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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 3, 2020 19:47:09 GMT -5
Hey y'all -- trying to convert an alien to TS4 by making him a full-body "costume." Unfortunately, I'm running into some significant distortion in game.  I'm not totally sure how to fix this. I assume that it has to do with the Weight Transfer somehow? I guess I could start from scratch, but I spent a lot of time editing the Vertex Groups (Weight Transfer resulted in some pretty significant Wrongness, since the alien isn't the same proportions as the mascot I cloned) so I'm a little reluctant to do so, since I know I'll have to make those same changes all over again. Blend file is here. I know that it's extremely high poly right now -- I plan on decimating it once I get it animating properly in game. [removed] |
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Post by mauvemorn on Oct 3, 2020 21:41:25 GMT -5
Hi. The issue happens because the mesh is not rigged in places where it distorts. Editing the weights manually so much was really unnecessary.
You can delete hands to avoid finger vertex groups being transferred - unfold rig, make top, bottom, and feet selectable and visible; - select top, in 3d view press Shift D, then Esc, do the same for feet and the bottom; - select top.001, Shift-select bottom.001 and feet.001, press Ctrl J to join; - select the joined mesh, switch to edit mode, select hands to around wrists, delete;
- select the joined mesh, Shift-select yours, switch to weight paint, choose Transfer weights, set like in the pic, then use Clean tool with All groups selected and Limit total; - using gradient tool, assign the head to the head vertex group
 Also, if you want it to morph, you need to make a uv_1 map and vertex paint it
You do not need to use Decimate, 22k is a lot but not the end of the world, it won't crush the game, Decimate will mess up your mesh and uvs too much
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Post by o19 on Oct 4, 2020 4:43:54 GMT -5
Hey y'all -- trying to convert an alien to TS4 by making him a full-body "costume." Unfortunately, I'm running into some significant distortion in game. You have a fairly good item. I tried this recently with no success. Actually I loaded a blend file with a sims rig and hided everything. I loaded the character obj and with blender/rigify I added a human rig. I posed the rig to match the character and applied it. Then I showed the TS4 rig again and scaled and posed the obj to match it. This should allow to transfer the weights and UV maps accordingly ... but I had some issues with blender.
More detailed descriptions how to and with which blender version to use would be nice.
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Post by mauvemorn on Oct 4, 2020 10:17:19 GMT -5
Hey y'all -- trying to convert an alien to TS4 by making him a full-body "costume." Unfortunately, I'm running into some significant distortion in game. You have a fairly good item. I tried this recently with no success. Actually I loaded a blend file with a sims rig and hided everything. I loaded the character obj and with blender/rigify I added a human rig. I posed the rig to match the character and applied it. Then I showed the TS4 rig again and scaled and posed the obj to match it. This should allow to transfer the weights and UV maps accordingly ... but I had some issues with blender.
More detailed descriptions how to and with which blender version to use would be nice.
You do not need to do any of that. There is already rig in the scene created by ts4 developers. There are already rigged items in CAS you can use as a reference. Just do that and that would be enough.
I explained in the reply above what to do. Literally watch any conversion tutorial on how to adapt the mesh to be functional in s4s and that's all you'd need. However, if your mesh dramatically differs from the human body ( like, tails, arms grow from the pelvis, 4 arms, etc), than you will have difficulties making it work because the rig looks and animates differently. You can change the default rig but it will be replaced for all items in CAS
The linked thread uses a different software to accomplish it. We do not provide assistance for it because this is s4s forum and most people only know it and tools related to it. The morph maker is not one of them. However, if you are making an alien, it is not a good idea to use morph maker, because meshes must be very close to each other in shape. Just make the head a part of the costume and rig the head manually.
