Fallout 4 Animation Modding (for modders and animators)

[ShadeAnimator]

 

The price for 3ds max right now is quite fair. It could be less, but still. You only pay 185$ a month (122$\mo if you subscribe for 1 year), when using it you can earn about 1500-5000$ a month, depending on your skill and opportunities, etc.

 

And still, there are always ways to obtain such software through means which we are not allowed to discuss here.

 

LOL call me old fashioned, though I believe in buying something, you own it, leasing a program is not my thing,  i am also to old for uni.. lol and just a general gamer which is good because i am seeing tutorials on blender on youtube more, still a little confused with the interface and some menu items not showing up, though i decided to try makehuman and transfer over to Blender, as well as opening the fallout 4 animation kit... the skeleton and body loads in Blender, its just confusing with the joints and i cant get into xray mode under display.. Hence, the start of my learning curve....

 

lol

 

 

Well, old fashioned or not, but there are actual reasons to this subscription system, and benefits as well.

There are also different types of subscription, some allow you to keep using your software even if your subscription ran out, you just won't get any updates. 

 

As for reasons, you basically pay for updates and support. Also piracy kinda forced them to switch to subscriptions. Because there are people working on those programs, all this talk about "theyre not doing anything" and "they only get programs worse", well, it's only half-fair. They do actually a lot of improvements, and with programs like maya and max, HUGE programs with a ton of code, and with a lot of people working on them, and with a very long time-span - trying to find and fix even a tiny bug can be a really hard task. Thats why they are actually rewriting a lot of modules from the ground up now. Because while it can seem that "you just need to fix that tiny bug and thats all", in fact it's "this tiny bug can only be fixed if we re-write half the program from scratch, and fix 10 thousand lines of code in another half". I'm exaggerating of course, but still. And it's really a theme for another thread, not this one. If you want to talk more about programs, feel free to create a thread about it somewhere in tech support, and ill happily join it

 

 

 

Goodamn, Shade, stop being such a professional. 

 

 

Can't help it But what do you mean? I mean I'm not sure which post you're referring to.

 

 

 

Well, even if there are some animators who do make money with their animations doing modding stuff, they seldomly do groundwork as thorough as you do. It's just a exponential boost to the whole community that most mod users will never (be able to) appreciate.

I mean, srsly, a mocap workflow before beth even finishes it's DLCs? People pay tons of money for half-done assets for game engines that do this. And well, here we have someone who knows his shit and likes to invest the time.

 

 

 

And please try to not spam stuff into the skeleton anymore, it was horrible with Skyrim.

 

 

Hmm, and what do you mean 'anymore' - compared to Skyrim? Like you say that we don't need to extend the skeleton with additional bones or what?

 

 

I HOPE that we don't end up with 200+ bones of which ~90% isn't even used 99% of the time. And which have to be set up all over again if someone somewhere makes something new. The skeleton stuff in skyrim broke stuff left and right and a lot of backtracking needed to be done to get things to work again. Feature creep sucks.

I don't know how FO4 handles skeletal stuff, but Skyrim just nonchalantly CTD'd on any discrepancy there. 

 

 

Has anyone tryed animating "additional" bones, ie goggles or dress stuff? With the subgraphs etc it may very well just be a matter of throwing it in there. ^^

Not yet, I don't know how to get it into the game and which assets to test this on. If you tell me what assets to try and animate and what files you need on export - I can make a test animation for you to.. well, test in the game 

 

Or you can tell me how to test it myself, though it may take longer

 

Sturgess outfit and the bathrobes have additional bones - they're (used as) Cloth nodes though. I'll try around with chopping .nifs, if stuff just CTDs we at least know that. ^^ I think we need to figure out how to make rig files for these things, it may be a good angle to start too.

 

 

I guess to create new skeleton, all custom joints have to be exported into nif but added manually into the skeleton.hkx (through xml editing). Because there is a lot of data that we can't still import into max, and it will be lost on import\export whatever. Like ragdoll data. We could, theoretically, create our own brand new ragdoll with HCT, but I don't think it's a good idea. Or is it? We could then add boner into the ragdoll But I had no luck yet trying to set up HCT to export ragdoll, need to test it still.

Have you looked at these mods? Invalidfate added custom bones and stuff, although it's for physics stuff. My uneducated guess would be that adding simple skin/bone needs less data/is easier to do. It needs oldschool text EDIT: hex editing currently afaik, but someone might want to streamline things... *WINK WINK*

 

The approach with subanims seems easier on the tech side for me, because we don't need to mess with original skeleton and it's xml code. But I can't test it myself, because I guess we'll need to use CK for it, and I have no experience with CK or Papyrus. Atm I don't have time to learn it either.

 

For all i know these things aren't done with the CK. The NIFs contain all the data, though FO4 stuff seems to have some additional files that are linked to the NIF. Clothing with extra cloth data has these SSF files in the folders, i haven't picked the NIFs apart to see if i can find references in there. It could also be that the engine just loads those extra things if the NIF needs them - just a wild guess though, going by the fact that FO4 does not crash on missing assets, but just uses fallback/placeholders.

 

 

But I'm also just thinking out loud yet.

We all do. It's what makes modding fun.

