Armor and item modification

Cheathem

Hey guys,i have a problem here and i would be very gratefull if you all could help me figure this out.

So heres the situations.
Lets say we have 5 different body types and 50 different armor pieces.
We want these armor pieces to fit all of the body types,but the problem is,all the body types are two different in size and shape for us to just duplicate the armor over.And were gonna have to many armor pieces to have to adjust manually.Especially cause we would have to adjust each armor piece 5 times.

Do any of you know a simple or easier solution to getting all these armor pieces to fit the different body types?

we've experimented with blend shapes,but the problem seems to be that you need the same polycount which limits us.

We've experimented with ffd modifiers too and that doesnt work to well.

Ace-Angel

It depends on how the pieces are made.

If they're floating geometry, just batch scale copies of the pieces before putting them on your character, you can use Snap to Vertex and say snap a Pauldron with a 125% in size to the middle vertice on the shoulder.

If you mean something which is more 'form fitting', then I have some bad news for you...and the only cure is some elbow grease.

ZacD

A quick and dirty solution might be to make the 50 items for the most average body type, then take all 50 at once and lattice deform them to roughly fit another size body, and then tweak them one by one. It'd help if some of the models were the same and just used different textures.

Cheathem

Thanks guys,I was hoping for something easier but i guess hard work is the way to go on this one.

LoTekK

An alternate solution (which may scale better if/when you start building more items), is to set up a base mesh for a "neutral" body type, and create morph targets for each of the five body types. Then you could put together a maxscript that basically creates morph targets for the items based on relative vertex positions.

I did something like this at work, but the main difference is that we already use a base mesh with morphs for the various body types.

How well this works, though, will also depend on just how different the body types are.

Cheathem

hey,now we're talking.Thanks LoTekK.
I think we can work off of this.
do the morph targets have to have the same poly count as the base?
also,if you don't mind,could you give me a small snippet of code to use as reference?

Cheathem

Problem solved!
Just needed a simple skin wrap modifier on the armor and it works perfectly.I can post photo examples if anyone else would benefit from this.

uncle

Sure, some more info is always appreciated. Curious how it turned out.

Ghostscape

Cheathem wrote: »

Problem solved!
Just needed a simple skin wrap modifier on the armor and it works perfectly.I can post photo examples if anyone else would benefit from this.

I'd be interested as well, just to see if there were any tricks you discovered.

Cheathem

basically you just add a skin wrap modifier to the armor,and select the morphable mesh as a reference,and there ya go.The armor will morph along side the morphed object.Pretty simple fix actually.Its really gonna help me and my friend out when it comes to getting multiple armor pieces and items to fit multiple body types.Lucky for us though,all of our main characters are gonna be morphed from one mesh,so this is extremely handy.

but heres a visual example: