3ds Max Armor rigging and skinning question

[Neptune]

When skinning full plate armor, would you suggest using the skinwrap modifier or just skin the sucker by hand? I see many people using skinwrap, but surely using that process, armor plates would stretch very unatturally - I can skin by hand, using something called bonespro in 3ds an get excellent results - all the armor plates deform realisticially without any dodgey stretching (except for breastplate). My question is, is it worth the effort to skin by hand, or is the skin wrap modifier 'good enough' ?

[Vioxsis]

By hand.

i use skin wrap as the base, and edit/fix the weights to work properly with the armour i'm weighting.

 

But if its worth the effort or not comes down to you.

[gerra6]

On that note, I'm developing a stand-alone automated rigging tool that is intended to be able to completely re-skin a mesh.

 

the way it is currently designed, it uses a weighted average location search to copy weights from one mesh to another.  For deformable meshes (soft clothing), this is fine, but as you've mentioned, it would give an an unnatural stretch to a rigid object.

 

One feature I could add would be the ability to identify certain materials as rigid and normalize any weights applied to vertices with those materials.  I'd probably code this so that the number of vertices affected by a given bone wouldn't change, but that all of those vertices had precisely the same weight painting for that bone.

 

What do you think?  Would that be a useful feature, worth spending time on developing?

[Neptune]

@Voxsis, sounds like a pretty solid workflow, one I was contemplating actually. Though Im unsure if skinwrap can then be edited by the bonespro skinning plugin. Need to experiment.. That said, the base skin you start with in bonespro is almost essentially a skinwrap in result, the base auto skinning of bp is really something special in comparison to the auto skin you get with the normal skin modifier and envelopes. But I digress, need to experiment with this combo before I can comment further.

 

@gerra6 worth it? oh god deffiniatly. Should be noted that the main issue I run across (could be different for other people) when skinning is those frelling influencing weights, like the legs randomly having influence on the shoulders etc D:< 2bh I spend like 70% of my time just reassigning proper weight influences to everything. If your tool could do as you stated while at the same time addressing the bone influence issues that would be absolutly delicious.

 

Now if only we had a tool for bypassing/automating the tediously time consuming process of copy/pasting blocks an shit in nifscope..

[Vioxsis]

There is a tool by Caliente called NifCleaner

 

NifCleaner is a simple tool that operates on a freshly exported .nif file from a 3d application such as Blender.  The program removes nodes that aren't supportedy by Skyrim, and updates the internal version information to the required values.  Additionally, the program offers an easy way to copy shader information into the same nif as part of the processing.  These shaders are stored in the shaderlibrary.nif file.

 

^taken from the read me.

 

It is included in the bodyslide download http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49015/?

 

Not tried it yet as all the meshes i have exported have needed specific edits done to them.

But worth a try.

 

[gerra6]

Now if only we had a tool for bypassing/automating the tediously time consuming process of copy/pasting blocks an shit in nifscope..

 

I've got an automatic geometry copier that I wrote for Movomo (my modding partner in the Oblivion Setbody Reloaded project).  It will be released sometime in the near future, but I'd be happy to send you a preview copy if you'd like to try it out.  It automatically copies niTriShapes and any necessary bones between nifs.  The tool was written to allow Movomo to mass-copy futa...err...parts to all of the female meshes in SR (with ~500 meshes in all, it would have been silly to do it by hand in Nifskope)

 

And the rigging tool automatically copies bones and skin partitions.

 

What other sorts of blocks would you like to copy.

 

I can probably toss something together.

 

I *should* note.  I have no Skyrim-specific experience, but I do know my way around a nif file and the Pyffi API, so I can look at a nif and figure out what needs to be copied over to make things work.  Up until recently I mostly developed tools for Blender.  Now that I'm building stand-alone tools, I'm learning about all of the amazing little quirks of Skyrim nifs.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

When skinning full plate armor, would you suggest using the skinwrap modifier or just skin the sucker by hand? I see many people using skinwrap, but surely using that process, armor plates would stretch very unatturally - I can skin by hand, using something called bonespro in 3ds an get excellent results - all the armor plates deform realisticially without any dodgey stretching (except for breastplate). My question is, is it worth the effort to skin by hand, or is the skin wrap modifier 'good enough' ?

 

BonesPro is not a free download other than as a time-limited "trial". I am using 3dsMax 2012 64 bit.

 

Also - on the whole by hand/SkinWrap thing:  I can vouch for the fact that SkinWrap for skirts in Skyrim is awful. For some reason, skirt bones don't seem to even register with it, and it ignores them. Skinning an entire armour solely by hand is even harder or I'd do it (touch-up weight-painting I can do - badly). I have had to get around this aspect by cutting the armour in two and leaving Bethesda's Vanilla skirt weighting/skinning well alone as far as possible.

[gerra6]

The current iteration of Mesh Rigger can handle skirts reasonably well, although you have to be a bit careful with the settings (long search distance, override distance, high number of vertex targets).

One of the features that my Blender Boneweight Copy Script has that I have not yet added to Mesh Rigger is the ability to weight search distance by axis. Decreasing the x-axis search weight in my BoneWeight copy tool can significantly improve the quality when painting things like Skirts.

What do you think...should I port search weighting to Mesh Rigger.

Any volunteers to test the feature if I add it?

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

I stopped using Blender completely after it drove me nuts, sorry.

[gerra6]

Mesh Rigger is an independent tool that doesn't use Blender or any other 3D modeling program.

[Neptune]

@Vioxsis, oh man nice heads up, wish I had access to that tool back in 2010 when I really got into modding, danm!

 

@Gerra, would be more then happy to test out that Movomo tool of yours. Though to clarify, is that your Mesh Rigger tool you later mentioned? or are they seperate tools? For years Ive wanted to get my hands on tools such as these. Typical that once I move into developement of my own game in Unity and decide I'd like to quickly make a few armors for skyrim that all these amazing tools come outta the woodwork lol. From what I can remember niTriShapes is the only block I need to copy, but its been awhile, 2010 infact, since I last did any niffing so I could be wrong.

 

@FastestDog, youve got max 2012? https://mega.co.nz/#!Btgk0C5b!OdVDKkO9bVGcwMbRgpchp24iOIUYS3o64W49qJ4Wc80 - Ive also got a copy for max 2014 if anyones intrested, pm me if you want the link. Your second paragraph also confirms what I suspected and feared with skinwrap. Im gussing its ok for things like leather armor and the like, but anything else with more specific designs like armor plates, hanging cloth bits or skirts/dresses will give anyone a headache.

 

@Gerra, porting the weighting feature to Mesh Rigger would depend on how accurately/easily someone could assign weights. When you said 'weight search distance by axis. Decreasing the x-axis search weight' that went straigth over my head. Ive never come across the notion of weighting by axis? How dose that work?