Digital Art Zone

Hi everybody,
I need a little help on a subject I am facing some problems on with DS4.  I often model hard surfaces using Hexagon; these objects have many independent parts organized in groups. But not every form or every group needs a bone. I modeled a lot of them with DS3 and everything was working well. (I was removing all unnecessary bones keeping only one bone per solid group)
But since I work with DS4 things are not the same. If I do the same, removed geometry is not following his parent bone. If I weld forms together getting “one form per bone” (in Hex) everything works fine but this is not a good way, UV’s are messed up ad model’s structure is destroyed.  So I tried to suppress some of the bones while setting the skeleton, but didn’t find a successful way to do this, neither in triaxe nor in parametric style. The problem can’t be easily seen on soft objects where part translations are not used and boneless parts are not the rule.
Does anybody has an idea or have faced the same? 

Hexagon v2.5.1.79
DS4 pro win64 v4.5.0.49

Regards,

DS3 accepted spaces as part of group names, but DS4 doesn’t - except, apparently, in Figure Setup. As a result it’s possible to create a figure that won’t work properly. The only fix i can think of, since you can’t safely edit the mesh in Hexagon, is to use a text editor to edit the group lines of the OBJ (the lines starting with g followed by a space) to remove the names that aren’t part of the real group names. This was even worse earlier - at least now DS can cope with multiple group names on a line as long as it’s been given the right names for the bone - and I found it was possible to use regular Expressions in a text editor to tidy things up fairly efficiently.

Thanks Richard,
I’ll try this and give you feedback, by the way, that’s probably why I’m getting fancy object names prefixed with all their ancestor in DS4 and not 3.
BB

If it’s a figure then you need to have every group assigned to a bone, otherwise DS4 will load the entire mesh, leaving you with little to no control over the non assigned groups.

Hi Richard,
Removing the spaces (or leading ancestor names) did not change anything to the behavior. Boneless parts are still left away. I would rather rig with the good old DS3 and render with 4.
…
Hello Bejaymac,
I think that your assertion is only true for the outer level groups (those whose parent is the root) the sub-groups doesn’t always need a bone (in hard surface models) as long as we only ask them to move with their parent.
Regards,
BB

I don’t think Bejaymac was saying every bone must have a group, he was saying every group must have a bone.I haven’t tested the situation he describes, but it sounds consistent with what you were seeing above.

The first pic is a skinsuit in DS3, what your seeing is pretty much what you’d get in DS1 & 2 as well as Poser, except I have it on wireframe view as well as having the joint editor active to show the bones. The CR2 is almost the same as the figures, I’ve removed some of the bones (eyes, fingers and toes) as well as removed the geometry reference from the head, hands & feet bones.

The second picture is the exact same CR2 in DS4, as you can see the geometry references in the CR2 are being ignored by DS4 and it’s loaded the entire mesh, the head, eyes, hands, fingers, feet and toe groups are now completely static lumps that get dragged around with the figure, none of the joints have any effect on them.

Bejaymac, this is not exactly my case although there might be a relation in the fact that it clearly shows that DS4 have a different behavior.
In the second image, when you move the head, does the eyes moves along with the head or floats in the air? In my case they will float!

Hard surface model’s skeletons are a bit different of soft object’s, in the sense that mesh will never deform (no joints) but groups will translate (almost never in soft models) and rotate. My problem is especially occurring when translating parent parts, this is difficult to observe on body parts.

Well, I obviously do not exclude the fact that I’m doing something wrong! the aim of my initial question was to have feedback from users building successful hard models.

Thank you very much for your help.
BB

The head & eyes don’t move, in my case they weren’t meant to be loaded so the joints have no control over those groups, if I bend the skinsuit at the waist then the head, eyes, hands and fingers stay where they were and the mesh gets distorted at the group seams.

Despite the fact that the head mesh is visible, the behavior of your model seems correct to me: descendants are moving with their parent.
Is this a genesis mesh?