rigging with triangles ?

bacteria

Hi,
I wanted to rig character I made, and at the begining I realise that my character is triangulated and all riging should be done with quads. I triangulate it becouse I baked normal maps in xnormal. I notice that if i don't triangulate before baking, normal map look wavy in marmoset. becouse xnormal triangulate my mesh diferent then marmo.
Now i have finished nad triangulate lowpoly model with all maps and no idea how to start rigging it
How is it look like in industry ? does rigger gets not finished lowpoly without normal map to rig ? or I'm doing something wrong. Help !

Vailias

um.. where did you hear rigging should only ever be done with quads?

Frankly I'd rather have the final game model, triangles in place, so that I don't get unexpected edge flipping in my animation app (like can happen some times), and so I'll know what the deformation will look like on the final model.

bacteria

I found tutorial on game character rigging, rigger was working with quads, I did research over various forums and most people says that rigging with tris is a pain in the ....., becouse there is no way to select loops, mesh is unclear, and painting weight is hard. that make me confused

Eric Chadwick

It's true that quads make weighting easier, but it certainly isn't required.

bacteria

Thanks for clearing this up for me guys

Mark Dygert

It just means you can't use loops and rings to select verts for weighting. It's not impossible, you probably end up doing more weight painting and or selecting verts by another method.

There are a lot of modelers out there that don't care about loops or poles and that makes weighting a quad mesh almost as much of a nightmare hahaha.

Mark Dygert

Oh yea depending on which program you're using there are a few different ways to un-triangulate a model, provided it was mostly built from quads to start with, so which app are using? And was it previously quads or was it a triagulated model from the beginning?

bacteria

I use maya. model was triangulated before normal map baking. I tried to quadrangulate it but some thing is bugged and mesh just lights up and stay triangulated. I add primitive object to the scene, triangulate and quadrangulate it, and it works, so ther is issue with my character model.
I also frequently have issue with smoothed and triangulated obj. with I export for xnoraml and when I import it back i can't harden normals.
I did not save quad version of my model and now i end up with tris.

Even if I be able to quadrangulate my character, maya seems to make quads from tris and back unpredictable, that may spoil my normal map display beked with previus triangulation.

claydough

On the bright side. Now is a good time to commit to your backup strategy.
For simple personal autosaves I like Andy J Rawling's ajr_autoSave.mel.
( first and still the best )

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/utility-external/c/ajrautosave

Andy has not updated it for Maya's new build menu scheme so you will have to add the following code to yer userSetup.mel instead of the normal userSetup.
[php]// Roger cly_doh's > Maya 2008 file menu friendly ajrAutoSave
float $mayaVersion = `getApplicationVersionAsFloat`;
//if ( $mayaVersion > 2008 ) {
if ( `getApplicationVersionAsFloat` > 2008 ) {
print ( `getApplicationVersionAsFloat`+ " \n" );
string $cmd = " buildFileMenu(); ajrAutoSave; ajrAutoSave; "; // repeated. once fer creation and again for window launch
scriptJob
-runOnce true // scriptjob dies on execution "menuItem will survive new scenes and menuMode changes"
-event "SceneOpened"
$cmd;
}
else {
ajrAutoSave; ajrAutoSave; // repeated. once fer creation and again for window launch
print ( $mayaVersion + " !\n");
}[/php]

bacteria

thanks claydough, I definitely need that

Vailias

Yeah it will spoil your. Normal map because how a quad is split highly affects how the vertex normals are interpolated.

Maybe it's just how I weight things, but I don't use ring and loop selection often or at all. Character wise I'm almost always using a Wacom and weight painting. Maya makes if simple since you can rotate joints during the paint via the middle mous button if you need to test deformation or get to an area you can't see well.

If your initial binds aren't going well try changing the max influencers and falloff type.