Rigging Misc. Items
polycounter lvl 8
Hey all,
I've been looking all over the place, and I can't find any solid knowledge on weighting misc clothes items like shirts, jackets, vests, etc.
I've imported the .SMD for the Scout into Maya, and as expected, the weighting is off. Certain vertices on the model are being affected by bones that should have zero influence on them. Now, I can go through the trouble of trying to fix everything and have it match the correct in-game rigging as much as possible. But it seems that at the very least it would take a ridiculous amount of tweaking to get it right.
Because I'm assuming that with clothes, they have to have the same skeleton as the character, right? So if the character rig is broken in the first place, how can we expect to get clothes that don't clip the character model? I'm assuming from looking at the Workshop submissions that people choose to do big, puffy clothes for this reason. So that they have enough extra space between the clothes and the character model to account for a margin of error. I'm thinking about doing something more tight-fitting, so if it's impossible to do, I would like to know now before I go through the effort.
I tested a hat and got it working in-game, but clothes are a bit different. Can one assume that you only need the bones on your model that would have some sort of influence? (EX: only needing bones located around the torso and arms if you're making a t-shirt).
If someone could shed some light on this, I would greatly appreciate it. I think it would not just help me, but lots of other people with the same questions.
I've been looking all over the place, and I can't find any solid knowledge on weighting misc clothes items like shirts, jackets, vests, etc.
I've imported the .SMD for the Scout into Maya, and as expected, the weighting is off. Certain vertices on the model are being affected by bones that should have zero influence on them. Now, I can go through the trouble of trying to fix everything and have it match the correct in-game rigging as much as possible. But it seems that at the very least it would take a ridiculous amount of tweaking to get it right.
Because I'm assuming that with clothes, they have to have the same skeleton as the character, right? So if the character rig is broken in the first place, how can we expect to get clothes that don't clip the character model? I'm assuming from looking at the Workshop submissions that people choose to do big, puffy clothes for this reason. So that they have enough extra space between the clothes and the character model to account for a margin of error. I'm thinking about doing something more tight-fitting, so if it's impossible to do, I would like to know now before I go through the effort.
I tested a hat and got it working in-game, but clothes are a bit different. Can one assume that you only need the bones on your model that would have some sort of influence? (EX: only needing bones located around the torso and arms if you're making a t-shirt).
If someone could shed some light on this, I would greatly appreciate it. I think it would not just help me, but lots of other people with the same questions.
Replies
For clothes:
- Create a copy of the character mesh from the smd file, if SDK files don't work, try decompiling. It's not the ideal solution but sometimes it works.
- Push your vertices as much as needed to avoid clipping problems.
- Cut poly's to fit your item's shape.
- Add any additional geometry.
- Unwrap, texture etc.
I hope this helps.