The 3DCG Thread: Revenge of the NURBS

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Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Hey kids don't place your thigh bones like this :emo:

but instead like this :buddy:

# ? Mar 24, 2017 08:48

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# ? May 29, 2024 17:08

sigma 6: Nov 27, 2004; the mirror would do well to reflect further

Flesh Forge posted:

Hey kids don't place your thigh bones like this

but instead like this

You're hilarious. Weighting FTW.

# ? Mar 24, 2017 09:27

ImplicitAssembler: Jan 24, 2013

Flesh Forge posted:

Hey kids don't place your thigh bones like this

but instead like this

Or like this!

(Which to be fair, is pretty close to your second image).

# ? Mar 24, 2017 19:41

Anagram of GINGER: Oct 3, 2014; by Smythe

We're learning free-floating joint-based expressions and I'm really looking forward to using them all over the body in place of corrective blendshapes.

# ? Mar 24, 2017 20:31

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

ImplicitAssembler posted:

Or like this!

(Which to be fair, is pretty close to your second image).

Yeah basically I learned joint placement the wrong way a very long time ago and it's really hard to un-learn the bad stuff, it keeps cropping up like a troublesome weed.

# ? Mar 24, 2017 21:52

Anagram of GINGER: Oct 3, 2014; by Smythe

Flesh Forge posted:

Yeah basically I learned joint placement the wrong way a very long time ago and it's really hard to un-learn the bad stuff, it keeps cropping up like a troublesome weed.

I place my leg joint chain straight up from the ankles. Seems to be about right. So really the feet are modeled below the hip joint I guess. The femur has the shape of a 7 but then the shins run straight up and down.

# ? Mar 24, 2017 22:47

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Seymore Buttz

http://imgur.com/a/x1llL in a gallery

# ? Mar 25, 2017 01:14

Anagram of GINGER: Oct 3, 2014; by Smythe

Flesh Forge posted:

Seymore Buttz

http://imgur.com/a/x1llL in a gallery

My next thigh rig will have intermediate joints to distribute the twisting a bit better. I dislike how the hip joint grabs the whole buttcheek and thigh muscles.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 01:16

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

The purpose for this is to get good deformation in Unreal Engine with the standard skeleton that everybody uses - it's OK to add a couple of end-of-chain bones here and there but I really don't want to insert any extra bones in existing chains, because that would make retargeting 3rd party animations (which there's a billion of) much harder. Of course this is not the be-all end-all ultimate rigging example for every purpose :shrug:

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Mar 25, 2017

# ? Mar 25, 2017 01:39

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

Diabetes Forecast posted:

Buckle up, this is a loving doozy.

Secondlife has both one of the most insanely flexible rigged character systems and the most restrictive systems at the same time, and the same can be said about many aspects of the mesh pipeline, and any sort of work with SL in general.
To start with, grab one of these files for your program of choice. I use Max, so I can't speak much about how things go for the other programs.
You have a whole boatload of bones, plus physics bones that can create jiggle physics and be directly controlled by the in-game sliders for scaling certain body parts. Downside, 4 bone influences per vert, which makes working with some of the physics/slider bones fairly difficult.
I grabbed my Melissa file to display some of this stuff, since I have just about everything important in it.

So, here you can see my own mesh, alongside three others: Utilizator's kemono body (left) Utilizator's Rikugou (right) and the standard LL avatar mesh (back). they're all three different heights and joint positions, and all three are totally valid. that's because you can directly change bone positions of any avatar and link those changes to the mesh on upload. In max it's stupid simple: go to the Animations Menu>Bone Tools, and then turn on Edit Bone Mode. From there, you can make any change you can think of doing to joint positions. NOTE: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SCALE THE BONES. Just move/rotate the joint positions around to the point you need them to be. Like So:

Pretty exaggerated example from my own stuff about the joint position changing:

You also don't even have to rig things if you're making mostly solid objects. You can actually just import them as static regular meshes, and attach them to your avatar ANYWHERE, and even have multiple things attached to the same spot. Rigging is 100% optional for avatar stuff that's just a static piece (Note: animating unrigged multi-objects or non-attached objects is a scripting thing, which falls out of my area of expertise. I have friends who do know things about that though.)

