3dsMax, Vanilla Meshes, M-Smooth, and Vertices count... *oh, and skirt bones too.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

Quick question - is it not adviseable to use the M-Smooth tool (ie: select element/s > convert to editable poly > MSmooth) to add more vertices to a Vanilla mesh? Example: if I hit it *once* with all elements of the Forsworn clothing selected, the count rises from 1516 polygons (*I've removed all the feathers & such from mine) to 4548. That's still under 5000, so it's okay, yes?

 

ALSO - why does 3dsMax not seem to skin armour elements to skirt bones? Skirt bones just don't seem to appear in the Bones list when the armour is skinned to the body. Is there an idiot-proof way to easily fix this? I'm using the XPMS skeleton with SeveNBase.

 

I am having REAL trouble with getting skirt elements of my armours up to a sufficiently playable quality - the stretching in skirt areas, especially at the front, is AWFUL. Trying to work this out is really slowing me down. I can edit the shape of my armours to the body reasonably well, but my current inability to do skirt-bone-weighting is becoming a real barrier to getting a result with the Vanilla meshes that I'm happy with...

[Aegis]

Why do you need to use meshsmooth? You won't be able to see the difference from smoothing if the normals are properly baked, and more vert should only be needed to add geometric features to the mesh.

 

Meshsmooth is usually used in conjunction with quadify to round edges:

 

 

 

3ds does not skin skirt bones because most references (i.e. the actor body) do not have the skirt bones mapped. You will need to paint in the 3 main skirt bones manually. Even the Bethesda developers don't often use the skirt bones in their vanilla armors because it's rather annoying to get the animation right.

 

The best way would be to import the various animations (walk/run/sneak/etc) and test the various frames in 3ds and adjust the weight paint accordingly. A rather time consuming task, but will often produce far superior results.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

Hey Aegis!

 

Re - MSmooth:  Yeh, the MSmooth query was a general "Hmm... I wonder..." question which came up while I was playing around with some functions  - I looked at what Nightasy was doing in his tutorial #50 (weight painting 1) with a custom mesh & wondered if there were any problems associated with applying the process to a Vanilla mesh.

 

Re - Skirt Bones:  Ahhh okay - so the process is basically "follow the weight-painting tutorial vids & you'll be fine". That's good news! I had looked at the differences between my meshes, which do not have skirt bones (even though they're right there in the skeleton), and MAK's for example which, like Vanilla, do have the skirt bones & thought "okay - I must really be missing something important here". If I can get my Ancient Nord armour to stop stretching & deforming across the crotch (along with every single other mesh I've made which has skirt elements) by weight-painting to the legs & pelvis & spine this would be good.

 

If in future I do want to paint to skirt bones manually, how do I do this? I don't think I've seen the process covered anywhere, and the bones don't appear in the list despite their presence as part of the skeleton (*I am assuming that this may be because the body itself does not use them, so skinning to the body does not really take them into account perhaps).

[Cyndi]

Manual weight painting is covered in one of the Nightasy tuts somewhere along the line iirc. It was pretty far down the line in his videos though.

 

... and yup, because the body itself isn't using those bones, when you skinwrap to it, it wont either,  because you are skinning to that body, not skinning to every bone in the skeleton.  You can however skinwrap to more than one thing if you aren't quite ready to get your feet wet with manual weight painting.  So you could always skinwrap to say....  a shirt, and a skirt, instead of just a body. or w/e and then make adjustments if needed after. Just "add" both items in before you click "convert to skin".  Im pretty sure the order you add the items in can effect your results too, so you may want to experiment with that.

 

  Learning how to weight paint properly will give you much better results though....   I'm just lazy and really hate weight painting, so I cheat where I can.  But yeah... watching the weight paint videos will probably explain it better than anything else.

[Leito86]

If you want to skin something to the skirt bone, you need to add them to the list of bones that are actually effecting the object.  Click on the Model, open the Skin drop down in the modifier list, click on envelope.  You'll see a list of bones below the modifier list.  Above that list is an 'add' button that allows you to add additional bones.

 

I'm guessing the reason why your skirt isn't getting any influnce from the skirt bones is because you did a skin wrap from a body.  Skirt joints don't have any influence on bodies, thus if you copy the weights, you'll get no skirt joint influence.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

Manual weight painting is covered in one of the Nightasy tuts somewhere along the line iirc. It was pretty far down the line in his videos though.

 

... and yup, because the body itself isn't using those bones, when you skinwrap to it, it wont either,  because you are skinning to that body, not skinning to every bone in the skeleton.  You can however skinwrap to more than one thing if you aren't quite ready to get your feet wet with manual weight painting.  So you could always skinwrap to say....  a shirt, and a skirt, instead of just a body. or w/e and then make adjustments if needed after. Just "add" both items in before you click "convert to skin".  Im pretty sure the order you add the items in can effect your results too, so you may want to experiment with that.

