Question about rigging in common and fitted mesh - new bones (using Avastar)

[Monti Messmer]

Hello, so i´m trying to use the new bones 2 problems have arised.

Using the BUTT bone doesn´t do anything when change the butt-size in SL, all other lower body (even use the belly bone) work fine. Is that a implementation thing or work in progress or .... ?

Following the tutorials i paint the weights with selecting the bone to create the Vertex Groups. Then i edit the weights in weight-painting mode. Now when i check the vertex groups it´s a wild selection of points but far away from where i painted the weights. What does the vertex groups do for the rigging inside SL or is that only a help using Blender ?

Btw, i created the vertex groups manually to fit my weight painting and the BUTT bone still does nothing only when butt size is set to 0 it looks like the lovehandels shoot out sideways.

Monti

[Gaia Clary]

For the first problem... do you use the Fitted Mesh test viewer ? or the default SL Viewer ?

For the second problem i only have a wild guess. Which version of Blender do you use ? There is an issue that has to do with anti aliasing. Now don't ask me how that refers to weight painting, but it does create weird painting results when you have anti aliasing turned on (in the user preferences). I am not sure but maybe more recent versions of blener no longer have this issue...

Regarding the vertex groups: Weight painting is actually a method for editing the vertex groups. So these are the essential information for your animation in SL. If things go wrong here, then they certainly go wrong in SL as well.

Have you tested your weighting in blender (used pose mode and tried to pose your model) ?

Also when you use Avastar then you should use the newest test version (currently we have update version 950) to get the most recent bug fixes.

[Monti Messmer]

Thanks for reply.

Using Fitted Mesh Viewer and Blender 2.6.9 with Avastar 1.1.949 with the option Fitted mesh enabled.

Created the mesh for lower body, parented mesh removed all vertex groups then select leg bone and painted the weights that created the vertex group.

Now thats how the painting looks

and how the vertex group

When is paint subtract weights the vertex groups stay unchanged but in SL everything looks ok ?!?

What is used for weights in SL - the vertex groups or the weight paint - or both ? what if they do not correspond, what shouldn´t happen imo.

The BUTT thing is that it works for almost every other bone in the body - even with the silly vertex groups - just not for that one bone.

Would it help if you look into my blender file ? It´s only a dummy anyway.

Monti

[Gaia Clary]

the weight paint data is stored in the vertex groups. Its essentially the SAME thing.

In your case it looks like the vertices on the right side (corresponding to blue areas in the weight paint display) are very low weighted or even weighted with a value of 0. from the animation point of view its the same if a vertex is weighted with a value of 0 to a bone, or is not at all weighted to the bone. So in first place there should be nothing to worry about this. However i see weights assigned to the right side of the mesh which probbaly will make problems.

I wonder however why you removed all vertex groups at all. Why dont you use the weight preset "Fitted Mesh" ? That should already give you a starting configuration from where you can fix issues. Instead of taking the long way and do all weights by hand ? Actually there is also "automatic weights from bones" that usually creates a better weighting than the "old" weight copy method...

One word of warning: You use an "in development version" of Avastar ... The testversions are meant to give users early access to the newest features, but we also expect to get feedback about bugs or workflow issues. So you must be prepared that things may break (athough i currently do not know of any broken feature).

[Monti Messmer]

After introduction of mesh i stopped creating and went away from SL. Creating one item in different sizes that still won´t fit , uploading testing .... isn´t worth the time spend.

I followed an older tutorial you did, and mentioned it´s old i know ;-), there you told to remove all groups before continue. Seems my work flow needs an update too.

That´s a reason i just downloaded one of the many versions for avastar, it´s merely to see if creating clothes now is on a way to give customers and creators happy easy life.

Ok i think me got the vertex group thing and 0 weight :-)

I will try one of the options to use pre-defined weights for fitted mesh and see where my mistake at the butt is. Maybe should work on a female avatars never had any probs with their behinds - rofl

Monti

[Gaia Clary]

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Monti Messmer wrote:

I followed an older tutorial you did, and mentioned it´s old i know ;-), there you told to remove all groups before continue. Seems my work flow needs an update too.

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Which one ? Can you tell me the link please ? Then i check what needs to be updated.

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Monti Messmer wrote:

That´s a reason i just downloaded one of the many versions for avastar, it´s merely to see if creating clothes now is on a way to give customers and creators happy easy life.

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Actually there are only 2 versions of Avastar: The Released 1.0 and the newest development version which is sort of an Avastar-1.1 early pre release. The prerelease might not even work correctly. And it has not been advertised as published and complete. Using Collision Volume Bones is also not easy. So it still needs a bit of witchcraft to get somewhere...

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Monti Messmer wrote:I will try one of the options to use pre-defined weights for fitted mesh and see where my mistake at the butt is. Maybe should work on a female avatars never had any probs with their behinds - rofl

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The gender should be of no importance in this case If you find something is going weird or wrong in your opininon, please let me know. We can never get enough feedback!