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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 4, 2020 14:51:59 GMT -5
o19 I didn't use MorphMaker or anything like that. The way Mauve explained it is basically how I did it. I started with the mascot costume as my base, imported my alien's head and body, adjusted their uv maps before merging them together and doing Weight Transfer to transfer the rig. It's when I was trying to change the rig that I apparently messed up! mauvemorn Thank you for your response! I don't plan on making it morph, but it's good to know what to do in case I decide to change that. And thank you for letting me know about Decimate! I have some lower-poly LODs which I might end up using instead of the higher-poly one if I decide I want to reduce the polycount. I always get nervous about having my items be too high-poly. I felt like I had to edit the weights manually, because when I just did the Weight Transfer, it wasn't animating right. Like, the "upper arm" bone included some of the side, so when his arm animated it was pulling out part of the side too, if that makes sense? I'm kind of muddling my way through this all, haha. But I'm learning a lot! Thank you so much, I'm going to go give this a shot!
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Post by o19 on Oct 4, 2020 15:40:29 GMT -5
Many thanks for the explanation. I must take some care not to overtake lesbrarians thread.
I adjusted my obj accordingly to make the mesh and the fingers match the TS4 rig hoping that weight transfer especially for finger and face bones would work much better if the meshes overlap 95%. And I'd like to have a custom face with working face bones but this may be an issue for a new thread in MTS one day.
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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 4, 2020 15:53:11 GMT -5
o19 Making face bones work correctly for non-humanoid heads is very hard! I'm in the process of doing so for a different alien, one with four eyes, and it's a challenge for sure. I'm taking a break from that project for a bit because I wanted to practice getting a body to work correctly. It's why I'm not doing a separate face for this alien and am just making it as a full-body costume. In your case, I'd advise not doing it through MorphMaker. You can use S4S to make your head as a skin detail instead: you can use ExcludePartFlags to hide the default sim head so that just your custom head shows, and you can make it animate just like a face morph would without having to adhere to the limitations of MorphMaker. (If I recall correctly, custom face morphs need the exact same number of vertices as the default sim head, which can be very limiting!) But yes, you should definitely make a thread if you run into issues! Good luck getting your character to work correctly!
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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 5, 2020 13:00:00 GMT -5
Thanks so much, Mauve, that fixed most of the mesh distortion! There is some distortion during animations but I'm hoping I can fix that with time. Not having the finger vertex groups means he can't bend his fingers during any animations, so I might try to manually assign those... Hopefully he won't distort on me again, since manually adjusting the vertex groups the first time is what made him go all wonky! It's hard, because he only has the three fingers compared to sims' five, but I'm feeling confident.
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Post by o19 on Oct 5, 2020 15:20:17 GMT -5
Thanks so much, Mauve, that fixed most of the mesh distortion! There is some distortion during animations but I'm hoping I can fix that with time. Not having the finger vertex groups means he can't bend his fingers during any animations, so I might try to manually assign those... Hopefully he won't distort on me again, since manually adjusting the vertex groups the first time is what made him go all wonky! It's hard, because he only has the three fingers compared to sims' five, but I'm feeling confident. I played with your mesh and also added an armature to pose it properly. As soon as the legs are moved closer together the weight transfer works much better as far as I can tell, even though Mauve said that it's not necessary.
If you want to give it a try:
Ctrl+Alu+U > User Preferences > Enter 'rigify' and enable it. Shift+A > Armature > Human (Meta-Rig) Select 'metarig', Armature Otions: X-Axis Mirror
Edit mode: Move the rig bones into the mesh Object mode: Select mesh, Shift-select metarig - Ctrl+P 'With automatic weights' and the mesh is rigged. It takes about 5 minutes as it does not have to be perfect.
Pose mode: Pose options: Auto IK. Move the legs clother together (to match the TS4 mesh) and do the weight transfer again. This should produce much better weight painted tights and calfs. Also the elbows and hands can be aligned properly this way.
Of course one can paint things manually afterwards but this may be more work than preparing the mesh beforehand. Also the in-game animations should look better this way.
I used "Remove Doubles" with 0.005 to join the meshes. Otherwise the animation in blender looks strange as there is no knee.
Thanks for the this thread, also to Mauve, and the Salarian mesh, I learned a lot playing with it. Hopefully my next blender sessions are less frustrating.