 

EDIT2:

 

I found this thread containing jonwd7 and a beth dev discussing file formats etc: https://community.bethesda.net/thread/6101?start=0&tstart=0

 

And there's this post on the niftools forums: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6288&p=31851&hilit=ssf#p31851

 

Other than that my research has been unfruitful, i may have gone off on a tangent b/c of those ssf files though...

 

EDIT3: Oh god, it seems this needs max 2013... *pukes* Seems that the beth nif plugin is the only way to get something usable without doing hardcore reverse engineering, though HCT already did a lot with that (afaik it's the same stuff as it was in skyrim).

 

 

 

EDIT4: ...ssf files are plain text bone deltas. I'm too ill for this shit... 

 

 

 

 

Well, even if there are some animators who do make money with their animations doing modding stuff, they seldomly do groundwork as thorough as you do. It's just a exponential boost to the whole community that most mod users will never (be able to) appreciate.

I mean, srsly, a mocap workflow before beth even finishes it's DLCs? People pay tons of money for half-done assets for game engines that do this. And well, here we have someone who knows his shit and likes to invest the time. 

 

Ah, well, thanks. But the up-side of 'knowing stuff' is that I don't actually spend that much time on it all. Though I do, of course, spend some time on it, and I just really want to help boost the F4 animation modding as much as I can. I just want my character to really adjust to the post-apocalyptic world and after watching her aged son die turn into some half mad wasteland queen, and it can't happen without rape and murder Having ability to actually have sex with your romance is actually a must too.

 

As for mocap, it is not that different from non-mocap workflow, and it's separate from all the import-export stuff, so no matter what they do to the game, as far as we have the tool to import skeleton into max and export animation for the engine - mocap\keyframe animation workflow will stay the same. Import\Export is the simplest thing in all the workflow, which is only hard because we have to reverse-engineer it all. 

 

 

 

I HOPE that we don't end up with 200+ bones of which ~90% isn't even used 99% of the time. And which have to be set up all over again if someone somewhere makes something new. The skeleton stuff in skyrim broke stuff left and right and a lot of backtracking needed to be done to get things to work again. Feature creep sucks.

I don't know how FO4 handles skeletal stuff, but Skyrim just nonchalantly CTD'd on any discrepancy there. 

 

I do agree, that's why I would also prefer some way to animate additional stuff through animation layers\additional animations\subanimgraphs or whatever, just not touching the base skeleton. Even if we'll have to sacrifice some animation freedom. We do have physics on breasts allready, and I think that it looks okay actually. 

 

But if we have to create the skeleton, you don't have to use all the joints every time. If there is some base skeleton with 250 joints, but the character currently on screen only uses 100 joints and the animation also was exported with just 100 joint skeleton, it should not impact performance... 

 

And i'm nearing my personal time limit on how much time I wanted to spend trying to find out how to set up HCT to export it correctly =(

 

 

 

Sturgess outfit and the bathrobes have additional bones - they're (used as) Cloth nodes though. I'll try around with chopping .nifs, if stuff just CTDs we at least know that. ^^ I think we need to figure out how to make rig files for these things, it may be a good angle to start too.

 

From what I know we can't yet edit nif's physics information, right? I wonder how outfitstudio manages it. We either need to improve niftools plugin, or improve nifskope or something, to allow editing of physics data...

 

As for animations, I could not find any examples of this approach working, with cloth objects with additional bones having animations on those bones.

 

 

 

Have you looked at these mods? Invalidfate added custom bones and stuff, although it's for physics stuff. My uneducated guess would be that adding simple skin/bone needs less data/is easier to do. It needs oldschool text EDIT: hex editing currently afaik, but someone might want to streamline things... *WINK WINK*

 

If only they could tell me how they used HKXPack to extract havok data from the nif file? o_O

 

 

 

 

EDIT2:

 

I found this thread containing jonwd7 and a beth dev discussing file formats etc: https://community.be...tart=0&tstart=0

 

And there's this post on the niftools forums: http://niftools.sour...ilit=ssf#p31851

 

Other than that my research has been unfruitful, i may have gone off on a tangent b/c of those ssf files though...

 

EDIT3: Oh god, it seems this needs max 2013... *pukes* Seems that the beth nif plugin is the only way to get something usable without doing hardcore reverse engineering, though HCT already did a lot with that (afaik it's the same stuff as it was in skyrim).

 

 

 

EDIT4: ...ssf files are plain text bone deltas. I'm too ill for this shit...  

 

Ill take a look at those links. I have max 2013 just for this case

But damn, decoding stuff like from byte code, etc is not really my area. I can help once I see the xml file only because I worked a lot with physics and rigs and game engines as a rigger\animator and a little bit as gameplay programmer ( this last bit - for my own projects mostly), so I can just figure some stuff out from the contents of the xml or json or whatever. For example I'm pretty sure that I found all the required settings and filters to export skeleton xml file, but I'm just missing something... like some settings or some filter, or maybe i just have to use max 2013 for it to work or whatever (wild guess, i thinks that hct 2014 is the same with every version). Or maybe they did not just use hct, maybe they somehow processed those skeleton files or something, args... that would be worse than just missing some setting or filter.

 

 

Asked Invalidfate if he could share some information... lets hope to get an answer

[ShadeAnimator]

I decided to put the guide on the wiki page.

 

http://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Animation_In_Fallout_4

 

So that more people can simultaneously work on the guide.

