Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
This chair is probably the easiest thing to rig you could choose.. so if you're waiting for something easier - don't.
As I take five to do a quick experiment, as this at least got FWSA Paloma's attention, lol.
It's a tad more difficult then "Just doing it", as the geometry of the two parts make distorting of one part inevitable, as I discovered months ago with an almost identical setup (A pneumatic piston). It's a single object made of two parts with no actual quads connecting them in the root mesh, it should work without something distorting.
However as soon As I tried to get the corners inside the outer box weight mapped to the child bone, I ran into some difficulty. I was unable to figure out how to get the part of that inside the other one, to turn red.
And as such, when the inner bone is moved, the cube distorts.
And that is why, I don't think it would be easy to do the same exact thing to that chair, not easily, and not without performing a game of twister while practicing some form of DUF black magic, lol.
Possible, yea. 1 create a spare bone. 2 weight map the outer cube to the spare bone. 3 save it and use the spare bone to move the outer object out of the way. 4. create your actual child bone and weight map the inner cube to it. 5. save it all again. 6 move the outer cube back and weight map it to the "hip" bone. 7 save it all yet again. 8 remove the spare bone, and pray nothing breaks.
Yea, not easily anyway.
I "just did it" for you.. check your email.
The problem with your example above is that not all the polys of the smaller cube are filled to 100% weight mapping.
And the boxes are stacked the other way from the piston, so it can be done (My 3D disorientation moment, lol). As for the example above, it is just impossible to 'just' weight map the four corners inside the outer box. Not even setting the opacity of the outer box works. There is warnings all over the place, stating that the rigging must be saved before the bones are moved, and thus it becomes a multi step process saving multiple Figure Prop Assets, just to get the outer box out of the way so the other four corners can be tagged with the weight map brush.
It would be nice to select surface zones from the surface tab and assign them to weight maps, tho I don't know of any way to do that in studio.
1. Load three part prop collection you sent me yesterday
2. Export 3 props together as obj
3. Open obj in Hexagon and rename 3 parts to "chair", "pivot", and "back"
4. Delete original props in DS, go to figure setup tab
5. Right click left side, import fixed up obj, drag geometry from left side to right side, rename the top two fields to get rid of the numbers (optional step), drag back to pivot and pivot to seat so they're nessled/parented correctly. Change bone dirrections all to YZX (that's up and down, I just know that from experience) Click create button
6. Adjust bone start and end points (minor changes, it did a pretty good job automatically), memorize figure rigging when done.
7. Check face group assignments and fill all three parts completely 100% weight mapping. (I set up a hotkey for it, when I hit "F" it opens the weight map fill dialog box - easier than right clicking and going through all the optons 12 times)
8. Set limits for rotations and translations, etc, basic cleanup.. Apply Sub-D, save figure/prop asset.
You need to use the figure setup tools to make a figure from scratch, don't try just adding bones unless you're working with a clothing figure type thing already made.
You select it in the polygon group editor.
Then you switch to Weight Mapping tool and fill it in.. of course you won't want to fill just the arm rests for this, but you get the idea..
As I walk threw this. That rigging looks fantastic by the way, especially given I never really considered that part of the design of the chair regarding the location of hinge points.
Using Hexagon, Studio dose funny stuff when exporting OBJ files. It's fine for quick stuff, just not complex things that need to retain separate parts.
The Hourglass is spinning in my brain at this point, lol. I think it just rebooted, lol. In studio with the geometry tab, you can just double click the text to rename the surfaces.
That dose not appear to work in hex, and right-click menu also dose not have a 'rename' in there.
(EDIT) total goof. I'm looking in the wrong spot.
If I had a penny for every time I forgot to select YZX when creating bones. And fixing it in the tool tab dose not always work, as the bones end up going the wrong way when you move the end points. It's kind of a brain-twist to see it happen, you move a point one way, and the bone moves the opposite direction, lol.
I will second that, I am impressed with the bone placement it created.
Don't worry, I'll put the zone colors back on this, lol.
That was a very good learning experience, tho I'm still not sure how much stuff I broke in the process, or how I got some stuff to happen, lol. The result looks good, it is still user friendly, and I am still considering it. However having pose bones or not is only one thing to consider when packing up something. There was a few things I had thought of doing for this chair, that I decided not to because of the geometry count and file sizes.
G3F has around 17k Vertices (base mesh), this chair already has around 4k Vertices without SubD (16k at SubD 1). It wasn't that bad at the beginning, however as soon as I started adding SubD corner protection lines into the mesh, the geometry count just exploded out of control, lol. And that is not the only thing that will eat up render memory (Iray GPU memory, or 3DL CPU memory).