An important thing that also leads into static world meshes: everything has a 'land impact' amount that affects how much a certain thing costs to upload. It also directly affects how much of a certain mesh you can place in-world (avatar attachments don't count towards this)
Land impact is a fairly complex thing, but you always want to make sure your world-meshes have as low of land impact as possible. It's factored by many things: texture memory usage, size of object, complexity of object, optimization of LODs, and complexity of physics shape. You can set up custom physics meshes and LODs, as well as have them auto-generated in the upload preview window. All these are a bit of trial and error, and you will more than likely need to adjust things before finally uploading. But doing well here will be the difference from having an ultra complex piece of furniture that is 1 land impact, and a simple mesh that's somehow 10 land impact or more. The lobby area build I'm working on is currently 417, which isn't bad at all for such a big build.
You can also use regular old SL primitives and apply textures to those. a single prim, no matter how big you make it, will ALWAYS be just one prim, so use them wherever you can get away with it. They're also PRETTY malleable, allowing you to do some crazy ArchVis shenannigans. play with their edit settings to get a good idea on how they work inworld.

Also worth noting, you have multi-material control for ANY mesh, regardless of what it is. just set up a multi/sub material with 8 material slots (the max you can have per mesh). if you don't want to actually texture your mesh, or want to do some pretty complex things with layered transparency/multiple UVs and textures, you can set color tint, glow, transparency level, diffuse/spec/normal, and any multitude of other texture operations on that material slot. SL calls them 'faces', and there's an edit mode for selecting and modifying each face. Scripts can also control things per face, so you can do fancy effects like the glowing lines on my road pieces, or perhaps even Jehuty energy lines across your whole character, gross wobbly goo textures, or many other things.

Caveats to Max workflow that aren't necessarily easy to catch: DAE export in Max isn't exactly that great. It only exports bone names for the ones that are actually used. You have to open the file in notepad after export and add in the rest of the names by hand AFTER the names of the used bones. If you attempt to just paste in a full list you'll break the bone order and get weird skinning on the SL import preview. It's best to write down a list of all the bone names in a text file you can get to easily, check the names that are already in the DAE's bone list, and just add them in. There WAS a batch file thing to do this for you, but it's LONG out of date and doesn't include physics or the new Bento bones.
Also, you'll be using Meters. When working with avatars or smaller things, I will set my units up like below so I'm not constantly hitting the clipping plane. (though might want to set the display unit scale to meters to check scale) Otherwise, if you need specific dimensions just use regular old meters.

If I remember anything else or anyone has questions, I'll give more detailed info about specific subjects to the best of my knowledge.

This is interesting. Have you created clothing for characters in Second Life? Is there a lot of rigging work that needs to be done to get the meshes to work on the characters? I'm thinking it might be a fun test of my modeling and texturing skills to make some clothing for characters and try selling them. I'm familiar with Maya rigging tools but I'm by no means an expert, though I do know people who are.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 02:42

Anagram of GINGER: Oct 3, 2014; by Smythe

Flesh Forge posted:

The purpose for this is to get good deformation in Unreal Engine with the standard skeleton that everybody uses - it's OK to add a couple of end-of-chain bones here and there but I really don't want to insert any extra bones in existing chains, because that would make retargeting 3rd party animations (which there's a billion of) much harder. Of course this is not the be-all end-all ultimate rigging example for every purpose

Oh okay I gotcha

# ? Mar 25, 2017 03:10

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Ccs posted:

This is interesting. Have you created clothing for characters in Second Life? Is there a lot of rigging work that needs to be done to get the meshes to work on the characters? I'm thinking it might be a fun test of my modeling and texturing skills to make some clothing for characters and try selling them. I'm familiar with Maya rigging tools but I'm by no means an expert, though I do know people who are.

