I've lost me Buttons!

Doc Acme

Been working on a character using big George and the Mobster outfit.  I'd forgotten that the outfit was converted from G3M to G8M (and of course no new icons get generated indicating the version) & somewhere along the line I loaded in the G3 coat. Didn't occur to me when I got the fitting dialog, and it looked pretty good. Probably weeks later I get around to working with him again & need to swap out the coat and ... no buttons.  Odd.  Finally track it down to the buttons weren't included in the conversion process to G8.  Open up the G3 version & there are the buttons.  I'd just leave it at that but the G3 coat just doesn't cope with G8 George.

I start examining the G3 coat on it's own & find these little guys again. Encountered them on a shirt with laces the other week & meant to ask then. Just what are these heiroglyphics & what is an I-Beam suppose to bring to mind?  How do you even search for this;I can't find ANY tool in the UI that remotely looks like this.

The docs for the Clothing conversion are a bit vague on the issue but might there be a methodology of getting old buttons on new coat?  Figure I can always do it after the fact in Lightwave, but would be nice to have them properly placed to begin with.

zombietaggerung

They're rigid follow nodes. The point of them, in my understanding, is to attach something like a button or a buckle to a particular vertex on a clothing item so it always follows that particular vertex and doesn't warp when the underlying mesh is morphed or draped.

I think you can create them yourself in the Building and Scripting panel with the geometry editor tool active.

Doc Acme

Thanks, I'll try looking there, now I know what to look for.  Pretty sure there's a similar function in other apps.

 

Syrus_Dante

I would at least select two polygons or better four, it seems that somehow the average polygon normals direction (the average direction in which the polygons facing) gets better calculated with more polygons selected / assigned for the rigid follow node to detect the proper rotation. Try an open jacked morph and look how the buttons react - the more reference polygons you assign the better they will follow.

BTW I didn't like the big sewing cross on the orignial buttons of some other clothing I've used. That looked like those that are used with your clothing in the screenshots. So I've replaced those with my own modeled buttons and they also can be duplicated by instancing a single button prop. Those are best placed at the world center and with the origin / Center Point in the middle to quickly parent them to the rigid follow nodes with Parent Items In Place turned off so they snap into position with drag and drop in the Scene pane.

Here is a nice tutorial dealing with Rigid Follow Nodes

Setting up items with rigid follow nodes tutorial

Doc Acme

Thanks.  That mentions This builds up on Josh's video on rigid follow nodes so watch that first, but didn't see a link. Might you have one?

In this case the coat's not going to be all that featured so the button's are pretty superflouous, but for later on I'd like to have them.  This is probably as close as the cam will to it get in this screen grab:

Going to work on Gondolier Floyd in the BG there tomorrow.

Mada

mdwhitney_17f0196a22 said:

Thanks.  That mentions This builds up on Josh's video on rigid follow nodes so watch that first, but didn't see a link. Might you have one?

Click on the image underneath that line and it will turn into a video :)