today's ingame rigs and 3ds skin,rigging
on 3ds max 9, nearly no addons included, other than texporter and unwrap scripts
simple question... what does today's games use for weighing and rigging human(and or humanoid) characters? Do they still stick to default calculations, like Max's Skin modifiers, or do they use someting more advanced, more towards muscle calculation and skin sliding deformations?
I've been doing my own model of a video-game girl (Christie, a character from the fighting game series Dead or Alive). This far things were coming out just fine, till I started rigging her. I went with the basic idea that arm, forearm and thighs (at least) should be divided in 2 bones each to help share rotating axis, particulary the x axis (twisting the wrist, thigh, forearm)...
While the body has good volumes, (at least according to my tastes), everytime this pair of bones twist, the corresponding part of the limb "shrinks", that happens due to the nature vertices are enveloped by the bones, and the way they are held in position, it's a known issue to most of you... it's not a big deal when you think of common poses (fighting stances, kicks, punches etc... where he twist is minimal) but I'm been tryng to practice poses similar to that of the DoAX2 (the beach one), wich often needs you to extrapolate these wrist/forearm/tighs twists, a generic weighing for a generic rigg looks uncapable...
what I'm really tryng to do is to evaluate my options, and pick the best one to represent this model the way I want it to, wich means. she should be able to perform both fighting stances and the kind of pose you'd see on DOAX2 game (I beleave most dificult one been to sit on the ground with legs crossed...) I can think of a few ways to do it (joint angle deformer or even more bones), but I guess there's an ideal one...
simple question... what does today's games use for weighing and rigging human(and or humanoid) characters? Do they still stick to default calculations, like Max's Skin modifiers, or do they use someting more advanced, more towards muscle calculation and skin sliding deformations?
I've been doing my own model of a video-game girl (Christie, a character from the fighting game series Dead or Alive). This far things were coming out just fine, till I started rigging her. I went with the basic idea that arm, forearm and thighs (at least) should be divided in 2 bones each to help share rotating axis, particulary the x axis (twisting the wrist, thigh, forearm)...
While the body has good volumes, (at least according to my tastes), everytime this pair of bones twist, the corresponding part of the limb "shrinks", that happens due to the nature vertices are enveloped by the bones, and the way they are held in position, it's a known issue to most of you... it's not a big deal when you think of common poses (fighting stances, kicks, punches etc... where he twist is minimal) but I'm been tryng to practice poses similar to that of the DoAX2 (the beach one), wich often needs you to extrapolate these wrist/forearm/tighs twists, a generic weighing for a generic rigg looks uncapable...
what I'm really tryng to do is to evaluate my options, and pick the best one to represent this model the way I want it to, wich means. she should be able to perform both fighting stances and the kind of pose you'd see on DOAX2 game (I beleave most dificult one been to sit on the ground with legs crossed...) I can think of a few ways to do it (joint angle deformer or even more bones), but I guess there's an ideal one...
Replies
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Spherical/Dual Quaternion is a newer technique that helps preserve volume, but you'll need an engire that supports it and it helps to have an authoring package that also supports it.
So, how can you lessen the effect of volume loss? You can add more roll/twist bones. I've seen several rigs with the forearm and upper arm split into 3 or even 4 sections so that the twisting gets distrubute the twisting.
I normally do 1 upper arm, 2-3 forearm, 1 calf, 0 thigh.
- Add twists in figure mode under "Twist Links"
- Then skin mostly to the twists
- Rotate some pieces around like the hand and watch the twists work.
For a quick example you can omit the bone the twists are parented to and skin only to the twists themselves. But I don't recommend leaving it that way, you'll end up with Gumby arms, but you'll get the idea.
I've just switched to the thighroll being the default, and the calf being optional - it seems to prevent exploding crotch syndrome.
Course, if you have the budget, sling them all in.
But I guess that is really just relative to the studio... anyways... I've been aware of how to set simple things like wire parameters, and practice parenting IKs to a bunch of helpers... still messy tho since wire parameters isn't giving me exactly the result I wanted it to (tho it was almost a hit)
so... putting nudity a side, this is how I've set it...
I know it looks messy, but in theory, it follows (more of less) what I saw on some tutorials (even tho it's got around three times more helpers than what is visible in these ss, including IKs)
sure paint weight would have made a whole lot of diference, but I wanted something that I could save and load for body variations with clothess with a minimal weight diference, so I limited myself to envelops alone...
anyways... I may have to restart the whole body from scratch... there are some loops ending in bad places, and during the cource of this i made so many tinny changes to the whole body, that I think the whole thing ended up looking bad... the hips look small (compared to both DoA games and what I had in mind), plus somehow the body ended up skinny, head looks big, thigh just doesn't want to behave in a ideal way... I guess it's the polyflow...
For stuff like jiggly goodness I can see it being run as a sim on top of the skin or maybe using something like stretchy bones. I dunno I'm no tech artist but thats how I would imagine stuff like bouncy ta tas are acomplished.
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most studios use additional joints or blendshapes to drive skin deformation, muscles, in some situations even jiggle stuff. The quaternion stuff helps your volume, but does no "magic". But when you can use quaternion skinning use it for sure when your engine support it.
I think a standard nextgen-rig is the motionbuilder rig which got the most important joints and you are free to go to use mocap any time which make your life sometimes easier. Twist joints for arms and legs are also important for my opinion. Naughty dog create a environment directly in maya with all motionbuilder functions as i read and drive the complete rig with additional joints
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