automatically re-sizing armor on female characters with vertex animation ?

[Wander]

I had read through the whole thread already at the time I had asked the question. I guess I'll do it again. 

What new brf files do I have to make in order to have a new race? Just the meshes for the body/head and anything else I wanna change for the new race, or...?

And do I have to edit clothes in Wings manually to get them to fit different races, or does something help me with that? I know that's what this thread is about, but I don't quite get it, even after reding it all through.

 

[Feral]

Did you actually did 28 morph taget per face, like the native  human face 
Sounds like a real pain. Well, worst case you disable it or reuse the same frame.

It looks like you don't have to have all 28. I started with a new mesh for a custom race and appended the morphs I wanted it to have. I only made 7 and it works great. You have to append the original model first to get the time code to behave. The morph listed as Post-Edit in the face keys is the original model appended at the end after all of the other morphs. I think it is the one the game starts with as your base shape.

Here is a screenshot and my module_skins code.

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By feralimages at 2009-04-20

trolloc_face_keys = [
(40,0,-0.8,0.8, "Eye Size"),
(30,0,-0.2,1.0, "Nose Shape"),
(20,0,-1.0,1.0, "Jaw Shape"),
(10,0,1.0,-0.6, "Snout Length"),
(60,0,0.0,1.2, "Tusks"),
(70,0,0.0,0.8, "Horn Shape"),
(50,0,1.0,0.0, "Horn Size"),

(80,0,0.0,1.0, "Post-Edit"),
]

Now for a problem I'm having.
My new face keys show up in the face editor ok and work when I move the sliders, but they are causing some of the other morphs to take effect. As an example when I move the nose size slider the nose gets bigger but so do the eyes.

I was able to solve this by making sure my obj only had a single mesh. When I was trying it the first time it contained separate meshes for the horns and teeth.

 

[HokieBT]

Has anybody gotten this to work correctly for new models, not just exporting/importing native models that were re-textured?

We created some jedi robes and moved some vertex to make a 2nd model to be slimmer for females.

The first attempt was:
1) import jedi_male.smd (un-check Y/Z Axis swap)
2) import jedi_female.smd (un-check Y/Z, and click replace selected mesh + append)

it looked decent with the sliders, but the female robe was messed up on a spot near the waist and on the baclk



The I saw jik's post about the 2nd model didn't need to be rigged.  so I tried the following:

1) import jedi_female.smd (un-check Y/Z Axis swap) and export a jedi_female.obj
2) import jedi_male.smd (un-check Y/Z Axis swap)
3) import jedi_female.obj (click replace selected mesh + append)

This gave worse results as seen by the screenshot below.



Are there are general advice about how we have to move vertex's to make this work?  Can you only move them in a certain direction on the x,y,z axis or is there a limit to how far you can move them around?

edit:

from reading this post maybe we moved the vertex too far and it messed up the ID's....  Or when I exported the OBJ out of BRFEdit it had different ID's then when we exported the jedi_male.smd out of our modeling program.  I also saw a few posts about not trying to use the Append button, but instead copying an existing model and doing a replace...  hmm, will have to play a little more.

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,61859.msg1610702.html#msg1610702

 

[jik]

I hope I didn't mess you up too much with that...  Actually, you are missing a step.  If you have the most recent (with the heraldic stuff) tutorial update, you can see what I did there in more detail, but the gist is this:

1.  export SMD and OBJ.
2.  Play around with OBJ (uvmap/shift some vertices around)
3.  Merge OBJ and SMD with OBJ2SMD.exe tool (see the tutorial on where to get it)
4.  Import the SMD only.

You still do the append for the female model of the armor.

This should work, though I have yet to try it myself.  Maybe I'll give it a shot this weekend just to see if it works.  I will try to pick your brain about weapon ammo sometime soon though...

 

[HokieBT]

I'm a little confused by your last post?  I've used the obj2smd program before and a few of my team members know how to manually rig.  So we basically exported a rigged man_armor.smd, then moved some vertex and rigged and exported a a female_armor.smd.  Does the 2nd model need to be rigged and the rigging have to be exactly the same so we should try something like this...

1) create, rig and export man_armor.smd
2) move vertex, export female_armor.obj
3) use obj2smd to autorig female_armor.obj using man_armor.smd
4) import man_armor.smd and append female_armor.smd
5) hope you don't get any weird vertex....

