Are Triax WeightMaps cumulative?
Kattey
Posts: 2,899
Let say, I have same piece of geometry affected by two different bones. Those bones are both children of the same parent bone but move differently, so I want to tie different weight maps to each one. But I think weight is shared between those two bones, so if I add to one, it deducts from another.
Is that so?
And if yes, is there a way to avoid it?
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Not that I can find. So far as I can tell, when you weight map two sibling bones, what you map to one will detract from the other and there's no way to have them overlap... :(
Oh, dammit, this is what I was afraid of -_- Thank you for the confirmation.
I'm fighting with long skirt rigging for a third day now, trying to set it like it was in Poser cr2 rigging but it just doesn't work :-/
Also even if bones aren't siblings, the weight you mapped the last is deducted from all other maps that cover this area. :-/
Yes, DS weight-maps are "normalised" - the total weighting for each axis of rotation has to add up to 1. You should be able to have overlapping areas of effect as long as you don't try assigning a weight of 1 (outside any areas that are affected only by that bone). It does make setting handles up a royal pain, sadly.
Hmm, there's a command to Normalize Maps, so I expect it should be possible in principle *not* to do it, but I don't know how. I do know it renormalises when you select a different map so I'd try to save before selecting a map. I haven't tried it and I don't know if it works or not, but it may be worth a try.
Yeah but I need same area to be affected by 3 various bones and while none of them has the weight of 1, total of them should far exceed the weight of 1 because I need full-effect movement from each bone but in different directions. Ideally one bone is affecting all of the skirt, second bone affects from thigh and down and third affects only the knee and down of the same area; partial movements from normalized maps are just too week and fragmented to do that.
Thanks, Richard, for confirming this even if this is sad news.
Any way I can work around it or I should resolve to morphs?
Hm, never noticed that command, but I'll look into it, thank you.
I wonder... is there a way to set the weight map brush so that it only goes up to say, 0.5 weight?
Brush yes, but if you brush over the same area even with 50% brush, it will add to the weight nevertheless until it is up to 100%
OH WAIT!!! I think I know how to do this!!! Give me a day, and I'll get back to you...
Okay, so here's what I did, and it's based on some dresses I have for V4...
the four big skirt bones as well as the four small corner bones all come off the Pelvis bone.
I painted in the weight maps for the four skirt bones first.
Then I set up corner regions to match the four corner bones, and FILLED them to 50%
Okay, that's the easy part.
The hard part was this: I had to check the weight mapping and found that front back and on each side, the corner bones overlapped to the point that they completely negated the larger bones weights, resulting in a line of polygons that went do the skirt's hem where the big bones had no weight at all.
I Painted weight back in for those polygons, copied all the weights and voyolay...
I think it works! So now, I have those four corner bones at not more than 50% weight and they work great!
I think, though this is deduction rather than something I've been told, that the issue is the way child bones inherit movement. In Poser rigging a child bone and its group move with the parent bone, and the parent of the parent and any siblings don't move at all - only the bone and its immediate parent are variable in how they react. By contrast, in TriAx the mesh a bone affects is that which has non-zero weights for the bone or its child bones (all of which get applied according to their weight). So in Poser rigging you can safely have multiple bones that add up, on paper, to more than 100% in effect as their weights don't get applied at once, but in TriAx rigging if a bones child bones added up to more than 100% for form vertices those vertices would move more than the parent bone, producing odd spikes and ridges.
Interesting. Even so, I'm rather happy with what I have here...
The next question would be how to I transfer this rig to a different dress mesh without having to build it again from scratch? I'd like to try it on the MFD but... I'll have to build it from scratch...
Testing the new rig...
You can use the dress as a source figure for the Transfer Utility - that's how the B25 dress resource figure is used.
HOLY BONEY, BATMAN! IT WORKS!
OH WAIT, OKay, so this is how it has to work so far as I can tell...
You have a dress for V4. Export it to OBJ.
Import that OBJ and convert to Genesis using the transfer utility (likely Victoria 4, maybe Aiko 4)
Apply smoothing modifier, set the smoothing iterations as high as you can, and set smoothing to Generic
Delete Genesis, so that the mesh goes to the default genesis fit...
Export the new shape to OBJ
Re-Import, and fit that OBJ to the dress with the new joints...
That should do it... well, doing whatever tweaking on the joints and weight maps necessary...
I'll try and get this done by Monday. I seem to recall that there is a public domain dress mesh I can use on ShareCG, so I'll use that if I can find it and post my results if they are successful... but what I just outlined is what I'm going to try first.
Hey, Wancow, I glad it worked for you :)
My attempt of rigging has slightly different bone layout: lower small bones were right under big thigh bones and there was one big handle to rotate/bend the whole skirt, so overlapping of bones just didn't work at all.
Is it possible for me to get your rig somehow to take a closer look?
And I didn't really get the idea about smoothing and re-export, sorry - what is the purpose of it?
Richard, yeah, it is what I suspect :-/ I didn't get spikes and ridges, only weight maps got "redistributed" once I add a new one.
Yes, but if the system didn't subtract the new weights from the old, so that you ended up with more than 100% weighting on a single vertex when all the maps were added together, you would get spikes and ridges.
But why then it worked in Poser rigging? Just due to nature of rigging system itself?
Yes, the limiting weights (via the angles and falloff spheres) to only the bone and its parent means you can't get cumulative weighting from multiple bones throwing the mesh out. I'm not sure how the new hybrid rigging handles this.
As soon as I have a sharable mesh I'll post it. It's worthless without the mesh, because there's no way to upload the weight mapping otherwise, and that's key.
As soon as I have a sharable mesh I'll post it. It's worthless without the mesh, because there's no way to upload the weight mapping otherwise, and that's key.
Will it help if I make a simple mesh for you? Do you need a full dress or sleeveless will do?
I'm working on making my own... I might ask Wendy if I can post hers, though...
Poser 9/Pro 2012 has weight-mapping, but unlike the DS version it gets mixed with old style rigging - the weight-maps supplementing the traditional angles and spheres (though you can do a single-skin, DS style rig if you want).
Poser 9/Pro 2012 has weight-mapping, but unlike the DS version it gets mixed with old style rigging - the weight-maps supplementing the traditional angles and spheres (though you can do a single-skin, DS style rig if you want).Ah. I don't work in Poser. Thanks for the explanation.
OKay, Wendy gave me permission to use her dress to distribute the rig.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/16859/
Thanks!
Bulge maps do not appear to go into that calculation. It was a pain trying to tweak default TU copied rigging until I figured this out, because I would paint 100% to one bone and still have distortions because it was still affected by bulge settings from other bones. I just walked someone through this on his gauntlet project, in fact. :D
Not that it matters to this project now. I'm really glad you figured it out, wancow, it looks great.
Just an asside: can someone explain the purpose of Bulge Maps to me?