Formatting is not polished yet, if someone have time for this - prettifying the text would be appreciated.

 

I will still support the pdf version for some time at least. Then maybe I will only update it for major updates.

[Guest kimbale]

I decided to put the guide on the wiki page.

 

http://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Animation_In_Fallout_4

 

So that more people can simultaneously work on the guide.

Formatting is not polished yet, if someone have time for this - prettifying the text would be appreciated.

 

I will still support the pdf version for some time at least. Then maybe I will only update it for major updates.

 

...that would be nice. Unfortunately i can't edit the page.

[ousnius]

 

I decided to put the guide on the wiki page.

 

http://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Animation_In_Fallout_4

 

So that more people can simultaneously work on the guide.

Formatting is not polished yet, if someone have time for this - prettifying the text would be appreciated.

 

I will still support the pdf version for some time at least. Then maybe I will only update it for major updates.

 

...that would be nice. Unfortunately i can't edit the page.

 

 

Everyone with a Nexus account can login on the site with the same password and edit anything (following the rules of course).

About the SSF files, we haven't figured out how they related to the segments in the NIF files yet either.

 

Everything we know is in the Outfit Studio, NifSkope, B.A.E and HKXPack source codes.

[zzz72w3r]

I hope my question is not considered derailing now that the topic is fait accompli.  I asked a long while back in another thread that FO4 toons seem to be a bit off around the postures or(?) body proportions when they are not clothed, even with new body mods like CBBE.  Some people responded that it's just me but enough people said they notice it too and it's probably due to skeleton.

 

What do people here think of vanilla FO4 human skeleton?  Not in terms of creating more complex animations but just in its maybe(?) shortcomings of correctly presenting the human body.  How would a new skeleton fix that?

 

Or, like some said this is just in the heads of me and some people

[ShadeAnimator]

Oh, well, it's a huge theme actually.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "toons", I guess you're talking about all human characters, poses in fallout 4, right? 

 

If you'd share some example screenshots and descriptions of what you don't like there - it would help to tell you exactly what's going on.

 

Short answer: In terms of proportions - F4 human model and skeleton are very close to being anatomically correct. Depending on what level of realism you're aiming at, there are both problems due to technical limitations of current gen games, and some artistic problems with, for example, skinning in F4. 

 

For example, something that first comes to mind - if a female character bends forward - her butt becomes distorted and flat, more or less. In movies and more technically advanced games this is usually fixed with blend shapes or additional deformation joints. In movies they also use physically correct (more or less) simulations of muscle and skin, but modern PCs won't be able to process that amount of data in realtime.

 

I'd personally change quite a few things in the skeleton, but that is very very bad idea. Because we can't change it's proportions really, it will break most, if not all, animations.

 

We could add additional joints to fix some deformations, but that is a hell lot of work to do for free.

[Acornus]

I might be talking out of my massive empty blackhole called a head, but bones don't have much bearing on the default posture of characters since they are pretty standard in terms of T-Pose (unless you mean the animation themselves, idle or otherwise). It's just that none of the bodies (when people make them) so far touch the back of the character, they all do that weird Hershey Kiss drop thing, where it feels like someone took a clay-cutting tool and removed a large chunck off someones back to make a smooth drop to a sudden bump.

 

It's good for stylized and sexually amped up artwork, but I can also see what the C-Void of the back isn't endearing all the time, especially since they lack the middle-bump (ei; the little thing known as a spine - even your most lean ballerina has a small back-line bump, and all Fo4 bodies so far lack that).

 

Also, most of the issues can be fixed easily if more control polygons are added to specific parts of the body to emulate the muscle bends or compensate for stretches, its what people did back in the days of pre-mid-joint points or morphs targets, thats why you had low-poly characters on the PS2 that looked like they had proper butts and pectorals without flattening them when stretched to extremes (especially all those fighting games on the PS2 era that were defunct Street of Rage successors that had half naked ladies in them).

 

The issue is, you need to do the rigging on the basic form of the model or the clean Quad-Model that doesn't have several dozen polygons per loop, so that you have proper control on the control-loops themselves, since many people usually use stuff like Weight-Painting Tools which lack the extra finesse you can get on the basic level or edge tools, you end up with stretchy butts and boobs (even triple A companies seem to do such things and the usually end up using stuff like BonesPro to 'refix' the issues - especially since the base model is being worked on by several people in different areas, so asking the model to be remade halfway through an animation/texture workload isn't efficient).

 

Quick Question: Just to be clear (I took a look at the original post and the wiki) we still don't have a way to exporting extra joints and physics to the game, right? Sorry if a stupid question, I just want to make sure on this point.

 

[ShadeAnimator]

Quick Question: Just to be clear (I took a look at the original post and the wiki) we still don't have a way to exporting extra joints and physics to the game, right? Sorry if a stupid question, I just want to make sure on this point.

 

Yes, we don't. 

 

 

Actually i'm currently moving cbbe body in max, and it looks ok, if you don't try to put it into extreme poses which only gymnasts could do.

So, please, share example of what you think is 'bad' and what it 'good', otherwise I can't help.

[Acornus]

Thanks for the info!

 

Also, ah, well, I personally don't know how to deal with this kind of stuff, but don't think it can be fixed in the traditional sense, as you said, there is some compression here and there, and outside of a new topology of the model, I don't think it can be fixed willy nilly (my friendo spent some time trying to fix the butt area, but outside of maybe vouching for the butt nodes, the fixing of said zones are outside of his ability on a non-clean model, he was the one to notice the stuff with butts and compression and was trying to figure it out).

 

Again, sorry if what I say doesn't make much sense, but he whipped up a couple of quick images on the basic of 'butt shape retention' (I swear, the terms he comes up with) and he means by the topology with control loops not being there to help retain the shape of the butt even on the most extreme cases.

 

 

The orange lines are the topology sweet-spots, usually set so when the artist moves to higher polygon counts, they are able to control the bend and curves on how the polygons move. They aren't 100% correct, since it depends on what you want out of the model, but they are essentially a cheap way to test the retention of the model. They are also the location where the body will bend without compressing on itself unless you're going full ballerina.

 

The green lines are where the actual 'sweet-spots' currently are. On the current CBBE models, they are direcly on the pelvis bone, so it will always change the 'location' of it's sweet-spot when rotating vs. being around a common area. Also, the the green lines with the mini lines on the sides are where the compression should be accumlating and can be forgiven, such as the taint, below butcheecks and that mid-section before the lovehandles. Usually those are like 'section' dividers for rigging.

 

 

The inverse-hershey-kiss effect he calls it, instead of the control loops dividing the back muscle and ass muscle from the middle, they are essentially 'eating the ass' (sucking it upwards) rather then keeping the sweet spot weighted more towards the middle/lower mark. I asked him if dividing the weight by 50/50 on the ass wouldn't work, and he said something about ass not having enough volume to keep it's shape and having to brute-force it with the 'paint tool' due to the density of the model and the way it loops in the front, but apparently that also causes certains parts of the body like the legs to get sucked up and gut-out near the pelvis.

 

 

The ass folding on itself (these terms are hilarious), the ass does compress as in real-life, but also the fat will retain its volume in the middle parts instead of being sucked towards the taint fully. I personally don't see it because I don't know how asses bend backwards without breaking their tail-bone, but each to his own.

 

 

The most basic example (he overalyed it on the model to get the basic volume), about the 3 basic control loops per section, like the ones below the ass. You have the shape (basically the cube he put on the ass if it makes sense), the line that is the ass, and the last extra loop to control the divide when it comes to rigging the model (so you don;t have to fight with the entire body compressing and fight on itself (I'm not sure what this is about).

 

I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm sure I butchered about 3/4 of whatever I was told, but all I know for sure is if the butt-bones are used as a custom inflate node or something, they would be the quickest way to solve issue outside of a new base model or brute forcing the cheeks into the place, but then again, I personally don't know of people would care enough about the quality of asses in Fo4.

 

[zzz72w3r]

I might be talking out of my massive empty blackhole called a head, but bones don't have much bearing on the default posture of characters since they are pretty standard in terms of T-Pose (unless you mean the animation themselves, idle or otherwise). It's just that none of the bodies (when people make them) so far touch the back of the character, they all do that weird Hershey Kiss drop thing, where it feels like someone took a clay-cutting tool and removed a large chunck off someones back to make a smooth drop to a sudden bump.

 

It's good for stylized and sexually amped up artwork, but I can also see what the C-Void of the back isn't endearing all the time, especially since they lack the middle-bump (ei; the little thing known as a spine - even your most lean ballerina has a small back-line bump, and all Fo4 bodies so far lack that).

 

Also, most of the issues can be fixed easily if more control polygons are added to specific parts of the body to emulate the muscle bends or compensate for stretches, its what people did back in the days of pre-mid-joint points or morphs targets, thats why you had low-poly characters on the PS2 that looked like they had proper butts and pectorals without flattening them when stretched to extremes (especially all those fighting games on the PS2 era that were defunct Street of Rage successors that had half naked ladies in them).

 

The issue is, you need to do the rigging on the basic form of the model or the clean Quad-Model that doesn't have several dozen polygons per loop, so that you have proper control on the control-loops themselves, since many people usually use stuff like Weight-Painting Tools which lack the extra finesse you can get on the basic level or edge tools, you end up with stretchy butts and boobs (even triple A companies seem to do such things and the usually end up using stuff like BonesPro to 'refix' the issues - especially since the base model is being worked on by several people in different areas, so asking the model to be remade halfway through an animation/texture workload isn't efficient).

 

Quick Question: Just to be clear (I took a look at the original post and the wiki) we still don't have a way to exporting extra joints and physics to the game, right? Sorry if a stupid question, I just want to make sure on this point.

 

-Acronus, sorry to quote you in a reply to ShadeAnimator but I don't have the technical know-how to respond intelligently. 

 

-ShadeAnimator: This is the thread I started a while back: http://www.loverslab.com/topic/61720-is-it-just-me-or-that-fo4-nude-toons-seem-a-bit-off-at-the-moment/   The thread only has a few replies so not much info to go on.  The only specific example given sounds like what Acronus said above.

 

I think the back curve is definitely something that bothered us sensitive types.  The "outline" of the nude body seems a bit off, this in contrast to that I am not bothered by fully clothed females in FO4, or any current Skyrim bodies.  I came to Skryim very late so not sure if I would have seen the same thing in earlier body and skeleton mods that are not in present releases.

 

I am guessing body makers probably are waiting for better skeletons before bother with fine-tuning their bodies?

[garg]

I might be talking out of my massive empty blackhole called a head, but bones don't have much bearing on the default posture of characters since they are pretty standard in terms of T-Pose (unless you mean the animation themselves, idle or otherwise). It's just that none of the bodies (when people make them) so far touch the back of the character, they all do that weird Hershey Kiss drop thing, where it feels like someone took a clay-cutting tool and removed a large chunck off someones back to make a smooth drop to a sudden bump.

 

It's good for stylized and sexually amped up artwork, but I can also see what the C-Void of the back isn't endearing all the time, especially since they lack the middle-bump (ei; the little thing known as a spine - even your most lean ballerina has a small back-line bump, and all Fo4 bodies so far lack that).

 

Also, most of the issues can be fixed easily if more control polygons are added to specific parts of the body to emulate the muscle bends or compensate for stretches, its what people did back in the days of pre-mid-joint points or morphs targets, thats why you had low-poly characters on the PS2 that looked like they had proper butts and pectorals without flattening them when stretched to extremes (especially all those fighting games on the PS2 era that were defunct Street of Rage successors that had half naked ladies in them).

 

The issue is, you need to do the rigging on the basic form of the model or the clean Quad-Model that doesn't have several dozen polygons per loop, so that you have proper control on the control-loops themselves, since many people usually use stuff like Weight-Painting Tools which lack the extra finesse you can get on the basic level or edge tools, you end up with stretchy butts and boobs (even triple A companies seem to do such things and the usually end up using stuff like BonesPro to 'refix' the issues - especially since the base model is being worked on by several people in different areas, so asking the model to be remade halfway through an animation/texture workload isn't efficient).

 

Quick Question: Just to be clear (I took a look at the original post and the wiki) we still don't have a way to exporting extra joints and physics to the game, right? Sorry if a stupid question, I just want to make sure on this point.

 

Not that I know why we would discuss this in this thread but have you tried the Jane body it has much better deformation suppression then vanilla or CBBE?

 

[ShadeAnimator]

 

 

Thanks for the info!

 

Also, ah, well, I personally don't know how to deal with this kind of stuff, but don't think it can be fixed in the traditional sense, as you said, there is some compression here and there, and outside of a new topology of the model, I don't think it can be fixed willy nilly (my friendo spent some time trying to fix the butt area, but outside of maybe vouching for the butt nodes, the fixing of said zones are outside of his ability on a non-clean model, he was the one to notice the stuff with butts and compression and was trying to figure it out).

 

Again, sorry if what I say doesn't make much sense, but he whipped up a couple of quick images on the basic of 'butt shape retention' (I swear, the terms he comes up with) and he means by the topology with control loops not being there to help retain the shape of the butt even on the most extreme cases.

 

3.jpg

 

The orange lines are the topology sweet-spots, usually set so when the artist moves to higher polygon counts, they are able to control the bend and curves on how the polygons move. They aren't 100% correct, since it depends on what you want out of the model, but they are essentially a cheap way to test the retention of the model. They are also the location where the body will bend without compressing on itself unless you're going full ballerina.

 

The green lines are where the actual 'sweet-spots' currently are. On the current CBBE models, they are direcly on the pelvis bone, so it will always change the 'location' of it's sweet-spot when rotating vs. being around a common area. Also, the the green lines with the mini lines on the sides are where the compression should be accumlating and can be forgiven, such as the taint, below butcheecks and that mid-section before the lovehandles. Usually those are like 'section' dividers for rigging.

 

2.jpg

 

The inverse-hershey-kiss effect he calls it, instead of the control loops dividing the back muscle and ass muscle from the middle, they are essentially 'eating the ass' (sucking it upwards) rather then keeping the sweet spot weighted more towards the middle/lower mark. I asked him if dividing the weight by 50/50 on the ass wouldn't work, and he said something about ass not having enough volume to keep it's shape and having to brute-force it with the 'paint tool' due to the density of the model and the way it loops in the front, but apparently that also causes certains parts of the body like the legs to get sucked up and gut-out near the pelvis.

 

1.jpg

 

The ass folding on itself (these terms are hilarious), the ass does compress as in real-life, but also the fat will retain its volume in the middle parts instead of being sucked towards the taint fully. I personally don't see it because I don't know how asses bend backwards without breaking their tail-bone, but each to his own.

 

4.jpg

 

The most basic example (he overalyed it on the model to get the basic volume), about the 3 basic control loops per section, like the ones below the ass. You have the shape (basically the cube he put on the ass if it makes sense), the line that is the ass, and the last extra loop to control the divide when it comes to rigging the model (so you don;t have to fight with the entire body compressing and fight on itself (I'm not sure what this is about).

 

I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm sure I butchered about 3/4 of whatever I was told, but all I know for sure is if the butt-bones are used as a custom inflate node or something, they would be the quickest way to solve issue outside of a new base model or brute forcing the cheeks into the place, but then again, I personally don't know of people would care enough about the quality of asses in Fo4.

 

 

 

I see.

 

Well, mostly I agree with everything. Though on the second picture there is actually no need to bend the pelvis so much, instead you can rotate pelvis around 45 degrees, and then bend spine forward. The pose will be very similar, but the butt will look better.

 

The problem here is problem simply with skinning. The 'orange line' thingy can be fixed, for example, in Maya with NG Skin Tools in a few minutes, literally with a few strokes of the Smooth brush. Just because NG Skin Tools' smooth is so much better than default smooth in Maya or Max, but it can also be done with max or maya native tools. The volume will still go away a bit, but not as much as it does now. While it's valid that it is harder to skin high poly model, and it's true that with just 3-5 loops you can acheve the bulge you need... Well... really I don't think anyone wants square ass nowadays. 

 

Also Fallout probably uses Linear skinning, while some engines start to use Dual Quaterion skinning, which preserves volume much better.

 

I also wonder how the vanilla model is skinned. Maybe it's just the CBBE problem?

 

About ass bulging when bending backwards - you can see it when you move your leg back.

 

 

So in general, yes I agree with all the visual problems with skinning. Indeed, there is loss of volume there where it should not be, it's obvious. I also agree that CBBE topology is not very good. I'd even say it's bad. Even ignoring triangulation issues - it is too dense even for Fallout 4, even for modern games, there is no need in SO MUCH polygons in most places. They are just uniformly spread, while they could instead be less but spread smarter. I don't know if there is character tesselation available in Fallout 4, but if it is - it would be smart to make the base model with less polygons, and rely on tesselation to smooth all the tasty parts. Also I think I read somewhere that there are problems with mutilation because of CBBE polycount, but not sure if it's true. 

 

But I'm not the guy to change the model. I guess we can only ask Caliente (Cell?) or whoever is maintaining CBBE nowadays to fix these things. I could fix skinning, but it won't matter much unless it's integrated into CBBE as default skinning.

 

Also mind that because of high polycount and triangulation it's hard to see the actual topology, but the loops on the ass are more or less okay, I think, they are horizontal enough... 

 

 

 

Sooo, final-final verdict...

Yes there are problems with skinning and folding and volume loss.

 

What can we do about it?

1. We can ask CBBE guys to fix skinning. It will partially solve the problem.

2. We could also ask them to fix topology to address the same issue. But I think that most problems will go away with better skinning.

3. We could use butt bones for volume-preservation, BUT we can't animate them at the moment. They are not included in the animation skeleton. They are static and can only be controlled to change the shape of the character. I don't know if they can be controlled from code.

4. We could use another body mod... I personally would prefer to support CBBE, as a standard. We need standards. And CBBE is currently ahead of every other mod with BodySlide and stuff. It's really cool. And you can do almost any body type with it. I'd just like to also find some good fitness normals, make nice fit preset, and that would be enough for me

5. Someone very smart could integrate Dual Quaterion into F4 engine But that's... you better forget that I said it, I'd consider it so hard that it's impossible.

 

As mentioned somewhere already, I am actually AGAINST making custom skeleton for anything except adding new bones for boners and tails and stuff like that. Changing vanilla skeleton's joints is not a good idea in my opinion. Someone will have to fix all animations as well. All. Vanilla. Animations. Even with automatic retargeting there will be a lot of bugs with it. 

 

I could help with skinning if there is a way for me to export all the required data to CBBE guys. Or maybe I'm making it sound harder than it is, I'm speculating, did not look at how BodySlide works exactly.

 

 

 

And is there any purpose why CBBE's body has actual cuts on it's geometry? Like on the butt area. Some vertices are not welded. Shaders?

[Leito86]

 

...

 

 

1. We can ask CBBE guys to fix skinning. It will partially solve the problem.

2. We could also ask them to fix topology to address the same issue. But I think that most problems will go away with better skinning.

 

 

And is there any purpose why CBBE's body has actual cuts on it's geometry? Like on the butt area. Some vertices are not welded. Shaders?

 

 

1.  Likely the best way to go about it.  It can't fix everything but that's thanks to joint skinning for gaming in general.  It's going to be a bitch though because of the extra bones that influences body weight.

 

2.  It'll basically require redoing all the morphs too....so probably won't happen.

 

3.  The cuts are something that the nif exporter does automatically.  It splits the edge wherever there are UV borders.  Not really anything you can do, although if you're just using the body as a reference in Max and have no intention of ever exporting it in game/using it with bodyslide, it won't hurt if you weld them (it might make it easier to paint weights and copy the weights over to an original copy).

[Guest kimbale]

 

 

...

 

 

1. We can ask CBBE guys to fix skinning. It will partially solve the problem.

2. We could also ask them to fix topology to address the same issue. But I think that most problems will go away with better skinning.

 

 

And is there any purpose why CBBE's body has actual cuts on it's geometry? Like on the butt area. Some vertices are not welded. Shaders?

 

 

1.  Likely the best way to go about it.  It can't fix everything but that's thanks to joint skinning for gaming in general.  It's going to be a bitch though because of the extra bones that influences body weight.

 

2.  It'll basically require redoing all the morphs too....so probably won't happen.

 

3.  The cuts are something that the nif exporter does automatically.  It splits the edge wherever there are UV borders.  Not really anything you can do, although if you're just using the body as a reference in Max and have no intention of ever exporting it in game/using it with bodyslide, it won't hurt if you weld them (it might make it easier to paint weights and copy the weights over to an original copy).

 

 

The engine expects those cuts there too, i have had my share of fun "fixing seams" for skyrim stuff - if it's actually welded ingame the textures go awry, sometimes skin too. I don't know how it works for FO4 though, not tryed it there.

 

On another note: I'm doing stuff with Jangles, the physics on him look interesting. And all the phys bodies have the same size, data-wise, only difference seems to be position. 

 

EDIT:

The CBBE topology is that way to make all the morphing in Bodyslide possible. Hence the uniform tri distribution. I don't think cell would make the effort of adding a reduce/retopo script/tool though...

[ShadeAnimator]

 

 

 

 

...

 

 

1. We can ask CBBE guys to fix skinning. It will partially solve the problem.

2. We could also ask them to fix topology to address the same issue. But I think that most problems will go away with better skinning.

 

 

And is there any purpose why CBBE's body has actual cuts on it's geometry? Like on the butt area. Some vertices are not welded. Shaders?

 

 

 

 

1.  Likely the best way to go about it.  It can't fix everything but that's thanks to joint skinning for gaming in general.  It's going to be a bitch though because of the extra bones that influences body weight.

 

2.  It'll basically require redoing all the morphs too....so probably won't happen.

 

3.  The cuts are something that the nif exporter does automatically.  It splits the edge wherever there are UV borders.  Not really anything you can do, although if you're just using the body as a reference in Max and have no intention of ever exporting it in game/using it with bodyslide, it won't hurt if you weld them (it might make it easier to paint weights and copy the weights over to an original copy).

 

 

1. Yeah, agree. But no, I tried it yesterday and was actually able to make the butt skinning look better in a few minutes using NG Skin Tools.  At least I was able to made it rounder, make the crease under the butt and above the hip better. It also actually looks like skin weights were transferred on cbbe from vanilla mesh, there are some places where mesh goes noisy when stretching.

 

2. Morphs could be automated. New topology can be attached to the old topology with some deformer, like shrink wrap or something. Or even nCloth Then it would be just the matter of turning each blendshape\morph on on the original mesh, one by one. 

 

3. Thats what I ended up doing, skinning the welded mesh, to transfer weights to the original one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

...

 

 

1. We can ask CBBE guys to fix skinning. It will partially solve the problem.

2. We could also ask them to fix topology to address the same issue. But I think that most problems will go away with better skinning.

 

 

And is there any purpose why CBBE's body has actual cuts on it's geometry? Like on the butt area. Some vertices are not welded. Shaders?

 

 

1.  Likely the best way to go about it.  It can't fix everything but that's thanks to joint skinning for gaming in general.  It's going to be a bitch though because of the extra bones that influences body weight.

 

2.  It'll basically require redoing all the morphs too....so probably won't happen.

 

3.  The cuts are something that the nif exporter does automatically.  It splits the edge wherever there are UV borders.  Not really anything you can do, although if you're just using the body as a reference in Max and have no intention of ever exporting it in game/using it with bodyslide, it won't hurt if you weld them (it might make it easier to paint weights and copy the weights over to an original copy).

 

 

 

 

The engine expects those cuts there too, i have had my share of fun "fixing seams" for skyrim stuff - if it's actually welded ingame the textures go awry, sometimes skin too. I don't know how it works for FO4 though, not tryed it there.

 

On another note: I'm doing stuff with Jangles, the physics on him look interesting. And all the phys bodies have the same size, data-wise, only difference seems to be position. 

 

EDIT:

The CBBE topology is that way to make all the morphing in Bodyslide possible. Hence the uniform tri distribution. I don't think cell would make the effort of adding a reduce/retopo script/tool though...

 

 

Yeah, I thought so. But anyway, at least skinning can be fixed i think.

[garg]

ShadeAnimator have you had a look at the Jane Body? It's friggin awesome!

[ShadeAnimator]

ShadeAnimator have you had a look at the Jane Body? It's friggin awesome!

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/8288/? This one?

 

Oh, so it's also compatible with BodySlide. Well, this opens my eyes a bit. Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

Still I think most clothing mods are initially modeled over CBBE, it became defacto stantard, from what I can see.

 

I'll tell more once I get my hands on it. On the body. Jane body I mean. I mean... Download it, try it in game and max. Damn.

 

 

This note however makes me a bit sad. I don't like when mods break vanilla gameplay stuff:

 

 

The scaling bones have been disabled and all but removed from the skin of the model. This means that the weight triangle will do nothing. This is the choice that I made because I don't like dealing with scaling bones when I make clothing models. If this makes you unhappy then please refrain from using this mod. 

[ShadeAnimator]

Okay, I looked at it.

 

So, first, numbers.

CBBE Body - 43150 Triangles

Jane Bod - 45316 Triangles

 

Jane loses here. 43k triangles is already a lot for a game like Fallout 4, and adding 2-3k more... On the other hand, it's not that much of a difference.

 

Now, topology and skinning.

Green is Jane, purple\pink - CBBE. Both are default shapes. Of course you can change their proportions with BodySlide.

 

 

Back side. I certainly like the edge flow of Jane body more.

 

 

Same here. Addition of Navel topology is not relaly needed in my opinion. Also CBBE's topology could handle navels easily with morphs.

 

Feet. You can see the problem on the left, non-uniform topology. And it's all over CBBE's body. But it does not really hurt much, with that dencity... if it saves some triangles in the end - thats fine.

 

Now skinning.