I opted to go with 2k maps, to keep some level of detail, and not waste ram for most renders, however the map image files also do not compress that much for zip files, and that was another concern. I have around 25MB of map files, and usually I try to keep my zip files in the 10MB or less range.
Yesterday's zip had only parented objects, I replaced them with just the chair seat and a Bone rigged with back chair, and it still got larger rather then smaller (not by much, but noticeably). 25MB vs 26MB.
Oh, and that is the other thing. With the stack of parts, I was able to only put SubD on the cushions and curb some of the out of control geometry count. With the Rigged one, it's either everything or nothing, no only where it is needed (to the best of my knowledge).
So, the debate weather to go with a stack of parts or a 'Rigged' prop is meaningless compared to the map size issue. I need to deal with the image size somehow at this point, and look closely at what is keeping them so large.
I think you're worrying about it too much.. I've made single earrings that are more than 5k polys.. I try not to, but sometimes you can't avoid it and get what you want.
And then there's this one..
Point made sufficiently. That only leaves one small usability difficulty I'm having with the cushions so close together and the same object.
when I try to put a D-form near the back of the seat cushion, it grabs stuff from the back support. Is there an easy way to put a D-form on one surface, and have it not mess with a different surface tab zone?
Yes, but you need to use the weight brush and paint what you want the Dformer to influence.
More than the average user is going to want to do.. and that's a very good reason to leave them as parented props.
Or you could just make some morphs for the seat and then people won't have to mess with d-forms at all
I'm not unwilling to use the brush, especially for on/off bone weight mapping. When it comes to getting a smooth gradient, it gets a tad dicey, lol. I've noticed similar behavior in other 'brush'/spray-paint programs as well (and not just on this computer). The rate that the surface gets changed depends on the CPU load, and that is never consistent at all, lol.
Morphs for the seat I did think about, and to do that for every possible 'sit' pose on that surface (one for the left, center, right, more this way, more that way, etc), I would get lost in the 'Morph' category, lol. I can make a few generic ones, and it isn't like the D-forms won't work at all. It would just take two or three (one for the front edge, one for the back edge, and one for the top), instead of just one.
Things to consider as I make some shader/mat icons.
Yeah I'd do like 5 or 6 and you'd cover most needs, if people want to get fancy they can mess the d-forms themselves. Most people don't know how to use them at all so you'd increasing the functionality a lot for those people who refuse to take the 10 minutes to learn how.
Arm twisted, and am in the process of doing so. Honestly it didn't take much convincing, it was on my 'possibly' list. And that is a very good reason, it took me an incredibly long time to get around to fixing skirt "balloon knee" with them.
Oh, and that is why I had 'Tool tips' off in studio by the way, and never new about the content library pop-up thing.
Some times it takes a little fussing with the rotation of the field to get the stuff you want, not just the XYZ scale.
And some times, it takes more then one D-Form to get into tricky locations, lol
(EDIT 05:24utc)
Well, I made two copies of some morphs so far (for the Rigged chair, and the No-Back-Chair), and it looks like a simple convert to SubD and save over the old SubD version puts the Morphs in there for the alternate versions. So I don't need to make each morph four times, only twice, lol.
It still needs a few more for the yet to be started inside arms, and the inside back. I'm starting to nod off at the keyboard, so I'll tackle them after some rest. Thanks, Until the next meeting.
Now, if you thought it was tedious to set up the D-Formers, make the morphs, and to save them (you can save them in groups at least), you have not gone threw the steps of assigning little icons for each dial.
You can't just drag them from windows explorer (file manager) over to that window, oh no.
You need to go and wander your way threw the computers folders starting from the 'Programs' folder..
Twice for each dial, Starting from the 'Programs' folder Every single time.
This is so much of a PITA, I may never do this again.
Even tho the results do look good.
Bread crumb time. Adding a sub category for morphs. Here I was right clicking all over the place in normal and in 'Edit' mode looking for a "Create new folder" menu item or something like that, lol.
I already made the category in this screen-cap, tho this is silly. you type it in, separated by back-slashes like a folder path.
And then for every morph going in that category after it is created, you can just use the pull down select thing.
I've never seen anyone make little icons for morphs for a prop.. only for characters. Not saying don't, but you're going above and beyond.