People make significant money doing this, fyi. I know of several that that's their full time job and they do well, it's basically the popular appeal of the Poser market but there's basically no piracy because the market and userbase is entirely contained.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 04:09

Diabetes Forecast: Aug 13, 2008; Droopy Only

Flesh Forge posted:

People make significant money doing this, fyi. I know of several that that's their full time job and they do well, it's basically the popular appeal of the Poser market but there's basically no piracy because the market and userbase is entirely contained.

SL product piracy IS a thing, but there's not that many people who have the ability to grab a fully rigged mesh, and there hasn't yet been an exploit to take joint offsets, and probably never will be. The few people who do take stuff are often ousted, as the userbase is VERY self-policing about these things. (Brazilians notwithstanding, they're a particularly aggravating bunch)

But yes, pick a popular mesh body, grab the devkit, and make clothing and accessories. That's how majority of money is made. A BIG NOTE though, majority of these devkits are meant for Blender so you'll want to have some knowledge of blender's rigging. I get by cuz I have friends with blender knowledge I can work with when I do things. You CAN however transfer skin weights from the devkit to your own mesh, making alot of the harder guesswork easier.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 04:46

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

Flesh Forge posted:

People make significant money doing this, fyi. I know of several that that's their full time job and they do well, it's basically the popular appeal of the Poser market but there's basically no piracy because the market and userbase is entirely contained.

Yeah, I mean I wouldn't do it just for fun. I'd do it if I could monetize it while also practicing modeling. Might be relaxing after spending all day animating.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 04:53

Sailor Dave: Sep 19, 2013

Diabetes Forecast posted:

SL product piracy IS a thing, but there's not that many people who have the ability to grab a fully rigged mesh, and there hasn't yet been an exploit to take joint offsets, and probably never will be. The few people who do take stuff are often ousted, as the userbase is VERY self-policing about these things. (Brazilians notwithstanding, they're a particularly aggravating bunch)

But yes, pick a popular mesh body, grab the devkit, and make clothing and accessories. That's how majority of money is made. A BIG NOTE though, majority of these devkits are meant for Blender so you'll want to have some knowledge of blender's rigging. I get by cuz I have friends with blender knowledge I can work with when I do things. You CAN however transfer skin weights from the devkit to your own mesh, making alot of the harder guesswork easier.

What devkits are you referring to? The skeletons you linked to in your last post don't seem to be any good for blender, which is what I use mainly.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 05:14

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Ccs posted:

Yeah, I mean I wouldn't do it just for fun. I'd do it if I could monetize it while also practicing modeling. Might be relaxing after spending all day animating.

If you want an easier road (because Jesus Christ there's a lot of extra steps for making SL content) another alternative is to sell your content on the Epic and/or Unity marketplaces. I'm pretty sure a very large fraction of your time spent making SL content is strictly to get stuff into it, which you'd only care about if you were really set on making money that way. If your goal is to just practice your modeling and try to make a few bucks then maybe you don't want to have to give a bunch of extra time into getting your work into SL.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 06:29

Diabetes Forecast: Aug 13, 2008; Droopy Only

Sailor Dave posted:

What devkits are you referring to? The skeletons you linked to in your last post don't seem to be any good for blender, which is what I use mainly.

avatar creators have their own devkit files for their mesh bodies so you can create things for their product. That's what I'm referring to.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 06:32

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

I keep breaking poo poo trying to set up a control rig :argh:

FK controls

Neck/head and torso bend/twist as a unit, with weight distributed appropriately along their chains (it's not a simple 1:all relationship)

~~e: between setting up my IK chains and setting up FK controls I somehow have the IK goals inheriting PSR from the pelvis, which kind of defeats the point of IK~~ durr never mind

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Mar 25, 2017

# ? Mar 25, 2017 07:58

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

get a grip :getin:

Wiggle your big toe

Did I miss anything? White = FK controller, Blue = IK goal (the finger/grasp sliders are tucked in the hand goals) , Red = IK pole (the arm poles are at the elbow), Pink = "a little something extra"