 

 

Good luck to your efforts.

[Monti Messmer]

OK so i tried as told and it cleared a few issues but

going into pose mode - shape editor. Moving the butt size slider the BUTT "bone" stops moving beyond 33.

Is that an SL skeleton limitation because exactly that was the reason i thought doing something wrong.

Monti

[Gaia Clary]

I can see what you mean. Now...

The Avastar animation system should be a perfect copy of the SL animation system. So all sliders should react in the same way in blender as they do in SL. So if the Butt bone behaves differently in SL compared to Avastars sliders then we have a bug. Otherwise its a feature.

I will check this in more detail and report back.

[Allison Lynagh]

I've been working with rigging for a long while now.. fitted mesh went from a perfect dream to my worst nightmare. It took awhile, but I've finally come to understand the rigging, weight paints etc.. or at least the concept behind them in any case. After twiddling with fitted mesh, brought to us humble blender users by Gaia, I have hit a wall. I've managed to tweak an outfit to deform the breasts (without bleedthru) to 80%.. the lovehandles to about 60%.. but the butt.. no.

So the issue lies here, and it was an unexpected behavior, on that has been documented before and does not seem to plague every user. As the avatar butt slider goes higher, the butt indeed does get bigger front to back.. but it gets thinner too, like you're puckered up about to get hit by a belt or some such thing. When the rump gets smaller, it shrinks front to back as expected, but it gets wider and wider, much more so than the actual avatar's hips. 

My initial response was exasperation, then I decided to make it into a treasure hunt. My findings are as follows:

When using Avastar 1.1, I've found removal of butt weights actually helps with this issue. It still doesn't deform quite properly width wise, and i'd be willing to show Gaia if she wished to see, but the deformations are closer to expectation than the pucker/pancake reaction I was getting before. I'm not particularly code saavy, but to me it would seem that the deformations were swapped somehow, bigger-> thinner, smaller -> wider. 

[Gaia Clary]

The weights used for Fitted mesh in upcoming Avastar-1.1 are only preliminary. I have a few other issues to solve before, but then i will go over the weights again and maybe i can find some good solution. Maybe it makes sense to look at the weights provided by LL ...

regarding the shape sliders we read the definitions from the Avatar definition files. SO unless there is a bug in the reader the avatar in Blender should react in the same way as the avatar in SL. SO if there is a difference between SL and Blender, please let me now. That must be a bug.

[Medhue Simoni]

Hey Gaia,

This is not really about Fitted Mesh, but I did notice that when you bend the mShoulder bones down into a more natural position, any clothing weighted to it stretches to expose the shoulder. In SL tho, I don't see the same affect. I been meaning to mention it to you, but I keep forgetting. If you want to talk about this more or somewhere else, just let me know.

[Gaia Clary]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Hey Gaia,

This is not really about Fitted Mesh, but I did notice that when you bend the mShoulder bones down into a more natural position, any clothing weighted to it stretches to expose the shoulder. In SL tho, I don't see the same affect. I been meaning to mention it to you, but I keep forgetting. If you want to talk about this more or somewhere else, just let me know.

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Hi, Medhue;

Possibly there is a relation to the "Preserve Volume" option in the Armature modifier. I have been informed by some people that "Preserve Volume" is used in SL. I heard the opposite from others. I did not yet check this in more detail though. But maybe you can test for your case if enabling "Preserve Volume" gives more consistent results in Blender.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Hey Gaia,

This is not really about Fitted Mesh, but I did notice that when you bend the mShoulder bones down into a more natural position, any clothing weighted to it stretches to expose the shoulder. In SL tho, I don't see the same affect. I been meaning to mention it to you, but I keep forgetting. If you want to talk about this more or somewhere else, just let me know.

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Hi, Medhue;

Possibly there is a relation to the "Preserve Volume" option in the Armature modifier. I have been informed by some people that "Preserve Volume" is used in SL. I heard the opposite from others. I did not yet check this in more detail though. But maybe you can test for your case if enabling "Preserve Volume" gives more consistent results in Blender.

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Yep, that was it! When it is checked, It seems to react like it should.

[Allison Lynagh]

It's harder to describe the exact issue, so I thought I would show you. There is no sound, just a quick video showing the issue I was speaking about. The behavior I would say is more like a bug and less like a benefit.

 

[Gaia Clary]

For me it is still not clear what would be the best way to do Fitted Mesh weighting. The Fitted Mesh weights from Avastar are a best guess on the information i got about 4 weeks ago. Currently the weights are the same as for the original SL Avatar, except for the new bones where the weights are automatically calculated from bones.

I know that these weights are not good. And they are very different from the weights provided by the SL demo characters. I still hesitate to use the weights provided by LL because this is not meant as "the official weight maps" but as a demo for how it could be done.

I believe there must be a better way to predict some decent weighting based on the mesh model. But we first need more experience to learn what is "the right way". Therefore i'd like to ask everybody to share your experience so that we eventually can find a better solution.