Rigging and weight painting a Poncho

[ahimsa Balut]

Hi everyone. This is my last hope to find some help, as it has been eating my brains for several hours and even days. I made a poncho. It came out perfectly, but when uploaded inworld, even with alphas, some parts of avies forearms would poke through it, due AO's. So, i didn't like that, and went back to Blender v272 and made a second version of the poncho. 

The idea is it to fall naturally down your shoulders and arms. No sleeves, no nothing. But to rig it in T-pose and then weight paint it it messes all up, no matter how many times i tried to re-do it. 

What can i do here, to make it look perfect inworld ? I was told this is one of the hardest things to make. But, i don't really care. I just want to know what steps can i give to make it look like it should when uploaded inworld, and not have some bits poking through even if they're with alphas. 

 

Thanks in advance. Any tip, hint, video tutorial, whatever is pretty valuable for me. I am about to give up, and that would be a shame on me. 

[Cybella Sieyes]

My suggestion to you on how to go about this sort of garment is to "fake" the poncho effect with full fabric arms and a loftier body panel.  Seperating the mesh into arms and a body will allow you to keep the alpha through AO motions.  It is not as simple an item of clothing as a poncho in RL but if you make the mesh baggey enough you should be able to fool the eye watching into thinking the garment is poncho like

[Gaia Clary]

You could rig this poncho to the current Pose, then bend the rigged avatar into T-Pose and finally bind it again to T-Pose. That should work for normal stand poses at least.

You will need to take special care for when the arms move sidewards. But it could work as well to some extend at least.

Here is the workflow in a nutshell:

 

1. The current pose (original mesh pose) is made the armature’s default pose.
2. The mesh is parented to the new default pose
3. The mesh gets weighted until it fits the needs
4. The skeleton is bended into the SL T-Pose (and the mesh gets bent into T-Pose)
5. The Armature Modifier gets applied (and mesh unbound from the armature)
6. The armature’s default pose is set back to T-Pose
7. The mesh is parented to T-Pose.

When now the armature is posed into the original mesh pose then the mesh looks exactly like it looked when it was not yet parented.

[ahimsa Balut]

The rigging was made in T pose. but either way, i tried various things, and when weight painting it gets all distorted and nothing gets better. I am desperating because i want to bring this project inworld. And there are no other tutorials that teach how to do things, i am still learning.

[Gaia Clary]

Maybe you misunderstood my post then. I meant that you should begin by making the current pose (the one in your picture) the rest pose and then go ahead. in the last steps you revert the pose back to T-Pose, apply the pose to your mesh, and finally you rig your mesh to the SL standard T-Pose.

Does that make more sense now ?

[Gaia Clary]

---

ahimsa Balut wrote:

...And there are no other tutorials that teach how to do things, i am still learning.

---

why do users tend to begin with the most complex projects ?

[ahimsa Balut]

Yeah... me and my ideas lol !

 

 

[ahimsa Balut]

maybe im not understanding much of what you're trying to tell me. But i do appreciate your help. I learned mesh because of you and your tutorials. So, thank you for being my greatest motivator around. 

 

Back to the thread , i did the mesh in the rest pose. and tried to rig it to the rest pose, and it got all distorted. Then i went back and tried to rig it to the default T pose, and ok, nothing happened. But when moving the arms, to fix the mesh deformations, it got even worse, and no brush, would fix it to better. 

 

It makes me sad, because i truly want to make this happen.

 

And, my apologies in advance, as my native language isn't english, so sometimes it can be a bit hard on me to be able to understand and translate it to my own language.  I do appreciate your help tho. Thank you very much <3

[Drongle McMahon]

why do users tend to begin with the most complex projects ?

Because they are optimists?

I am a pessimist, which is why I don't do rigging at all. :matte-motes-smile:

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Drongle McMahon wrote:

why do users tend to begin with the most complex projects ?

Because they are

optimists

?

I am a

pessimist

, which is why I don't do rigging at all. :matte-motes-smile:

---

Smart! It saves alot of brain damage, banging your head against the desk, especially for fitted mesh.

[Medhue Simoni]

If you post some image of the distortions, maybe we can help a little more. As it is, you have said the arm pokes through, which should be an easy fix. Yes, something like a poncho can be 1 of the most difficult things to rig, when you can't add any bones. I actually turned down a job where someone wanted me to rig their komodo. Now, if we had custom bones, then you could just set up extra bones to have more control over the poncho, and the folding of the clothing. Plus, with a poncho, you have the extra headache of it having 2 sides that will cross over each other.

[ahimsa Balut]

exactly ! and believe me, i have been tossing my head against the wall with this great idea of mine !!!

lol!

 

I will share a screenshot of how it looks after being rigged and with the weight paint.. thank you !