Digital Art Zone

Trying to not warp a few polys is warping my grey matter!

I have working rigidity maps on some hardware on a bridle. However, when morphing breeds, I need the items to rotate. But when I set rotate in rigidity maps to any setting, save the prop and reopen it, the rotation is set back to none and it is not rotating. I poured through Google and can’t find any help with this.

The bridle is simply autofit to Horse 2 and has no bones nor weight maps except for the transferred riggin. Only the rigid item is filled under rigidity map.

What am I missing?

Rigidity maps are for morphs, not transforms - you handle those with the weight map (if you want things to move as a unit, they need to have the same weight across all vertices). I’m not sure what you mean by setting the rotation, though.

Hi Richard. Sorry, I must be dense. I’m including images to fill in maybe some of the 1000 words.

Aside from what is obviously Horse 2, is my halter and browband which are separate items. these have been fit to Horse 2.

I’m not sure I understand the difference between a morph and a transform? The Daz docs on Rigidity maps say:

““Rigidity” is a function that protects areas of mesh from distortion when morphs are automatically generated to match a TriAx™ figure to which the item has been configured. Think of Rigidity as “Resistance to morphing.” An example would be a metal ring joining the two sides of a bikini top. If the user applies a morph to change the size of the figure’s breasts, Rigidity would allow the metal ring to remain round even though the dynamically projected morph might be otherwise. Rigidity is also useful for buttons, pockets, buckles, and anything else that should maintain its shape or position relative to a reference point on the rest of the mesh, regardless of morphs applied to the underlying character. “

Is a breast PBM morph different from a Horse 2 head FBM? Well, aside from the obvious. Both are shown in the params as Type: Modifier/Shape. I have assumed BM stands for body morph? I’m not sure what P or F stand for.

Anyway, the halter below, like a bikini top mentioned above, has various hardware or ‘a ring’ to hold 2 (or more) sides together. I’m trying to stop the distortion of these metal bits. I thought I understood that the underlying triax would move the vertices around even if a full weight map was applied?

The non-distorted image is Horse 2. The image with distortion has the Arabian Breed set to full 1.00.

I have a rigidity map set on the medallion (coin shape) which is a part of the browband. Otherwise, this distorts badly. I also have a rigidity map set on the ring under the chin and the 3-way ring on the nose. The buckles obviously need work. I sure hope I don’t have to fuss with all of these polys for each breed to fix this via the morphs. Whew!!!! As per your help in another thread, I have completed my reins not pictured, by correcting via the Hex bridge and morph loader pro. But they need to remain flexible, just not wrinkled or distorted.

As for rotation. The same Daz Rigidity doc talks a bit about rotation, but doesn’t really go much beyond only a warning. I see in the Rigidity Groups Editor, a line for assigning Rotation, but none of the selections there hold after I save the item, but instead reverts back to No Rotation every time.

The Llama for instance needs to have rotation allowed badly. On the Arabian, you can’t see it in the image below, but the 3-way ring is not tilting properly and needs to rotate a bit in 2 axes, as it is cutting into the back of the halter bands.

I hope this helps better explain my situation. I do hope what I think I’m reading about rigidity maps is applicable in this situation, otherwise there is likely days of fixing the polys on these breed morphs.

And Richard… yet again thanks for being you. You are the best and have helped me a ton.

P = Partial (as in just a part)
F = Full (as in entire body)

From what little I know/have done with Rigidity grouping, you need to make sure the entire item (3 way ring, for example), is covered and uniformly ‘weighted’...leave out one poly or have a little falloff and it distorts.

As to rotation…I think it still relies on center/pivot point relations.  If they are line up right, it should rotate correctly.  But I haven’t done enough to really know (a flat button just isn’t enough experience to say what is so for everything…)

mjc1016 - 09 December 2012 10:15 PM

P = Partial (as in just a part)
F = Full (as in entire body)

From what little I know/have done with Rigidity grouping, you need to make sure the entire item (3 way ring, for example), is covered and uniformly ‘weighted’...leave out one poly or have a little falloff and it distorts.

As to rotation…I think it still relies on center/pivot point relations.  If they are line up right, it should rotate correctly.  But I haven’t done enough to really know (a flat button just isn’t enough experience to say what is so for everything…)

Thanks JCM. I remember F and B now! Somewhere along the line my brain kicked over to F being Female. I guess that tells you what I model the most? LOL on the button. Yeah, that medallion on the browband wasn’t too bad to do. The worst was the undefined Primary, Seconday and Tertiary assignment. I was visualizing the Primary scale boundaries and so on, but figuring out which to set for each axis was not so clear. I wound up just doing rotations on each three through the three axes until I landed on what worked. A not so fun task as you have to save the prop each time, remove it from the scene and then load the prop to see what you got. Lots of steps.

As for getting all the polys, I have them all divided out into separate Face Groups, so it is pretty easy in Poly Group Editor to grab any one item’s polys, well…. I have both left and right under the one group. I’ve started doing this with the Mats in Hex, which makes importing them much faster.

dumorian - 09 December 2012 10:36 PM

Thanks JCM. I remember F and B now! Somewhere along the line my brain kicked over to F being Female. I guess that tells you what I model the most? LOL on the button. Yeah, that medallion on the browband wasn’t too bad to do. The worst was the undefined Primary, Seconday and Tertiary assignment. I was visualizing the Primary scale boundaries and so on, but figuring out which to set for each axis was not so clear. I wound up just doing rotations on each three through the three axes until I landed on what worked. A not so fun task as you have to save the prop each time, remove it from the scene and then load the prop to see what you got. Lots of steps.

There’s got to be an easier way…but I can’t figure it out…right now my level is flat buttons…I need to play with it more.

Basically, I’d like to figure it out well enough to do some armor.

LOL!!! Thinking about FBM and PBM, I slipped up and called you JCM. Too funny!

Anyway, MJC! Yes, this is one feature of Daz that I find ‘in theory’ should solve a lot of issues. The transfer utility is great! But, for those things you don’t want adjusted, Triax becomes irritating. So, rigidity maps. That sure ‘sounds’ like the cure. I do wish they would spend a bit more time on the tutorial page for this. A lot of great work has been done in the docs, but it seems that it is only done when time is available and time seems to be at a premium at Daz. Understandable. Rigidity does seem to be one of the dark magics. Googling doesn’t bring up much aside from questions.

As I work/guess my way along, I can’t help but wonder if maybe it is not really a finished tool? With the lack of documentation, I don’t know if I need to be doing something else or not to get the rotation part working, as I think I have tried just about everything… but might have missed the one key to success. Each test is such a set of steps with saving the prop, removing the prop, adding the prop to see what this one little setting did.

Armor, jewelry, hooks, zippers… the list goes on. I have a beautiful set of glasses I made… a lot of polys…. and the distortion when going even to just V5 loses their form enough to not be so pretty. I want to lock those down as well, but until I figure out a way to do that aside from export to Hex, fix the mess, send to Daz… the ‘fix the mess’ in the middle could literally take days or weeks given all the morphs for Genesis.