Rahkis Andel
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Posts posted by Rahkis Andel
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Sienia Trevellion wrote:I would love to get a step by step for the native transfer script in 2.66 if it isn't too much trouble. Obviously when you have time and I'm sure others could use it as well. My computer is pretty solid so I'm guessing it's a freak crash and will try this again. I had played around with some modifiers and perhaps forgot to delete one, so I'll check that as well. Thank you for your help!
It's not much trouble at all. It's as simple as selecting the objects and clicking a button. It may not happen today, but over the weekend, not a problem.
Good luck.
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If she said to parent it without creating groups, she probably meant to parent to object, without setting it to deform to the armature at all.
Perhaps she asked you to do that so that you can add in the groups by hand.
I see no reason not to use empty groups, though. If the bones don't wind up getting an influence over anything, no harm was done.Edit: And no, I can't think of anything short of rendering an animation or really high res image that should take more than 2 hours. It probably crashed. Maybe?
What are your computer specs? That may not be important -- I'm not sure what the script is actually doing. I use 2.66 that has it's own native weight transfer script, so it's kind of moot. Perhaps use that instead? If you need a step by step instruction, I could do that at some point.-
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Drongle McMahon wrote:"clearly not a backface culling issue"Not so clear to me. Here is a picture of a cylinder with a patch of inverted normals without (left) and with (right) backface culling. Naturally, when you can't see the triangles, it looks as if they are missing.
I think I just misinterperated what you were saying. Were you saying that if she turned on backface culling she could see the problem areas in Blender? That's true, of course. All I meant was that selecting everything and hitting ctrl + n would fix any flipped normals straight away.
At any rate, glad the issue is fixed.
You might consider looking up a tutorial on how to use the decimate modifier. I think it would work well for your purposes. Having Second life automatically create LODs for you is going to be very bad for your look when people are at a distance from you or have their graphics settings low.
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It says there are only 5798 triangles, but frankly, I think that's a bug. Looking at the edge display, I'd guess it's more in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
I hate to shoot down your aspirations to create clothing for Second Life, but you can't import a file that is completely unedited from Marvelous Designer. MD It is a visualization tool, not a 3d modeling tool. It's for concept art.
You couldn't even use that mesh for a high detail animation (well, you could, but it would be ill advised).
There are topology threads here on this forum if you look. You will need to understand the contents of those before you attempt to make anything to upload on second life.
Edit: Just to address the other answers in this thread, I doubt you have normals flipped, but the proper shortcut for that is (ctrl+n) to recalculate normals. If you have flipped normals and you flip all the normals in your mesh, you'll just wind up with the same problem on the other side.
This is also clearly not a backface culling issue, since you are clearly missing triangles. That said, assuming you retopologized your model, you would want to model inner faces to cover up the backfaces of the inside of your skirt because Second Life indeed cannot see them.
Edit Edit: I was wayyy off -- That is indeed what around 6000 tris would look like. I should have tested that before opening my big mouth. That said, my advice hasn't changed. Even though I'm not sure what specifically is causing this issue, it would still be solved by retopologizing your mesh.
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I've seen this already, but kudos anyway for a good read.
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Thanks Codewarrior.
You're right - the arms look okay and the mesh seems like it walks along with me just fine as I move, except for it really makes my avatar explode and my custom mesh walks in splits.
That brings up a secondary question, after I take off the mesh, my avatar stays all...crushy looking. His eyes pop out of the top of his head and his legs break in 3 places. It's rather bizarre and hilarious. I have to log in and out to get it back to normal. Is there a simple explanation?
But anyway, it's odd. I did just as you said -- I only moved the bones in front and side view from the endpoints as you described. I must have messed something up somewhere along the line. Little mistakes are somewhat easy to make without noticing, I suppose.
As for the t-pose and the custom AO thing, yeah. It makes sense now. SL has no idea what I intend for it to do with my customized version of it's skeleton. For the record, though, this is a test project for me to learn the entire process, so I actually sort of am willing to make a custom AO for it, just for the sake of learning how.
