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Not quite there yet, just reading in prep for getting Blender up for the first time. Just a side question in passing as I wait for more RAM so I can not have blender crash.
What is this "Pinning" thing? is it phraseology for locking it in place, or something in the interface for working with triangle-parts?
(edit)
Before Daz3D a few month ago, this was all I knew of Blender. And the vid doesn't cover when he is right-clicking, or pressing keyboard keys to make that stuff happen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2tZx7cEXtE
What is this "Pinning" thing? is it phraseology for locking it in place, or something in the interface for working with triangle-parts?
(edit)
Before Daz3D a few month ago, this was all I knew of Blender. And the vid doesn't cover when he is right-clicking, or pressing keyboard keys to make that stuff happen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2tZx7cEXtE
This manual is your best friend, then:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Mapping/UV/Layout_Editing
And this page has a lot of good stuff on UV mapping, especially if you scroll down to the pinning section. Basically, in the UV window you can select a vertex and press P (alt+p to unpin) to make a vertex immovable when live unwrap or regular unwrap is triggered. (Live Unwrap is an option in the UV menu you can check, which lets the UV dynamically update with changes to the mesh. I turn it on and off a lot.)
Check the "stitching" thing on that page, too. I don't use that as much because I never noticed that function, but it looks like it could be useful. And yes, I'm always finding stuff like that in Blender where there's an easier method than I've been using - the program is monolithic in its feature set and there is a shortcut key for everything.
Also be aware of the "sync UV" button at the bottom of the UV window. This prevents some other useful features being used, but if you're feeling lost about where you are on the UV, this syncs selection on the UV window with selection on your mesh so you can always find what flat poly on the UV screen goes with what 3d poly on the object. My biggest use of this is in tracking down distorted areas to place additional seams.
Thankyou so much, that answered so many questions, not having Blender up yet. Perhaps some day, not today, I can export cloths, add bones/handles, and re-import them so my figure can look good dancing. Again, not today. I'm off to read that manual, till the hot part of the day passes, thanks.
As I often say on my radio, "Going back into the woodwork now".
Let me know if I can help more. I'm seeing more and more people trying to learn Blender for DAZ Studio, and that's awesome.
Hey Sickle and hello Zarcon and welcome to our little corner on the internet where we talk about 3D stuff! Get ready for Blender because it is a wild ride. When I first launched Blender I was like "Wat the hell am I supposed to do with this damn cube" and I really hated the interface but it gets better after a while. I´m still learning and theres a lot of stuff I dont know about Blender yet but going back to Sickles tutorial and reading some parts again it is all starting to make much more sense now.
Today I managed to get some better results for the lighting on the dress in Daz Studio, it seems like the area lights (plane, sphere and so on) are good for the shadow effect, or at least better than the regular lights.
I also have a pretty decent bump map but there is still some stretching that needs to be fixed and I created a first test texture and just trying it out right now, the flower details though are a tough one, almost every flowers needs to have its own material and Uv map as somehow they are all different, I have no idea how that happened.
Anyways I was wondering, is it okay if the Uv map is overlapping in an area that is symmetrical or will it cause problems later on when creating maps?
You don't want areas to overlap unless 1. they're literally identical in their UV or 2. they're on different material zones.
I think they are identical then, the bump map works pretty well so they must be. Today I hope I have the final version of the object saved in Daz Studio and I am creating some textures for the dress and for the flower petals, those are kinda hard. Also I had some accessories for the outfit in mind and I have already created earrings and I was thinking about some bracelets that are kinda loose so I was wondering, how to influence objects like this with gravity? So they arent stuck in one place on the figure when it moves or when I load a different pose. IS this achieved with rigging?
With bracelets you can do it with rigging (you'd need to create a bone for each bracelet so it can be tilted etc., then weight-map each bracelet 100% to its bone), or you can do it with morphs (which is not friendly to intermediate stages but is faster).
