Generation 3 Aiko and Hiro Appreciation Thread

Ethin

richardandtracy said:

These are the things I think would be useful:

1. Weight mapping. This works.
2. Autofit. This works.
3. Creating morphs from existing character shapes is a pain with a weight mapped character if you're going to make it work like a standard character morph, but it's possible. A script might make this easier. I will have to learn how to script this.
4. Apply Poser Material Poses: Will probably have to make a script as really will only want to apply the textures to Iray materials now 3DLight is on the extinct list. I will have to learn how to script this.
5. Autofit clothing templates would be very useful for new clothing to get things like dress rigging close to right on loading. Need knowledge.
6. Improving the character weight maps. Need knowledge.
7. Do controls for the hands and other body parts (like 'L Hand Spread', 'L Hand Grip' etc) These work, but take time - done a few on my TriAx GV3.
8. Create additional bones for rigging the face and eyelids. Need knowledge. 

Actually, it's pretty much everything that goes into creating a figure from scratch except creating the mesh. I have bought Blondie999's Rigging tutorial ,  Advanced Rigging Tutorial and Rigidity Grouping and Mapping in DS4.5+ and read them a couple of times but haven't got as far doing much of what is in there - however, it's one of the things that made me think about trying to TriAx GV3 myself. I do know the tutorials are based around an early version of DS4, so may not be 100% applicable now (or there may be easier ways of doing it), however I think most of it works the same.

Regards,

Richard

The things that I'd like to add to that are:

UV set swapping. That way you can still use the old textures, but you could also switch to a new UV set that's laid out more like the Genesis figures. That would make creating textures in general and making higher resolution textures easier. I know how to UV map, but I've never done anything as complex as the generation 3 figure, though.

Geograft. I understand the basic concept of how it works, but don't know how to actually do it. Plus, I don't know if there's something about how the Generation 3 figures were created that might prevent them from working.

Like I previously stated, I was thinking about also adding HD Morphs, but there are a couple issues with that, so I don't know that it's necessary. I know this technology is proprietary and only PAs have access to it, so that's not something that the general public could do. Also, it is meant to be used with Sub-D on a lower-poly mesh.

 

One of the things that has confused me is the fact that over the years, on certain technologies when they came out, they would state, "this technology only works on single mesh figures". But what does single mesh even mean? Because if you take it literally, even Genesis isn't a single mesh figure, because the eyeballs, eyelashes, and teeth are all separate meshes, they're not actually connected to the main mesh of the figure.

 

richardandtracy

UV swapping is something I had forgotten about. Which is silly, because I have done it [once] on a model of a fountain pen, and I've never done anything so complex either. Coping with the different areas from each generation for the material zones means it might be best to use a fit suit and hide the Gen3 character.

Geografting is something I have done twice, and vaguely understand. What would they be used for? That's the bit I'm not sure about. When TriAxed or General weight mapped the character is not a Generation 3 character, it just uses a Gen3 mesh, so there shouldn't be anything to prevent it working.

HD morphs are something we couldn't do.

As far as I know, Gen3 is welded on loading into DS into a single mesh. Don't think it's something we need to worry about.

Regards,

Richard.

Ethin

Felicia got a new variation.

 

carrie58

Sweet !

richardandtracy

Yep, definitely sweet. Regards, Richard

Ethin

carrie58 said:

Sweet !

richardandtracy said:

Yep, definitely sweet. Regards, Richard

Thanks!

Apparently she wasn't finished though, and I posted her in haste. Because I've come up with a bunch of refinements I could do and ideas I could try out. So we'll see how that goes. 

Bejaymac

When DS4.0 pro became free I jumped in feet first, as I wanted to learn how all of the tools worked as well as what was going on internally, I practically dismantled Genesis figuring out how it all worked.

I realised I was going to have to rig my own figure to really learn how that side of things worked, so I used Aiko 3 as my guinea pig and like everyone else I used "convert to WM", back then I didn't know any better, took me over a month to realise what a mess I had, so I kept the mesh, the skeleton and the UVs and deleted everything else.

I then spent the rest of 4.0 and most of 4.5 rebuilding her as a full on Tri-Ax figure, that means "painting" custom weight maps, rebuilding her morphs and adding regions so they appear in the Shaping tab correctly, rebuilt most of her JCMs (Tri-Ax meant I didn't need some of them), added autofit clones for the rest of the Gen3s.

The attached image is from one of many backups i made, that is from early 2013, I was about 80%-85% happy with the WMs at this stage, had added the regions and started rebuilding her morphs.

I "mothballed" the project before DS4.6 for a few reasons.

I'd learned everything I could from doing it.

I'd never be able to distribute her.

I realised I now had ALL of her content to rebuild.

So while it can be done it's not advisable.