In practice, though, It wouldn't make sense to do that for something that is already no different than the default avatar. I will probably not be doing this yet if I don't absolutely have to.
Now, when you say "redo it" I'm not sure what it you're referring to. Naturally, I've no intention of remaking everything.
You have given me an idea, though. I'm not sure if it will work, so I'll report back with the results and leave it at that rather than try to explain what I am going to do now.
Edit: Okay, it worked fine so I'll explain now.
All I did was use my current armature to easily put my mesh into the default T-Pose and applied the armature modifier to "freeze" it in place with the deformations applied. Then I imported a fresh version of the SL armature and parented my mesh to that instead. Finally, I added a new armature modifier to my mesh and set it to respect the fresh SL armature. It recognizes all my weights just fine, as I expected. The bones are all named exactly the same, after all. It even moves pretty naturally considering the bones are not lined up to the mesh properly.
I'll go ahead and redo the bone positions now, which I'm thinking is what you were talking about, Codewarrior.
Thanks again.
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Here's the latest progress in my saga. I'm doing a test upload for all of the work I did in skinning this mesh. I'm happy with how it looks in blender, but aren't we all?
As you can see, all of the joints are misaligned.
Meanwhile, in Blender:
Looks fine, doesn't it? Well, here are some of the answers to the inevitable offscreen questions:
The objects are all facing the correct second life direction. None of the objects have any unapplied transformations/ rots /scales. I used the rigged mesh presets and otherwise set everything up correctly for export.
It's obviously an issue somewhere in some or all of the bones -- some might have an odd roll or...something? I don't know. Any help?
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I think this is a conspiracy to get people to pay more by not being able to test upload on the beta server.
It's brillaint.
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It's been a few weeks since I've been back to this thread because I've abandoned these short pants in favor of something closer to what I ultimately want to make.
I'm making a mesh body without a head, hands or feet with the goal of making it as generic as possible and allowing the textures to be as easily editable as possible. My goal for this test project is to have a male body base with interchangeable parts.
It is the same object that can be found in my thread on UVs.
I am happy to say that I have successfully (pending testing in SL) weighted the entire object. In the process I learned that everything I thought about weight painting was wrong. In fact a lot of misconceptions are taught by the very few tutorials that do exist:
- Weight paint mode isn't as imprecise as it seems when you first start using it.
- Updated (4/9/13): Based on my tests, Preserve volume is absolutely useless for our purposes. It won't make it into Second Life, so all it really does is give you a very inaccurate idea of how your mesh is deforming.
- It's a bad idea to use automatic weights when you are learning how to weight paint. They aren't perfect to begin with, and If you don't know what you're doing, you're only going to make them worse. You're better off with empty vertex groups and doing it all by hand. At least that way you are under control and can learn something.
Updated (4/9/13): I still believe it would be a good practice to weight paint from scratch at least once, but with the workflow I've discovered at the bottom, I have a much higher opinion of the automatic weights.
- The order in which you weight your skin is important.
- The ability to lock vertex groups is even more important than the previous point.
- The gradient tool speeds things up quite a bit. It's like a paint bucket for weight painting, except more useful.
I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a few points. I'm sure I'll make a video of it, but for now, I just want to move on to the textures.
Old Update: Through testing and advice I gained from other users, I found out that I needed to keep changes to the SL armature from to an absolute minimum so that I wouldn't have to create a custom AO for it. I've successfully adjusted the bones so that they work well enough, but I am noticing the mesh doesn't deform...quite as well as it used to with my custom bone positions. Enough so that it really bothers me.
At this point, it feels worth it to me to totally redo the weights (though it's always frustrating to redo hard work). Since I have to redo this anyway, I might as well do a video demo of my workflow since I'm actually very happy with this method.
There aren't a great deal of free videos where all of the available tools in Blender are used for weight painting, so I think it will be useful to a lot of people.
