Bangs head against wall...armor again
Malandar
Posts: 776
Before anyone says it, yes i know that I should learn to model and texture my own armor so I can have what I want, When I learn how to do that I will sell the silly thing so others can have it too... ( I wouldn't hold my breath though, I am a terrible procrastinator.)
Now the point of this, Please, Model and texture creators please do some research on how mail patterns fall, actual armor, not stuff someone made for a costume, this is driving me nuts here, the new armor set for G8 male... the mail pattern falls the wrong way, in one case DIAGONALLY and in another the pattern runs right to the end of the model and has partial links that would fall out before you got the thing on. I think I will stop here so this post doesn't come off as mean, just to be mean, it is not meant to be at all, it is just that I think almost every single set of armor that has chain armor components has the mail pattern falling the wrong way and usually in a physically impossible manner. But this new one has it in two different directions...
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Comments
Can't you retexture it or something? The artist put a ton of material zones on this set - something few others do - it's for the men, and it's not skimpwear. If you're that much of an armor enthusiast to find that to be enough reason to not purchase it, then yes, you're going to have to learn to make them yourself to be satisfied.
We all have products that wish would be made 'just right', but in all likelihood, will never be. I want a gorgon/naga with a blended transition between woman and snake under the abdomen and the ability to use whatever female skin textures and morphs I want with it. Hasn't happened in 19 years of my doing this and probably won't now that everyone is geografting creature parts. I can request it, I can offer sacrifices to Josh Crockett to make one someday, but I know I'm going to have to paint that transition myself if I want it. We have to learn to make do.
There are actually some really lovely scale and mail textures that might work for you. Try this one. No idea if its accurate but I use it all the time. There are a couple more if you do a search in the store for chainmail shaders etc.
On a (somewhat?) related question, I have found myself wondering whether there was some limitation in the way armour could be applied, as a "clothing" item, that prevented realistic plate armour from being created and sold, or whether it's a matter of artists not knowing that much about real historical plate.
Maybe there's no way to make a clothing item "rigid" and parented only to, say, the center of the limb it goes to?
I figured it would just be something I'd have to learn myself, but since I saw this thread, maybe it's relevant here and someone knows?
Like, typically, in articulated plate armour, protection for the knee would be three or more inflexible pieces that fold into one another, and are strapped around the leg, rather than one piece with no visible means of connection. I'm guessing knees in armour here (as one example) aren't done that way either because you'd have to have a skeleton and complex rigging for the model itself, or because it's just detail that's not needed in most renders - I just do't know which yet.
I'm not a PA, but I have created my own mail armour, and so I can tell you it is one of the most difficult things I've ever had to texture because you have an oddly shaped object that has to be flattened out and textured. But when you fold it up again, the links have to line up again across all these broken seams. Unless you are physically placing each link, it is almost impossible to do. I only had a small, relatively simple section that needed texturing but I spent hours juggling everything to get it to fit together, and still, there were some areas that will never look great. Those areas have to be hidden by slight of hand. The amount of extra time, along with blood, sweat and tears that it would take to get everything to fall realistically compared to how much extra you would make would just not be worth it IMHO.
This would be an incredibly easy fix, but I'll not go into it. THe OP doesn't wanna learn how, the OP doesn't wanna learn how.
Also, it's a valid complaint. People are paying for this stuff so they don't have to fix it. But, I'd say retexturing would be overkill.
It is possibly to do rigid plates.Also fairly easy to do, which makes mewonder why I neever seem to see it done. Mind, I don't know that it would work well for articulated armor plate in all cases, but the major joints were it would be so easy a caveman could do it, elbows and knees, itnever seems to happen.
I suspect it wouldget a bit challenging on the poke through perspective with torso armor. It might require a handfull of thinks to handle shoulders.
The main thing I think that keeps armchair artists from seeing how to do this is terminology. If search for Daz Rigid, you get rigidity maps,which is a different animal The maps exist to keep figure and ERC morphs from distorting things. Buckles and claps, for example, shouldn't twist like taffy because of a muscle flex. For something like a knee guard that is attached to a shin plate, you go with bone weight map. Most clothing items take their base weight map from a projection from the base figure.The result with a quick and dirty plate wouldbe that knee guard bends and twists with both the shin and thigh. So you go in to node weight editor, and you change the weight maps so it only moves with the shin.
Admittedly, things like rigid knee pads, that don't really follow shin or thigh, but sit atop the kneecapt, this would be challenging. For articulated torso armor, it would likely take a lot of effort balancing the shapes to keep it from poking through itself, and you still have to consider having the figure poke through. Which means figuring out what you can hide and how you can hide it. If iure, at least in that case, you end up not seeing it done that way often because that adds a lot of work to getting product out. The rest of it, me thinks, isn't that much more effort for accuracy.
Rigid armor clips like crazy and then people complain.