We can try that, but I'm not sure that is the issue.  I think we're moving vertex too far and maybe messing up the ID's or something like SantasHelper mentioned in a previous post?  Page 2 of this thread had some good info about this.  Reading that again it does seem like both models have to be rigged, probably to the same spots, and the vertex id can't get messed up.  so its possible that when I did my test earlier BRFEdit exported it as different id's then our modeling program..... wish I understood all this stuff better, but getting this working would be very helpful in our mod.

 

[Shik]

It's verry possible Wings may have problems doing that (screw up vertices order = > screw vertices IDs)

I can confirm this. Importing an .obj from BRFedit into Wings3d completely screws up the vertex IDs. Here's a picture of what I mean:

I've done tests on this; each new time I import an .obj, the vertex IDs are different.

So, has anyone had any success doing this with a free modeling program? I know 3dsmax works, but obviously that one isn't free.

 

[octoburn]

yeah, that's pretty much the same problem I had.

I'm thinking that to get it to work right, you're going to have to rig the model yourself, or export the smd, modify the smd in a different program than wings (gmax, fragmotion) and export both the male and female shapes from the same file. that way, as long as you don't move the verts too much, it should almost guarantee that the vert IDs will remain the same.

 

[HokieBT]

hmm, so if Wings3D isn't consistent on how it does the ID's on export every time then thats a big problem...  My first attempt to import these using two rigged SMD files that were done by Happy Stormtrooper in a non-wings3d program "almost" worked.



so, do we think:
A) this is because they were rigged slighly different?  if so we might be able to export an OBJ and re-rig using obj2smd?
B) a few vertex were moved a little bit too far which shifted a few of the vertex id's?  if so, can you view the vertex id's in the text file or a modeling program itself?  We'd need to try and determine which ones were different so we could try and fix it....

edit:

trying some google searches, will post any links that look interesting below since I don't really understand all this stuff...
http://nendowingsmirai.yuku.com/topic/5989/t/export-options--dont-change--vertex-order---imported-mesh.html
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=25471
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=143326  lead me to this next post
A fix for Wings3D Exploding meshes. - http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=57446  (I gotta go, so haven't read/tried this yet)

 

[jik]

I use MAX so I never had that issue.  I guess that's why I had to pay the big bucks for it. 

I've had to do the export and import with all my heraldic armors, but I have not played with the vertices.  Let me go take a look at making a female version of one of them now.

As a reference, I noticed that with the coarse_tunic (item_meshes1.brf) you have 3 frames.  The base frame is male, then Frame 1 time 10 is female, and Frame 2 Time 20 is male again.

Trying to make some changes.  I will try to make it a bit drastic, just to see if I have any issues.

No problems with max:

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Let me know if you want me to try more drastic changes.

 

[The Happy Stormtrooper]

I have since re-rigged the female robe (I use 3DSMax) and tested it on the BRFEdit preview. It looked okay to me, but I'm waiting to hear back from Hokie on how it's worked for him.

Hopefully it was just a freak incident...

 

[HokieBT]

ok, Happy Stormtrooper's latest model worked better and I was able to get it working in game.  woohoo!

However, as was mentioned on page 2 of this thread, there is a problem with the 'append' feature since it doesn't increment the frame 1 time.  You can see this happen in jik's screenshot above, but that frame 1 model didn't appear when I initially tried this on a female character in game.  I also tried cloning an existing robe and doing the 'replace selected frame' but BRFEdit would crash on me every time.  So what I had to do is this....

1) import male_model as the base frame (frame 0)
2) append the male_model (frame 1, time 0)
3) append the female_model (frame 2, time 10)
4) append the male_model (frame 3, time 20)

So I think I ended up with a 4th frame, but I believe the resize concept uses the time interval so this seems to work fine in game (2nd pic is a twilek female with a slimmer model).

 

[jik]

I'm sure that the number of frames will make no difference.  As you said what is referenced is time.  If you look at the various items with VTA and such (hands, flags, map icons), they are specific on the times that each frame needs to be.  I've changed the flags to be the way I want, so I had to do the same append stuff there.

Those screen shots were just to show that the export/merge/import all worked, not for actual use in game.