Keeping Metal in Clothes from bending.
Scavenger
Posts: 2,674
I coverted an old v4 out to G2F..it converted pretty well.. There's a number of metal peices on the outfit..spikes, rings, buckles.... I'd like to keep them from bending whith poses.
All the parts are seperated surfaces from everything else, so I can select the polygons easily..they're not in seperate face groups...I tried selected them by surface and assigning them to a new face group, but the face group would be made without any polygons in it, which was an attempt to follow a "make rigid" instructions.
When I try that it gives me an error that it "requires a node with geometry as well as some of its faces to be selected."
AND I read a Sickleyeild dA page saying that "rigidity" doesn't really work for "rings in bikinis" which this more or less is...
SO,, any thoughts on what I can do?
Let's think outside the box if there isn't a "just do this" fix..creating an object from the metal parts and loading that?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Does this help?
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31112/rigidity-maps-are-not-rigid
Since a lot of what I'm reading tells me that rigity doesn't do what I think it does, it doesn't really.. but I'll make note of it, thanks :D
Bending due to what? Rigidity mapping (which is done in vertex selection mode) will help with auto-generated morphs. If you want to stop the emtal deforming in response to posing you need to edit the weight maps so that the whole piece has a single weight, making it move as a unit.
This works really well, I've done it in the past. Its much easier than figuring out the rigidty mapping. I never had much success with rgidity mapping myself, maybe slight improvement. But painting the weight maps is pretty straightforward once you learn how to do it and should solve your issues. Depending on the location of the metal...
Yes, bending when posing.
Ok, this sounds intersting...do you offhand know of good explanations of this? and lars comment of "painting the weight maps"
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/creating_content/rigging/tutorials/weight_mapping_a_figure/start
Basically you paint how much influence a bone has over the mesh. So if you had a helmet that had the lower piece being influenced by the chest, you could erase the chest bone influence from the helment. And paint full influence of the Head bone for the helmet. You just have to pick the best bone for the piece.
At first it may seem complicated, but once you do it a few times it's not hard to understand. At first it's kinda weird, so I would practice it a bit and I think you may find this a good option.
I think one of my issues with this is when you want to have something rigid and the surfaces allows you to hide all but those parts to ease up on the maps, if they are painting fully (red) getting them to blue is a time consuming nightmare even using the Ctrl and Alt key alternately to get the maps to blur and then remove. I've not tried the right click, remove maps yet. I guess if things are hidden only those parts would have the maps removed but it's a concern... Any thoughts?
Hmm.. weird..I thought I had posted a screen shot for this... I mean, I HAVE a screenshot I made yesturday..
I've read over the instructions lars posted...I guess I'll go see how they might apply..
my suggestion would be to see how it is rigged with the weight mapping tool before you try to edit anything. Just click on the different bones and see how much influence they have over the different areas. If you find a bone that is controlling something you think it should not, then you could start from there.
(stares at Scavenger's image)
At some point I need to learn this stuff, but right now weight mapping looks reeeeeally daunting. ;)
Well, that's been a short trip to nowhere...trying to follow the instructions, I loaded the jacket, I turned off the leather surface so I could pinpoint metal..and I've made a selection of one of the peices...but the side pannel is blank, I see no bones...
-----
Lars, maybe I don't understand what you mean, because when i switch to the weight mapping tool, I don't see any thing.
Is the problem that you say "Weight mapping tool" do you mean the bursh? I don't have anything labeled "Weight Mapping Tool"
forgive my terminology. But a brush is a tool right :) So with the "Node Weight Brush Tool" active, in the scene tab select a bone. You should see what area of influence it has over the item. You will need to switch between the Scene tab and the Tool settings tab, so having both tabs separate may be good.
No hurry, I rarely use it myself, but sometimes it is handy. Like I had horns I couldn't use as a prop for technical reasons, so when it autofit they had pieces that were following the collar. Used this to stop that from happening. Rare use for me. And another time I had some super crazy deformed figure, and parts of the body just weren't following right, I have probably used this tool 3 times in 5 years. (excluding tutorials to learn what it was about. I made a snake from scratch once...for science)
OK.. random clicking has turned up something...
I had been expecting a grid like the joint editor so I select stuff and it shows me what it's attached to....but in the scene panel, I clicked on the Chest bone and then stuff filled the tool window....and click on those makes colors.
So now there's something, and from Ram Wolf's comment, I want to make that red, blue.
But lots of bones gave different colors..does this have to be done for all Bones? ?
Is there seriously no way to select stuff and say "This is Metal, it does not bend"....or like the chain hanging down..when i hear "weight mapping" I think "how gravity affects this" so like the chain, It should basically dangle and point down.
* - I know weight map conversion is one of the things that happens when you convert from v4 to G2F...If I go back to the v4 version and work on that, will it go better?
* If I use the geomentry editor to extract the metal, can I make it an object and put in on a geo shell for the jacket and work that way?
Gonna try and answer as best I can. I may miss a few points if I dont know.. Random clicking is very good btw, it's how we learn :)
You would want to make it blue for bones that should not have any influence over the piece in question. So from your screenshot, each area would have a different bone it should follow. Some may need to follow the collar, some the abdomen, etc.
I don't think there is a super simple way to say, DON"T BEND once you autofit things. Unless you just make it a prop. However in your case, you would need several props.
Weight mapping is not about gravity, it is about how much influence a bone has over the mesh.
You have to do the weight mapping after the autofit, because autofit creates new mapping during the transfer process.
Even geografts follow the mesh, so when you say geo-shell do you mean geo-graft or soemthing else? For example extracting the pieces as props could work.
If it were me, I would probably leave the body studs alone and focus on the other pieces.