Oh.. and another "there is an easy way to do that" moment.. Right click the parameters tab, turn on Edit Mode, select all your morphs and right click, chose.. umm... set properety group? You'll find it.. poke around. That's also where you can turn on limits, set limit amounts, all sorts of good stuff on a whole pile of morphs at once.. 'cause gonig into the properties of 70 moprhs one at a time gets.. teedious..
That's been going threw my mind. Tho my reasoning behind the madness, is that little red blob is showing roughly where the morph is doing it's thing. An attempt to reduce any confusion regarding what dial dose what, lol.
(EDIT)
I did miss that post. That is nice, like em so.
(EDIT 2) That came in so incredibly helpful for moving morphs from one place to another. I'm taking five from making morphs, to go threw some of the Mat preset mess.
With the chair a single object, I think I can combine some of these.
The debate is weather it will complain if there used on the no-back chair or not. I don't think it will, as the zones are the same names (UV mapping, etc).
Much Better
.
Morning. I decided to doo some cleanup, and on the advice rename some files (I'm sorry, that will require deleting the old ones now, I wanted to avoid that.).
I'm also going to add a couple more padded leather colors (I like that purple/magenta). I still need to make up icons and 'tip' images for the 'shader' folder, tho that is more wait for renders, then tedious stuff.
I have that nifty scene I set up for my Rock shader icons, and I was going to use something like that for the chair and Mat preset Icons. However it looked so good with just the head lamp in a empty world, I just went with that, lol. As for the shader icons, I am doing them here in this Shader Icon scene. The sky-dome is from "Sea Scapes" to give reflective stuff something to reflect. The light set is from my test chamber. And as you can guess from that little "1k" floating in mid air, the Icons do not get any Post Processing at all, what you see is what you get (with no exaggerations at all). It's not a Promo, it's an icon, lol. I got the idea from all the Fisty and DestinysGarden shader icons I've seen floating around my Content library, and decided it would be incredibly easy to set up a "Render and ship-it" scene for that using some stuff I had.
That label by the way, is incredibly simple. I made a black and white map in MS Paint (using the text tool), and put the map on a Primitive plane in the Opacity channel. I have one slightly larger then the other to give that black border around the text. I think it took less then a couple of seconds to bake that up. Placing it in the view of the camera was a bit more work, tho not difficult (much easier then posing a figure, lol).
(EDIT)
And I do need to re-save the shaders, as there asking for some obj UV map that is not needed at all (an old version of the chair).
It's a shader, what dose it need a UV map for!? Resists the erg to reach threw the monitor and strangle Studio, lol.
So it's a Work In Progress. Old vs new. I do need to make the resolution of the "2k" a bit higher for the tool tip image, tho it is sufficient for the Icons (it's legible on the 91x91 pixel icon, that's what I was looking for back in the day).
(EDIT 2) And just when I thought I was done with rigging.
It appears the XYZ move the chair around stuff for the 'Rigged' back chair, have gone completely nuts on me. Aghhh!
Those numbers on the root node need to be ZERO (Zero!, Zero, zero echoes back), not whatever that came from, lol. I'm not sure about the other numbers yet.
For a 'Vertical' Prop, these numbers on the "Root Node" need to be Zero for the placement controls to work properly in Studio.
Right click the preset and choose rename... /grumble grumble...
(Anything in the library can be renamed, and labels for morphs can be changed, just leave the actual "name" (that's the internal name, not the label) of morphs the same after they've been saved or you'll end up with a duplicate. And don't touch the file names in the data or texture folders.)
You can lock the xyz translations on the seat bone and resave the figure if you want, it's like G3F and her Hip right now, both selections do the same thing, no way around it other than just locking it as far as I know, 'cause the figure needs that root bone.
I know what it is, as I just did it again, lol.
When you go to save a figure/prop asset, make sure you have the 'Root Node' selected in the scene tab, and not a bone. Otherwise it will throw the Root node rotation numbers all out of whack.
Ah, okay, different issue than I thought you were talking about..
As for the renaming.. I figured out from the emails what you were actually on about..
I'm deleting the old version every time you send me an update, as a proper tester should do.. so don't worry about that. In a perfect world testers should install things to a completely seperate contant library to test.. then it will catch things like those annoying useless UV calls on shader presets before they get to Daz QA.. /gives Zarcon the eye
(Yes, I'm giving you hell.. I don't tease people I don't like, I just ignore them)
Also it would probably be a good idea to enable the limits on the various morphs. You have the min/max values set to -100/100% but the limits are off. At over 100% the morphs do some pretty extreme movement. And cause some nasty texture distortion (at least on the highly patterned cloth).