 

 

CBBE on the left. Clearly skinning needs to be smoothed under the butt crease. Yesterday I did it in Maya in a few minutes. So it's an easy fix. Don't bother.

 

 

As you can see, the problem we discussed here is actually even worse with Jane body. It stretches too much up as well.

 

 

 

 

So in the end, not so much of a difference. But Jane Bod had a lot more morphs of course. Makes me think that Poser was used for it somehow... Same morphs, most of them.

 

 

[garg]

Okay, I looked at it.

 

 

Hey glad you took a look! For me it's when you start to shape the body your going to use in Bodyslide that counts for me! More uniformity on the Jane Body and all those sliders to work with, well you can work wonders! The triangle thing was a little bit of a bummer for me and with CBBE being so popular, but it's just too good a body not to use!! As for the stretch up butt area, is there a proper comparison to a real body? I would assume it would stretch up to some degree!  Let me go check!

[ShadeAnimator]

Stretching is fine, its more about the final shape once it's bent. As you can see, part of it is pushed upwards. Thats not right It should be rounder. 

 

Hm, I wonder now how hard is it to add your own morph target into CBBE... Is it something that's inside the osd file? I don't know what that file is.

[Adenan]

Isnt i possible to make both bodys compatible with each other so that both could be used?

Imo thats better then forcing people to use a certain body.

[Guest kimbale]

Stretching is fine, its more about the final shape once it's bent. As you can see, part of it is pushed upwards. Thats not right It should be rounder. 

 

Hm, I wonder now how hard is it to add your own morph target into CBBE... Is it something that's inside the osd file? I don't know what that file is.

 

Making sliders for Bodyslide is pretty easy, if you meant that. You can basically just make a morpher in max and export it (afair) or export the morph as obj and use that. There should be tutorials around for it.

 

Morphing ingame would be awesome, but was something that took ages to do for Skyrim (and i don't even know if it was finished/works well). But that's probably something for later F4SE versions.

 

Isnt i possible to make both bodys compatible with each other so that both could be used?

Imo thats better then forcing people to use a certain body.

 

How do you mean "compatible"? You can use any number of body meshes in your game; check out Unique Player/Unique Followers on Nexus.

If you want to have all the sliders for all the bodies in Bodyslide, port them. ^^

The sliders depend on the base mesh though, so to have JB sliders on CBBE would not work well. Plus we're also hitting the reasonable number of polys with the current bodies, any more detail in the form of sliders needs more polys - which would probably kill performance.

[ShadeAnimator]

 

Stretching is fine, its more about the final shape once it's bent. As you can see, part of it is pushed upwards. Thats not right It should be rounder. 

 

Hm, I wonder now how hard is it to add your own morph target into CBBE... Is it something that's inside the osd file? I don't know what that file is.

 

Making sliders for Bodyslide is pretty easy, if you meant that. You can basically just make a morpher in max and export it (afair) or export the morph as obj and use that. There should be tutorials around for it.

 

Morphing ingame would be awesome, but was something that took ages to do for Skyrim (and i don't even know if it was finished/works well). But that's probably something for later F4SE versions.

 

Isnt i possible to make both bodys compatible with each other so that both could be used?

Imo thats better then forcing people to use a certain body.

 

How do you mean "compatible"? You can use any number of body meshes in your game; check out Unique Player/Unique Followers on Nexus.

If you want to have all the sliders for all the bodies in Bodyslide, port them. ^^

The sliders depend on the base mesh though, so to have JB sliders on CBBE would not work well. Plus we're also hitting the reasonable number of polys with the current bodies, any more detail in the form of sliders needs more polys - which would probably kill performance.

 

 

Thanks, will take a look. If you can point me in direction of where those tuts or manuals are, would be great. 

 

As for sliders.. It would be awesome to have sliders for normal maps as well. This way it would be possible to add a lot of fine-detail stuff, without the need for all those polys.

 

I also read somewhere that CBBE body might be too dense for mutilation to work correctly? Is that even true? If it is, i'd prefer less polygons but working mutilation

 

And a question about OutfitStudio...

Is it somehow possible to automatically adapt cloth mesh to the morphed body? Or is it only possible to do it by hand, manually?

If it's not possible, then it's pretty bad It'd be awesome, if BodySlide could import cloth, attach it to the body in vanilla shape, then morph the body and calculate new positions for all vertices, attaching them to the underlying mesh. It would be pretty easy to do in max or maya, but I understand that it might be hard to add into a standalone program... 

[Adenan]

 

The sliders depend on the base mesh though, so to have JB sliders on CBBE would not work well.

 

Thats what i mean with compatible.If there would be a way to make it work well, everybody could use any body without a hassle.

However i have no clue if this would be possible.

It was just an idea that came to my mind....

 

[ShadeAnimator]

Making universal morphs that would work with any base shape is practically impossible.

 

But in theory it would be possible to make automatic adaptation of all game outfits to the custom shape you made. But it would be very hard to do inside Outfit studio, i think. I could try to write some Maya script for this, but... 

 

I'd just stick with one base mesh, like CBBE and just expand it with more morph targets. I really don't see a lot of problems in making almost all shapes from Jane Bod for CBBE. I mean technically the topology can handle almost verything from Jane Bod. The only problem is that I don't really like some of edge flows in CBBE body. And that mutilation is not supported yet But whatever.

 

SexTec is more important right now.