Everything is frozen so it can all be zeroed easily without breaking anything (learned this by loving it up dozens of times). The mesh is locked, there are reasonable rotation/translation limits on the controllers (none on the joints themselves) which be changed or turned off if needed, the hand sliders only pop up when their controller is selected. The hand/feet IK goals double as rotation handles.

e: I'm looking for actual animator feedback, does this look like a usable control rig? I'm not very into animation so I don't really have any idea :shrug:

typical operator view (you shouldn't ever need to touch the skeleton and the various sets of controls can be hidden/shown whenever)

e: Seems to work pretty OK for posing :shrug:

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Mar 25, 2017

# ? Mar 25, 2017 12:13

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

It looks like a useable control rig to me, though playback could be an issue. If you're getting 24+ frames per second playback, then good, the animators will like you. If it's less than that, it's worth creating proxy geo so the animators can animate using proxy geo and then turn on the high-res geo near the end of the process.

Also I'm personally not a big fan of sliders for hand controls, it makes it difficult to achieve a lot of poses. Sub controls on the hands for individual fingers is good.

Deformation looks good though.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 15:01

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Thanks! My machine is verrrrrrry old so it's not a good benchmark for anything but just working in the viewport and posing the rig I'm getting ~35 fps, although I think you mean keyframed playback - again my machine is about 10 years old, top end at that time but not comparable to anything modern. This is also a pretty light model (16k tris/8100 verts).

The hand controls was just what I could think of, I'm actually using a pose collection to do that - what approach to hand controls are you talking about, got a picture or something?

This here pose was done almost totally through the visible controls, I did have to tweak one joint on the thumb of the left hand - you're right though it's nice to have more direct control over the fingers.

e: at least now I know for sure my proportions are OK

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Mar 25, 2017

# ? Mar 25, 2017 15:28

BonoMan: Feb 20, 2002; Jade Ear Joe

Christ I can't look at this thread on my phone anymore without someone walking by and loudly proclaiming "JESUS CHRIST MAN WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!"

# ? Mar 25, 2017 20:22

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

Put a controller on each joint/bone of the finger so they can be posed individually, not just with a slider that bends the whole finger. That can cause issues when trying to get specific hand poses.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 21:46

EoinCannon: Aug 29, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Flesh Forge posted:

e: at least now I know for sure my proportions are OK

I know this is more of a rigging exercise and the proportions are OK, but the anatomy of her armpit area is kind of missing. The bicep and tricep insert much deeper behind the pectoral and latissimus.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 21:55

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Ccs posted:

Put a controller on each joint/bone of the finger so they can be posed individually, not just with a slider that bends the whole finger. That can cause issues when trying to get specific hand poses.

I can do that, I'll try it after I get some sleep (skipped sleep last night).

EoinCannon posted:

I know this is more of a rigging exercise and the proportions are OK, but the anatomy of her armpit area is kind of missing. The bicep and tricep insert much deeper behind the pectoral and latissimus.

Good crit and you're right, and I actually have topology there for that, so how's something like this for a first pass at that

I'm much less afraid of dicking around with the base mesh and repairing the rigging/weighting so I wouldn't mind changing it. Thanks!

e: the neck you're right again it's a bit thin, let me think about that. .... did someone say something about the neck? :confused:

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Mar 25, 2017

# ? Mar 25, 2017 22:04

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

BonoMan posted:

Christ I can't look at this thread on my phone anymore without someone walking by and loudly proclaiming "JESUS CHRIST MAN WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!"

I am sorry someone saw a technically clothed butt

# ? Mar 25, 2017 22:06

BonoMan: Feb 20, 2002; Jade Ear Joe

Flesh Forge posted:

I am sorry someone saw a technically clothed butt

Oh it wasn't about the butts... it was about the horrible palm proportions on the hand!

