From the furthest distance away, some objects don't need much more than a 2d image bilboard.

All you have to technically do to create a new LOD for your jacket is to take out parts that shouldn't be visible and use the decimate modifier to remove some unneded edges. This respects weights and UVs seams almost like magic, so if used carefully it can give you -okay- results.

The best results come from manually removing edge loops, but in your case, the jacket is already triangulated, so that would be a time consuming process.

After you have made an LOD you just export it as it's own .dae. So you could consider your jacket as it is to be the highest LOD and you could create different LODs by hand and upload them separately.

Do -not- let SL determine the LOD by itself. It's decimation algorithm tends to just ahnialate all surface details as quickly as possible.

[Deezy Abruzzo]

Google is my friend and I use it frequently. In fact, that is how I found this forum. I was only asking the site in which he found his jacket so I wouldn't have to look through 76 million results.