Another Update (4/9/13): After I started working for a few minutes, I decided against doing the video right away because I found a few new techniques to try out first. I'm starting to become amazed by how fun weight painting is with Blender's tools when you use them correctly. I'd say "easy", but I'm not sure that playing with weights is ever "hard", just usually miserable and time consuming.The fact that I'm actually finding it to be enjoyable should be a telling statement indeed. Here is my updated list of advice to anyone who actually takes the time to read this (Hi, Jared):
1. The order that you skin your mesh to the bones will matter (especially if you don't start with automatic weights).
My favorite method is to start at the top of the head and work my way down to the feet, ignoring the shoulders out to the fingers until the very end.
2. You can lock vertex groups by clicking on the little lock icon by them. This is the key to the triad of tools that make this workflow so enjoyable.
Only ever have 2 vertex groups unlocked at a time. When you select a bone and start weight painting for it, you are only focusing on the flow of weights between those two groups. You don't touch the vertices that will be shared by a locked bone.
Every time you press "normalize all", Blender automatically sets all weights within the unlocked vertex groups to a total of 1, favoring the bone you have selected and subtracting from the inactive bone's group. You then move down the chain, locking and unlocking groups as you go.
This means Blender is always doing half of the work for you. As you work on the skin of one bone, blender automatically determines the weights of the previous bone in the chain wherever there are shared vertices.
3. So long as you have only 2 vGroups unlocked at a time, you can -always- have Auto Normalize on. If you don't have it on, you'll have to press "normalize all" every few brush strokes to make sure that each brush stroke is actually putting the vertex into it's true position.
Note that if you don't lock your vGroups, auto normalize is not reliable. You'll find that vertices start getting weighted automatically to unrelated bones. As I said, the ability to lock vertex groups is the key to this workflow.
4. Finally, there are a lot of brushes, so it can be a little confusing to decide which ones to use and even more confusing to know how to use them. The ones I found to be the most useful are add and subtract (after a lot of fussing around with the other ones).
I found with the standard draw brush, it was hardly different than selecting vertices and setting them to a value. Just a little faster. It still felt like really slow trial and error guesswork. The common monologue was,
"Will .50 look right? No? How about .75? Okay, that looks good. Oh wait, under this deformation .75 looks like crap. Let's try .6..."
With the add and subtract brushes, it was endlessly more natural feeling. You just gradually add or subtract a degree weight that you can choose to the vertices and see what it does to your deformation progressively. If you use unified settings, it's extremely fast to switch from add to subtract without skipping a beat.
I've heard this method described as managing the flow of weights from one vertex group to another, which is very accurate. Using this workflow means that you never again need to worry about the numbers. You will never need to take the time to look at the n panel to look at what your weights are or set vertices one by one; Blender handles all that for you. All you have to do is see how well your deformation is doing and make small adjustments where necessary.
Suddenly the automatic weights -really- take you a long way!
Here are my brush settings:
Weight: 0.025 (This weight can be whatever you like, but I like this value as it is good for achieving subtle skin stretching in areas that don't move much, yet it isn't such a small value that it takes too long to build up.)
Radius: constantly varies as needed
Strength: Always 1 (never affected by tablet pressure)
Auto Normalize: On
Multi-Paint: Off
All other options are default except that I keep Unified settings all checked so that I don't have to reset my values every time I switch brushes (which I do constantly with this method.)
Hopefully this has been helpful in the unlikely event that someone actually finds this thread and read this far.
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That link redirects to a broken page.
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No worries. The Link is just incorrect -- I've seen this same issue in this forum already a few times, so If you search a bit, you'll find the correct link or I'm sure someone else will tell you what it is soon enough.
I would do it but I am not at my home computer. -
Either it's an issue with your materials or it's way too high poly. Judging by how smooth it looks, I'd bet on the former.
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Unfortunately, no matter what you do, mesh is not going to respect all of the shape sliders. You will need to make another with a wide enough cut for the strong heel shape if you want to use it.
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It's refreshing to hear when someone is designing so low poly that they start having issues. Less is a better place to start than more!
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There is a rundown of several AO baking methods for Blender In one of my threads. My final result captured a lot of detail considering how little was actually in my mesh to begin with.