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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 5, 2020 16:32:45 GMT -5
Thanks so much, Mauve, that fixed most of the mesh distortion! There is some distortion during animations but I'm hoping I can fix that with time. Not having the finger vertex groups means he can't bend his fingers during any animations, so I might try to manually assign those... Hopefully he won't distort on me again, since manually adjusting the vertex groups the first time is what made him go all wonky! It's hard, because he only has the three fingers compared to sims' five, but I'm feeling confident. I played with your mesh and also added an armature to pose it properly. As soon as the legs are moved closer together the weight transfer works much better as far as I can tell, even though Mauve said that it's not necessary.
If you want to give it a try:
Ctrl+Alu+U > User Preferences > Enter 'rigify' and enable it. Shift+A > Armature > Human (Meta-Rig) Select 'metarig', Armature Otions: X-Axis Mirror
Edit mode: Move the rig bones into the mesh Object mode: Select mesh, Shift-select metarig - Ctrl+P 'With automatic weights' and the mesh is rigged. It takes about 5 minutes as it does not have to be perfect.
Pose mode: Pose options: Auto IK. Move the legs clother together (to match the TS4 mesh) and do the weight transfer again. This should produce much better weight painted tights and calfs. Also the elbows and hands can be aligned properly this way.
Of course one can paint things manually afterwards but this may be more work than preparing the mesh beforehand. Also the in-game animations should look better this way.
I used "Remove Doubles" with 0.005 to join the meshes. Otherwise the animation in blender looks strange as there is no knee.
Thanks for the this thread, also to Mauve, and the Salarian mesh, I learned a lot playing with it. Hopefully my next blender sessions are less frustrating.
Thanks! In between my original post with my initial file and my last response, I edited my mesh pretty significantly. Chose a different base mesh (bird mascot) as well, which worked much better than the one I originally was working with (racoon mascot). Editing my mesh so that the arms were straighter and more in line with the TS4 t-pose gave me a much smoother weight transfer. After I figure out the finger situation, I'll probably do the same for the legs as well since there's some slight distortion around the thigh and knees (those darn digitigrade legs!) when it animates in game. I might try rigify if I have issues repositioning the fingers, but I was able to do the arms just through the regular mesh editing tools. I'm glad playing with the salarian mesh helped you out too! |
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Post by mauvemorn on Oct 5, 2020 18:16:26 GMT -5
As soon as the legs are moved closer together the weight transfer works much better as far as I can tell, even though Mauve said that it's not necessary. No mesh or rig adjustment or jumping over hoops was needed to accomplish this in a minute  |
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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 5, 2020 20:29:43 GMT -5
Mauve, was that done by positioning the joints on the skeleton? I've been unable to figure out how to work with the skeleton directly in Blender, ugh -- I come from a Milkshape background, and adjusting to Blender has been a huge learning curve for me. I miss working in Milkshape, Blender makes me feel so dumb!
I'm not that concerned with straightening the legs or arms anymore (since I've already manually adjusted the arms by adjusting the mesh itself, and the legs already animate fine -- I've fixed the thigh distortion during animation, so they're looking good. Knees still distort a bit funny, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about that, given that they're digitigrade legs), but I AM concerned with straightening out the fingers so that I can do a weight transfer on the hands and get them animating correctly.
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Post by o19 on Oct 6, 2020 8:23:49 GMT -5
Mauve, I know that using the sim rig is possible. But with the mesh not matching the bones exactly I suspect that the sim will never be able to grab a glass correctly. Also sitting on a bike could look strange as the feet may never touch the pedals. lesbrariansMake the rig visible and selectable (eye&arrow) Select the mesh, then Shift-click the 'rig'. Click into the 'Object view' window and press Ctrl+P, select "With automatic weights" and then you can use the pose mode to pose the character. One may either join the upper and lower leg together or edit the mesh of the lower to add a proper knee which becomes visible when the lower leg is rotated. |
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Post by lesbrarians on Oct 6, 2020 18:51:42 GMT -5
Good news, everyone! Didn't even need to touch the rig -- sim or otherwise. Still working out some kinks with certain animations being a bit funky, but I have moving fingers and no more explodey distortion! I'm gonna go ahead and mark this thread as solved -- I'll make a new thread if I run into any other issues that I can't figure out myself.
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