You would think that clothing technology would have some basic parameters for stretchiness, shear, rigidity, and so on. But I guess that's the domain of dynamic stuff.
I mean a Geometry Shell...the invisible forcefield you surround characters with to put sweat or decals on them.
Ok, like the ring in the center, holding the chain.. It shouldn't be influenced by anything other than I guess the chest since that's where it is...but it needs to be "influenced" to move as itself without distorting..
The Genesis technology is all about super easy rigging, crazy morphing and automatically following the shape of a figure. So that other stuff is firmly going in the opposite direction. Dynamics are about physics and gravity and stuff, so clothes don't have any bias on what piece of a figure they are draped on. Autofit clothes have a strong bias to stay close to certain points, regardless of physics.
Don't get me wrong, there are benefits to both. I've been making my own dynamic clothes lately and it's a blast. But I do still leverage some of that great autofit tech for stuff I don't want to craft myself!
Scavenger, not sure about Geo-Shell. Thanks for explaining. I forgot about that functionality as I rarely use it.
I've been experimenting with geoshells lately...thinking of ways the orthodoxy doesn't use stuff to do what I want.
---
See.. Easy rigging AND dynamics shouldn't be mutaly exclusive. The interface side of it would be literaly a flag that changes saying "Cloth" or "metal", or "warp" non "warp"
---
Ok, let's try this step by step in an easy way/ (And let me say, I appreciate all the help)
I've selected the Abodmen bone. Everything in the screen shot needs to NOT be affected by it...so, how do I make that happen. So far, all I was able to do was make the "unpainted" red, which is wrong.
So how do I make the painted stuff blue or not painted.
Dynamics don't use rigging. They wouldn't be dynamic if they did. I'm sure there are some exceptions to this, but generally speaking they work very differently. However for your purposes, rigging could have more attributes to control zones of the mesh differently. But that alone isn't really what we group into dynamics.
useless post
Use the polygon selection tool to highlight a poly on the metal piece, hold down control and numpad + until all the polys on that piece are selected. Switch to weight mapping tool, right click viewport, go down to the very bottom option, weight map editing I think, then smooth. Put in 100 and 100. See how that works. If the piece flies off then try weight map editing and fill, put in values til it doesn't fly off, it's mostly trial and error (there is a way to check how much influence there is on a particular point in the weight map tool tab if you want to poke around, that will get you closer but still not exact without trying a few numbers) It's a pain in the butt.
Weight maps are, unless you switch the feature off, normalised - the total weights for any vertex for any axis always add up to 1. you don't want to erase weight as that genrally pushes the influence down the hierarchy, towards the hip - adding weight to the bone you do want to affect the area will autoamtically subtract weight from the other bones.
thanks for the tips.
Clear weight clears all weights from the whole jacket, so that's not good. And while it seemed to keep some stuff from warping, like the shoulder pads warped when the finger went into a hunched pose with the shoulder s moved inward.
-----
Started over, loaded up the V4 version, and didn't autofit it.. Made 3 copies.. 1 I converted to General Weight, 1 to Triax, and one left as a control. Wanted to see if doing that, THEN autofitting might keep some of the conversion warping from happening (the circles become ovals). It didn't.
So, I'll work on non-fitted outfits.
I tried selecting the chain and "locking the polygons" I'm not sure what that does, but it didn't "lock them in shape"
I've found "Selecting polygons" does no value..it doesn't for example limit painting area to only the selected. ---
Ok, there is some change selected's weight and attenuation settings..
Attenuation sounds good...
I found the base of the chain is anchored somewhere, so it still warps as it moves.
And then Daz crashed while I was trying a show bone option or something...sigh
my bad :(
Did you see fisty's advice? Prolly much much better than what I said.
I suppose at worst you could place buttons by hand. Hmm.
Might be nice for vendors to provide extra props for buttons. Like spare buttons when you buy good clothes. ;)
No, I hadn't seen Fisty's advice..I'll try that next.
Joint Editing did nothing....
First pic is the joints (chest selected).
Second pic is how I changed the joints.
Third pic is bending the chest back, and the part is still anchored at the bottom.
There has to be a way to get rid of that anchor point.
(EDIT TO ADD: 4th pic is the "chest selected weight map picture" That grey tip is the problem.
5th pic is after I've painted it all red. 6th pic is again chest bent, didn't work. ).
I hope Chief of Forum Richard Hastline is pointing this thread out to the "development team" or whatever the people who code the program call themselves to keep them hidden from the public. THIS should not be this difficult to do. It should be "I don't want this section to warp, do step 1, step 2, step 3". Not many people giving many different suggestions that might eventually lead to a solution.
Ok..now to try Fisty's solution.
*chuckles* fortunately it's digital so it's easy enough to make your own copies.
Fisty is a pro, so they are better advice than I was for this area.
And keep in mind, while I know you think it can/should be easier, this concept is not unique to DS. It's always a bit of a chore in other programs too. And I think the old school "Standard" Version of DS didn't have this ability. I think it was in the Advanced/Pro versions. Now everyone gets the pro version free, but we forget some of these tools are really for people willing to struggle a bit to learn the ropes.
With the patience you have demonstrated, I'm sure you will figure it out.
Lock Polygons stops their weight from being edited - it's a masking function.
What outfit is this?
Ok, tried Fisty's suggestion. Focusing on the ring at the bottom of the chain.
Selected it's polygons (that's a nice trick the Cmd-+)
Chest bone selected.
Smoothing did nothing noticible.
Did the fill to 100, did nothing noticable with bend test.
Did the fill to 0, did nothing noticable with bend test.
Selected neckbone, set fill to 100, did nothing noticable with bend test
Selected abodmen bone, set fill to 100, did nothing noticable with bend test