# ? Mar 25, 2017 22:38

EoinCannon: Aug 29, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Flesh Forge posted:

I am sorry someone saw a technically clothed butt

It's an... interesting choice of clothing for an anatomy/rigging exercise. Not slut-shaming or anything but it kind of looks like something a stripper or sex doll would wear rather than something created to conceal nudity for the purposes of decency in illustration.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 22:49

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

I've been called a lot of things but nobody ever called me decent :pervert:

e: and yes the fingers were too thin, I thcikened them up and might do more, thanks for the crit

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Mar 25, 2017

# ? Mar 25, 2017 23:28

BonoMan: Feb 20, 2002; Jade Ear Joe

Flesh Forge posted:

I've been called a lot of things but nobody ever called me decent

e: and yes the fingers were too thin, I thcikened them up and might do more, thanks for the crit

I'm on my phone so I can't properly illustrate but the thumb connection to the palm is wrong as well as the general height of the palm. It's like a too-tall torso if that makes sense.

# ? Mar 25, 2017 23:46

mutata: Mar 1, 2003

It's very obviously a T&A themed model.

# ? Mar 26, 2017 00:23

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

what tipped you off exactly :raise:

# ? Mar 26, 2017 04:42

mutata: Mar 1, 2003

The palm proportions on the hand!

# ? Mar 26, 2017 04:57

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

I'm trying to take a picture of my hand from that angle but it hurts

ouch

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Mar 26, 2017

# ? Mar 26, 2017 05:06

Taffer: Oct 15, 2010

Use reference images of a hand that fits your model, ergo, not a squat man hand.

# ? Mar 26, 2017 05:32

EoinCannon: Aug 29, 2008; Grimey Drawer

The middle finger should be about as long as the palm

# ? Mar 26, 2017 05:33

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

I'll give some thought to the hand anatomy problem, I don't quite get what's wrong with what I've got - not saying it's correct but I am not exactly sure what's wrong either. The fingers are still a bit too thin, I can see that, but I dunno what else :shrug:

maybe I'll see it better after I do something about the fingers, thanks. Gonna hook up some finger controls now :toot:

e: some screen controls to turn IK off/on too because wow that really fucks me very often like just now :argh:

they only show when their chain is active, or when you select the root they all show

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Mar 26, 2017

# ? Mar 26, 2017 05:55

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

I figured out how to prevent specific objects from being selected in viewport (Cinema's Interaction tag) so that's nice

These are splines made of 8 points, I'd rather have stuck with nulls but I can't change their pivot point - ~~although now that I think about it that doesn't really matter does it? But this works and isn't really heavy, if/when I do it again though I'll probably stick with nulls.~~ never mind, the point was to constrain each control's position to the endpoint of each finger joint so they move as the bones do :derp:

e: They're also locked from being translated/scaled to make it harder to break (another painful lesson) and all frozen so you just have to reset PSR for the whole control tree to zero it, or just the hand branch to zero from that point down or whatever.

Also these are no longer linked to the IK goal at all (the IK goal will often not be very near where the hand actually is) so they follow the hand joints rather than the goal.

Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Mar 26, 2017

# ? Mar 26, 2017 07:54

Flesh Forge: Jan 31, 2011; LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY DOG

Animation totally baffles me but I did find a decent walk cycle on Mixamo and tinkered around with correcting it with animation layers - I guess Cinema's retargeting tag is pretty fundamentally at odds with importing animation from outside, because I have no idea how to get imported keyframes onto a skeleton in Cinema that has any constraints or IK setup, it goes nuts :shrug:

But here's a walk cycle (from Mixamo) that is not very good

# ? Mar 27, 2017 00:30

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# ? May 29, 2024 17:08

Keket: Apr 18, 2009; Mhmm

Got Hard Ops on the weekend to help speed up my workflow. Ended up making these goggles and slapping them over that base character I've been working on, threw a flannel over her in Marvelous.

Also made a boring gun whilst further delving into the Hard Ops tools.

Overall, if you're using blender, get Hard Ops.

# ? Mar 27, 2017 15:22

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The 3DCG Thread: Revenge of the NURBS

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