 

  Learning how to weight paint properly will give you much better results though....   I'm just lazy and really hate weight painting, so I cheat where I can.  But yeah... watching the weight paint videos will probably explain it better than anything else.

 

Ahh - yes, Nightasy covers exactly what you describe in videos 50-55 or so. In fact, he does both - includes a skirted mesh (a farm dress) and the body in the skin, and then  weight paints afterward. I am a little worried that I will need to break my meshes up into more separate parts if I do this - there's nothing wrong with them above the waist, but if I monkey around with re-skinning to another clothing item to fix the skirt, I'm worried about what it might do to the other parts of the mesh (eg: If I go back and, say, re-skin using the Vanilla Draugr armour, or a dress).  

 

 

If you want to skin something to the skirt bone, you need to add them to the list of bones that are actually effecting the object.  Click on the Model, open the Skin drop down in the modifier list, click on envelope.  You'll see a list of bones below the modifier list.  Above that list is an 'add' button that allows you to add additional bones.

 

I'm guessing the reason why your skirt isn't getting any influnce from the skirt bones is because you did a skin wrap from a body.  Skirt joints don't have any influence on bodies, thus if you copy the weights, you'll get no skirt joint influence.

 

Interesting! I might experiment with this as well & see what it can do.

[Cyndi]

Overly complicated, but it's an option:

Instead of breaking up your mesh,  break up said farm dress.  Just an idea~  just cut the farm dress in half, say from waist down.  Then delete the top half. Import the unedited farm dress again, then skin wrap the one you chopped in half to the original (probably want to by vertex instead of face).  Now you have the skirt, that won't influence the top half of your armor.  The skinwrap fall off should cover you there now. 

 

The advantage being, you already have the bones you want added, with a bit of weight paint.  That probably just needs to be touched up.

 

The disadvantages:

      ~You don't learn as much

      ~You end up wasting hdd space on crap that's just for being lazy with weighting.

 

[Leito86]

That certainly is a method.  However I would recommend against it as it's more work than just adding bones to the list and skinning it.  You'll have to refit the armor again if you want a working weight slider.  It might not be a big deal with simple outfits, but it can become a pain if you're working with outfits that have multiple objects.  You also have to make sure that the skin weights at the attachment points match so there wouldn't be any gaps in the outfit when the character moves around.  You can do it using the weight table (probably no other way anyway) but Max's weight table isn't the most efficient.

 

Edit:  I redact my statement.  I misread the post.  That acutally will work out really nicely.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

Overly complicated, but it's an option:

Instead of breaking up your mesh,  break up said farm dress.  Just an idea~  just cut the farm dress in half, say from waist down.  Then delete the top half. Import the unedited farm dress again, then skin wrap the one you chopped in half to the original (probably want to by vertex instead of face).  Now you have the skirt, that won't influence the top half of your armor.  The skinwrap fall off should cover you there now. 

 

The advantage being, you already have the bones you want added, with a bit of weight paint.  That probably just needs to be touched up.

 

The disadvantages:

      ~You don't learn as much

      ~You end up wasting hdd space on crap that's just for being lazy with weighting.

 

Okay - I have just attempted this on the "Prisoner Clothes", fitted to SevenBase. However, I think I have done something wrong. It seems to be doing the REVERSE of what I had hoped (ie: I've somehow made the skirt weighting WORSE not better - it now clips through the thighs, which should not be occurring). Additionally, somehow some of the mesh (parts of the cord tied around the waist) are for some reason being rendered as invisible from certain angles - which seems REALLY weird.

 

(*EDIT: Weighting is a combination of better in some spots, worse in others)

 

 

I think I am missing a step, or breaking something I shouldn't, but I have no clue what.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

*Polite bump, in case anyone is able to shed further light on this following my last post*

 

Also - I am getting the "collapsing body" bug when importing animations into Max. The advice in Nightasy's tutorial is to simply keep importing until it stops happening, but after re-re-re-re-re-re-importing for the (at least) 40th time, after repeating the whole process again, twice, and re-importing at least a dozen times, still it does not work and the body is still crushed and mangled. Is there a trick to this step that I'm missing??

[Vioxsis]

The parts of the mesh that go invisible are due to more than 4 weights affecting 1 vert.

 

And skirt bones will never do as you expect ever...

 

As for your importing of animations, you could try using a different skeleton? 

Or move the the bones yourself (rotate the thigh bone to see how the mesh bends?).

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

The parts of the mesh that go invisible are due to more than 4 weights affecting 1 vert.

 

And skirt bones will never do as you expect ever...

 

As for your importing of animations, you could try using a different skeleton? 

Or move the the bones yourself (rotate the thigh bone to see how the mesh bends?).

 

Re: the skeleton - as these armours are for SevenBase, it's pretty much "XPMS or nothing". I'll try a different version & report back.

 

UPDATE: Nope, still no luck. As I need to use the XPMS skeleton though, I'm stuck with it. Is there any way to get around this problem?