Either way, it's probably not going to work automatically. Although you know, I've never tried setting up JCM or automatic bends for something like bracelets. It might be an interesting experiment. Most people just have loose bracelets as a prop and let people tilt them on their own when they pose the figure.
I see, when it comes to rigging I only know how to use the transfer utility tool now from your tutorial and I have also read a page about it on daz documentation center. I will need to look into that. Also when it comes to clothing, theres this button in Daz called dynamic clothing and I have also seen some thing in the store that says dynamic dress for example, what exactly is that? And weight mapping, I have done some in Blender, can it be done inside Daz too or does it need to be done in another program just like the modeling and uv unwrapping phase?
The dynamic clothing plugin regrettably can only be used on clothing that is already dynamic (which means made with the proprietary Optitex process, so downloaded from their site or bought from the DAZ store).
Weight mapping can be done in DAZ Studio. The actual painting of the maps will not export with an obj so there's no point in doing it in Blender; the only thing to do in Blender is to assign vertex groups if you are going to use the Figure Setup tools (since using Transfer Utility will wipe them out). Assigning vert groups just tells the program "these faces belong to this group;" it doesn't create the maps for each axis.
I see, I googled the dynamic clothing and it looks like it moves pretty well when the figure moves. Also when I ran the transfer utility tool to fit the dress to genesis I selected the dress knee-length option although it is a bit shorter than that so what the tool did was it copied the rigging bones from the figure to the dress right? Now, the problem with this automatic created rigging is of course that it sometimes doesnt look very realistic as the dress is bound to the legs even in position when it shouldnt be, so I guess in order to fix that I will have to edit it to do some custom rigging and bones and then paint weight maps right?
Or you can just rename the thigh bones to something like "Left Thigh Handle" and "Right Thigh Handle" in both the label and actual name, then save to library, then delete and reload. This turns the thighs into handles instead of just clinging to the legs. You'll probably still need to smooth out the xrotate left bulge maps for both thighs in the center bum area to prevent the inappropriate distortion that tends to happen there.
Thanks a lot this will be useful later on! I still need to do some introduction research into rigging but I am going to try to rig the dress when all the maps are finished, luckily no displacement needed for this one as it has the folds modeled and I still managed to keep it on rather low poly count which is definitely and achievement after the almost 2 mil polygon version : D I´m finishing one more texture for one more flower and then I´m calling it a day. The next thing I do won´t definitely have any flowers in it : D I should really map the bedroom I have modeled. I think my cursor mus have gone through at least 1500+ flowers by now while working on this dress : D : D
Anyways, thanks a lot for your assistance and have a wonderful day! : )
You're welcome! You have a good one too.
So today I started looking at the Figure Setup pane tutorial at Daz wiki and in that tutorial they are teaching how to rig a dragon so I tried to apply this method to my dress but I have a few questions.
In the tutorial they are teaching how to create custom bones for an object that has not been rigged yet. But as my object is a dress for genesis 2 female and I used the transfer utility tool to create an auto generated basic rig, I don´t know if there is any point in trying to rig the dress from scratch.
Also, I understand the whole point of the hierarchy of the bones and I guess that every part of the dragons body needed to be rigged in some way but, what if there are parts of the object that dont need to be rigged such as the flowers or the lining decorating the dress?
Do I simply remove the objects I dont want to rig from the Relationships window in the Figure Setup?
Will they still be there following the dress in all poses but without their own bones?
So I think the only things I want to rig on this dress is the dress itself (which has been done by the transfer utility) and the zipper detail so its acting like its being affected by gravity in certain poses instead of being static in an unreal pose all the time. And also fix the dress so its not stuck on the legs as I already mentioned.
So I guess the best way to achieve this would be to edit the already existing rig that was created by the transfer utility BUT, is there actually a way to do this? Because I have the item that has the transfer utility rig saved in my library and when I open the Figure Setup in the tutorial they said an obj needs to be loaded in there which in this case is the completely unrigged version of the dress before I applied the transfer utility to fit the dress to genesis.