Or it bends like silly putty. And then people complain.
Wouldn't it be possible to have a base armor layer fitted to the character, and then the outer (rigid) plates parented to different parts of the base layer?
Off course it you changed character size you must change size of the plates too.
And you should still have be careful with your poses, but that would also be the case in a real plate armor.
I think they refer to that as mail pattern baldness.
+1
Somebody really needs to make a cartoon...
There are threads about the Rigit Follow Nodes that can be used to parent static armor plate props to the figure.
Switch to Geometry Editor, select some reference polys on the figure, right-click the viewport and choose Geometry Assignment > Create Rigit Follow Node from Selected you get an item that looks like a Null but with the Icon of an I-beam in the Scene pane parented to the figure. Now parent the armor plate prop to the Rigit Follow Node and dial in some character shape. The result is that the Rigit Follow Node will try to follow the shape and posing of the reference faces you have selected on the figure and the parented armor plate prop does follow as well.
A google search on: "site:daz3d.com rigid follow node" gave me these results
I've seen a thread where someone did this for a full armor outfit. Much work, not an easy task an maybe not that "poseable" to have it in a commercial product.
Making armor less "bendy" ist quite possible, but it requires a fair amount of rigging work. The torso and shoulder area are especially problematic. It requires a lot of JCMs for the different movements and even then the customer will need to use adjustment morphs for fine tuning. The High Paladin Armour does work that way in regards to the shoulders.
https://www.daz3d.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/d/f/dforce-high-paladin-for-genesis-8-females-08-daz3d.jpg
It is overall a compromise between realistiv movement and ease-of-use for most customers. If you take a look at gaming models, everyone seems to not even notice that armour bends with the animations.
That wouldn't solve the clipping issue. Armor restricts mobility. Put on armor and you can't twist/bend with same range as you can without. The armor get in your way. Atop that, it gets in its own way. It can bind against your body or itself.
Put armor on a Daz figure, and it is unimpared. Daz doen really do collisions outside dforce, and it would probably be over kill to try use dforce or this application, so the armor won't stop itself. With clever scripting, on might address some of that, but not all.
Clipping is what happens where, in the real world, the armor would have stopped that movement. Kinda obvious, yeah, but using rigid follow and parented props doesn't change that, and makes the resulting product less compatiable with character morphs. One thing I've learned from being conversant in the use of blender is you can't take the user out of there comfort zone and expect reasonable results. what is easy for me in blender just makes other peole mad. By the same token, I see the same kind of reactions to dealing with some of the more esoteric functions of Studio. It's not a god idea to put the user in that position if you want the user to give you money/ If you want to sell a product, you need to make it as user proof as possible. that is to say, plug and play, if you will.
OTOH, if you understand how rigid follow works, and can see how to parent the armor, are comfortable with resizing the prop peices, you can buy any armor set and pretty much do all that stuff yourself. Rather than paying for plug and play, you're paying for not having to spend a few days modeling, unwrapping, and texturing. So, I think from a vendor perspective, there's a strong economic case not do it the parented prop way.
Economic case in that people will balk at having to do all that work themselves, yeah; I mean, personally, I think that kind of armor would be great for my uses. I just wouldn't expect it to sell well.
That's what I'm talking about, great armour except the shoulder plates somehow seem to hover above the shoulder with no real connection like straps that hold them in place. I wonder whats the purpose of dForece in this, does the chain mail use that? So the Rigit Follow Nodes follow reference points on the chain mail that is draped over the figure with dForce?
Yeah, I just had a nice idea you could lower the Rotation Limits on the figure joints to mimic the limited movment in the armor the figure wears. I tune some Rotation Limits myself some time on the genesis figures or I set all rotation limits off if the pose needs it. That is the case in some scenes and poses, if you want new rotation limits by default with the genesis figure I think you just need to use Save Modified Assets. However I don't know which of Daz Studio save Presets will save the Rotation Limits, I suspect its the Properties Preset.
Thats how I use most of my products, as a starting point they may be already well made but sometimes just need something, a morph, a DFormer, extra pose controls or rigging whatever.
You are right about the strap. Some armor pieces are missing that.
dForce is used for the chainmail so that the skirt behaves appropriatly. The Plates are still regular rigged followers though and do not use rigid follow nodes.
As much as I would love to have armor like this
alas this sort of thing is beyond the general purpose nature
of daz figures but easily accomplished with purpose built
Game engine character rigs.
Note how the rigid sections of these armors never intersect in this video( begiining around 1:40) despite all of the violent body motions
oh well.. we can dream
Game engine rigs? Maybe, I just remember horrible clipping in nearly every in-engine game cutscene I've ever seen.
Indeed you see major intersection in the game play for certain
however obviously for the hi res " cinematics" they have some manner of collsion detection for those ridiculous armors worn by the Characters.