My guess is that you can't see the detail because either your UV map layout is too confusing or your AO isn't strong enough (If you include a floor with the high-poly mesh you're baking from, you will get more details in your bake).
Adding shadows will just get you inconsistent shading within secondlife. Especially in clothing that will move all the time. AO just adds darkening based on proximity to other faces.
You can try painting in the 3d viewport where you -know- you can see the folds. There is indeed a texture paint mode, though it's archaic even with brush presets (that said, it works if you are willing to work with it). I still think they should be plenty visible with just the AO, however.
Would you mind showing a screenshot of your UVs and the AO bake you say doesn't show the folds?
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I don't think that hair looks poorly built at all. As Codewarrior said, it looks like it just wasn't intended for SecondLife purposes.
I can't really add anything more than this, so good luck! -
I would be excited to hear about improvements to the multires system in Blender. There is so much potential there -- it should be a higher priority, since so much sculpting relies on that working well.
Anyway, I'll be going with the final result and using that as the basis for my diffuse texture. My goal is to do as much of the texture paintng in blender as possible. Gimp will be used only to do minor image editing tasks like creating tilable textures and alpha brushes. I will be using a similar technique to
here to paint the skin color on the model in the 3d viewport. Then I'm going to attempt to create some alpha textures of skin to try and do the same thing.Based on previous experience, I predict a 95% chance of headaches! But this is all a test to find the best workflow for me, so much fun will be had.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "Because of the vertices".
I'm guessing you are meaning to say that there is a lot of mesh density, which is quite likely! It's really not reccomended that you take something from elsewhere and try to directly upload it into second life, because of issues like this. If it's not made for a real-time environment, it's going to be hard to bring it over.Even if you tried to make it SL ready, you'd probably ruin the UV's and would have to re-texture it by hand and it just wouldn't be worth the effort.
If you could share a wireframe of the hair, that would be useful to see what we're dealing with. If it seemed like there was an easy fix, I'd be glad to give it a shot if you linked me to the files as well.
Edit: I got ninja'd on that one, but I agree with the above; for hair past the shoulders, flexi-prims start to be the better option.
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Thanks Codewarrior!
When I read your post last night, I was having trouble understanding what you were saying about the upper body, but I get it now. Actually, what you suggested is how I initially had my UVs laid out, but I came up with the idea to separate at the shoulders instead and put a main seam down the back.
I'm going to go back to the layout you drew because I think it's more consistent with how I laid out the lower body -- I was just experimenting, I guess. Thanks!
As for the lower body, I've already made the changes you suggested and did an AO bake overnight at 4086 and downsized it to 2048, which I hear gives an anti-aliasing effect(Citations needed):
This is a before and after, the before being a previous test with a different Layout with totally mirrored legs. I'm mostly illustrating the fact that I had a few ray errors that needed to be fixed by getting rid of some intersecting verts. Obviously, there are some major issues with the quality of the bake here that won't be fixed so easily...So I guess that means I need to learn how the Blender baking really works now.
I've been experimenting with the various settings for the last several hours and I have gotten far smoother results, but not without complications. One method is baking from multires. To do this, you add a multires modifier to your object, add enough subdivisions to get a smooth bake and then set the preview to the lowest multires you want to bake to:
The benefit to this method is that it uses far less memory than the standard bake. The multires bake also gave me incredibly smooth results that baked faster, which suggests that I haven't found the right balance of samples in the standard bake yet, (The standard bake should be faster according to what I've read).
A downside is that you can't set the preview multires level to less than 1, which means the resulting bake is meant to be applied to your mesh with a subdiv level of 1...meaning those incredibly smooth results are actually fake and won't line up accurately with the low poly mesh that I'll actually be uploading to Second life.
Another potential downside to this method is that you can't take into account the effect proximity to the ground would have on your mesh. This is why there is no detail towards the center of geometry (no detail in the knees for example) -- it's only receiving a darkening effect from nearby body parts even though I have a ground plane in my scene.