You can't leave parts of the dress unrigged. Gravity is not a force that exists on its own inside the artificial environment of a 3d program; that's why we have "dynamic simulation" and "cloth simulation," etc. and not "gravity." If you don't rig they will stick out in weird directions because they're trying not to move with the body.
The best way to create skirt handles is, as I said before, to rename the thigh bones.
I see, so when I ran the transfer utility it created bones for all parts of the dress not just the base?
It created bones from the template, and then it assigned all of the vertices of the dress to those bones, yes.
The templates are there so that you can rig things differently from just using the main body's rigging. Sometimes they work better, sometimes not. The dress-knee length one is called that because it has no bones below the knee.
So is there a way to edit this rig in the figure setup so I could rig the zipper? They say in the wiki it needs to be an obj file loaded in there.
What exactly are you wanting to do with the zipper?
Im gonna do some quick renders to show u what I mean : ) I just ran the joint editor tool for the first time and I can see the bones of the dress that were copied from the figure now. So can I remove forearms and shins since the dress has no sleeves and is not longer than the knee length? Or is it better to leave the bones there?
You can remove them, definitely. Just make sure you right-click in the 3d window and use memorize--memorize figure rigging in the joint editor before resaving to library.
Okay here it is.
Picture 1 - the zipper in the default position.
Picture 2 - Genesis sitting on the floor so the zipper should look like its hanging down a bit more than it is now so that will have to be achieved using some rigging I guess.
Also heres the picture of the dress stuck to the legs, I will try to fix this renaming the bones as u suggested.
Aha. Well, you can add an extra bone for the zipper pull if you like (probably need to be a child of the chest bone), or you can add a morph to pivot it (easier, but as I've mentioned, only looks right at 0 or 100%). Either way it will not be automatic; the user will need to move it or turn the dial. That's just a limitation we all work with.
Okay I´m going to keep following the tutorial and see if I can rig it. So, after I have ran the transfer utility I only now need to work with joint editor and I no longer need the Figure Setup Pane?
If you're able to get the results you want from Transfer Utility, you don't need the Figure Setup at all. It's most useful for rigging things that need a large number of custom bones.
I see, right now I only need to rig the zipper oh and also the earrings as well. Shoes won´t need rigging hopefully as they are tight and I´ll think about creating the bracelet.
I also had a simple purse in mind for the outfit but I will need to learn how to place things into genesis´s hand in order for it to look good. I think I´ll get to that after the shoes, I need to find out if I can make the object import with the right pose or not.
I remember when I was doing the interactive lesson Day at the beach and there was one step after I posed the genesis to sit on the ground that said the string should be hanging down to look more realistic and I adjusted it by going into parameters and there was a bunch of custom made parameter settings there for the string so that it could hang or go left/right and so on. Was that the morph rigging or the bone rigging?
I bet it was the morph but I cant tell for sure as everything can be so deceiving in 3D : D
Those were probably morphs.
About the purse: http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/journal/Tutorial-Creating-A-Smart-prop-With-DS4-5-Pro-367622372
Oh great! I´ll check it out when I get there!! Im gonna work on the rigging now and I´ll be back when I get some results! : )
So I created a custom bone and scaled it down, rotated it and placed it where the zipper is, now I need to parent it to the closest bone I guess which is the abdomen bone. I tried to right click on the Zipper bone in the scene tab and I selected change figure parent but it doesnt do anything.
I guess I´d need to go to the figure setup window and change the hierarchy of the objects bones in there but is there a way to do this since its a non obj object?
Also, I guess there should be an option where I select that I only want his bone the influence that one part of the whole object which is the zipper but I don´t know where that would be.
And about the morph rigging, can it be done the way you are describing creation of completely custom morphs in the 5th part of your tutorial?
Im not even sure if Im doing it the right way, the bone creation but this seemed the most logical way to me to scale it down, rotate it and place it where the zipper is. I might be completely wrong though : )