So here is the standard bake using selected to active -- To do this, I duplicated my mesh, named it "high poly" and gave it a subdiv modifier at 5 levels, which is the lowest number that got me perfectly smooth results. I left my low poly mesh without a subdiv modifier at all (and named it "low poly"). I selected the high poly first, then low poly (the order is important) and made sure "selected to active" was checked. I also have "normalized" checked so as to avoid bringing in material settings into the AO:
So here we are. There are a few immediately obvious things different about this bake. For one, we have a bake that is much more accurate to the actual geometry of our low poly mesh, which doesn't look as smooth, but when applied will still look better and more accurate overall. The second thing I notice is that the margin is terribly messed up. Luckily, I figured out how to fix this. This is a ray error caused by the intersecting points from the upper body, which I forgot to hide from render. I'll make sure that is fixed for my final test.
My final test will illustrate what this type of bake will look like with a mesh floor to add in the additional data from bounced rays. All my settings are exactly the same as above except I have a "ground plane" in my scene with rendering enabled. It isn't actually a plane, though -- I created it by adding a UV sphere that was just big enough to enclose the lower body and cut off the top half of the sphere.
With a floor, we get much more detail than before, which is really nice. Plus, turning off the render visibility of the upper body removed all of the ray errors at the top of the pelvis -- we just have the faintest of artifacts from the margin, which I have set to 4 to prevent some seam gaps (I notice if you zoom out a lot you start to see more seams the lower the margin is, though I'm not sure if that will be visible in game or not). I think this is the best result yet, and I believe I could fine-tune the darkness a little by moving the body further from the ground plane. Note that the strength of the AO effect is based on proximity. Since a hemisphere will have some points further away to the mesh than others, we would get a different effect with a flat plane (or other objects). From my experience, the difference is extremely subtle, but the shading seems a bit softer to me with the hemisphere, which I like.
If someone wants to see a comparison of the effect different ground planes have, I could do it, but I think this post is long enough as it is.
Hopefully my trial and error work winds up being useful to someone!
Edit: I forgot to mention, I'm using 32 samples for all of the above examples. Anything more gave me unnoticable returns and 16 wasn't high enough to keep away the graininess. You set this in the world settings under Gather. The raytrace samples will be grayed out while it isn't baking but you can still set the samples whenever you like.Kind of a stupid Blender UI thing, I admit.
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Thanks for making a full thread about this. It would be hard to find otherwise and something this useful shouldn't be buried.
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This thread continues where my weight painting thread left off.
I changed my mind about creating clothes -- Instead, I wanted to move forward with my goal of creating avatars by making a male body base as a practical test case.My goal for this avatar body is for it to be very easy to modify it's textures while still utilizing the most of the 2048^2 texture space.
So far, my approach is to take a cue from the default avatar and split the avatar into an upper and lower body so that I can have double the texture space off the bat. Then, rather than mirroring any of the extremities, I chose instead to hug the center of the UV space, making the UV's symmetrical across the x-axis. This will allow me to texture paint one side, and then just mirror that work to the other side in any image editor, and still preserve my ability to for instance, have a tattoo sleeve be only on one arm. Finally, rather than halve the avatar down the sides as LL did with the default avatar, I chose a different seam setup that I hoped would hide the seams a little bit better.
To make a long story short, UV's really aren't an area of expertise of mine and I'm basically just guessing here. I think I'm on the right track more or less, but I could use some guidance.
I haven't touched the lower body yet, so my next post will probably be of that.
Edit: This is what I came up with for the lower body.
If you are wondering why I didn't cut the pelvis down the sides as in the SL default avatar, I wanted to utilize the x-axis for symmetrical texture painting as I mentioned above. Having one island be smaller than the other allows it to fit in between the legs.
Plus, it sort of looks like briefs! I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not...I'll find out soon enough because I will be painting next.
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Thanks a lot Nancy. I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time and the positive feedback is a great vote of confidence. Hopefully, I'll fill my channel up with videos like these and keep improving.
And again, thanks Codewarrior for making this excellent thread. -
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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?
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.
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When rigging, screen flashes & never copies weights from avi to clothing
in Mesh
Posted
Well, I guess I just don't need to do ANYTHING do I? I love this forum.
Cheers.