Weight Map Puzzle

[Ma3rk]

I'm trying to come up with a technique to correct some wt maps that were transferred to TuxCat's fur via Paint Weights. The weights were transferred from a zero pose, but then when the character is actually posed, there are a few polys that are confused where they belong it seems.



What I've been doing is save an endomorph to the fur object at that frame (fur was divided up so there are 5 fur objects), save out that object with it's new morph, then exit Layout & open the object in Modeler. I can then enable the morph & see the errant polys.

My problem now is how to actually adjust the weights. I can just delete the polys which works, but I'd like to find an adjustment solution where I can save every follicle.

With the arcane points info to see what weights actually be long to given point, SINCE YOU HAVE TO OPEN EACH INDIVIDUALLY, I'm able to eventually see what weights are involved, but not sure what the next step should be. Remove Wts? Set Values? Zero Values? ...

There must be a better overall technique?

[gar26lw]

cant you use paint weights in the deformed pose and adjust the areas that are incorrect with brush and smooth?

[Sensei]

With the arcane points info to see what weights actually be long to given point, SINCE YOU HAVE TO OPEN EACH INDIVIDUALLY, I'm able to eventually see what weights are involved, but not sure what the next step should be. Remove Wts? Set Values? Zero Values? ...

There must be a better overall technique?

To solve such puzzles I made Show Weights :


..and Show Unmapped Weights plugins..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhHyieNfIIc

They are part of TrueArt's Modeling Pack
http://modelingpack.trueart.eu

They will show you where are troublemaking vertices without value, or with the wrong value, in Modeler's viewport in the real-time.

[Ma3rk]

Thanks Sensei. I'll check in on this further.

[Ma3rk]

cant you use paint weights in the deformed pose and adjust the areas that are incorrect with brush and smooth?

Possibly. Mostly, I wasn't really certain how. Probably worth a try certainly.

... a bit later,

Hiding everything except the one fur group, there's still just too many points for Paint Weights to work on, in that it's Super boggy; no useful feedback to actually paint or even select.

You can only see the problem in VPR and Shaded Solid plus Open GL UI needs to be on as well as Deformations.

[Ma3rk]

Well, just to let you know Sensei, I pulled the trigger & ordered the Modeling pack tonight.

Expect your brain to get picked from time to time Mister!

[gar26lw]

one thought is to export as fbx (or lwo 2015, if you have the blender/maya lwo loader - see blender and lw thread) then load into blender or maya and fix weights there, then use fbx interchange

[fishhead]

Okay, maybe thats a stupid question but I have no idea what a LAMH-Character looks like when exported, so I am not 100% what I am looking at:
In the weight painted screen grab you sent there is -by the looks of it - an enormous amount of vertices.
That´s not actual body vertices, are they? Is the cat body mesh really that high res or is it just the fibers that I visually get confused with vertices here? I´d really like to see a wireframe view of the cats body.

[Ma3rk]

Correct fishhead. Here are some screen grabs...

In Modeler, the wireframe of just the cat body, a bit over 50K:



... and then with just the front legs section, a tad over 900K:



So you can imagine with all fur loaded in to Layout. Surprisingly, it's actually pretty responsive to animating.

[Greenlaw]

Well, just to let you know Sensei, I pulled the trigger & ordered the Modeling pack tonight...

Re: TrueArt's Show Weights, yes, Show Weights is incredibly useful and I recommend it! There are many useful tools in the pack and Show Weights is one I use a lot when rigging characters.

Just wondering, how are the fur guides generated and how are you transferring the weights? It sounds like the guide objects are in separate layers, which is what I did for the cats in my 'Brudders' music video thing. In that project, I used ZBrush FiberMesh to create the guides, and when I brought it into Lightwave, the guides lacked a UV map and proper weights. To fix this, I used Weighter 2. This tool lets you project the UV map and weight values from one object to another. At the time, this tool worked like a charm and it probably saved me hours of painstaking work.

Unfortunately for me, Weighter 2 broke on my system after Windows 10 came out, but then a similar tool came out as part of ODTools which is what I use now. To be clear, Weighter 2 should work under Windows 10 but I contacted Liberty3D about this issue and it apparently just doesn't work on my computer for some reason. (Come to think of it, I should check this again since I'm using a different computer now.)

Good luck! I hope you get this figured out.

[Ma3rk]

Thanks Greenlaw.

Daz has a number of products by Alessandro Mastronardi, simply known as AM. The hair uses Rman curves & these respond to poses... until the actual geometry is created at which point it gets frozen.\



No matter if via OBJ or FBX, the fur gets no weight maps. Daz has a Transfer Utility, or should be call Futility; no docs, etc. to try transfer but either hung or taking it's time w/o any sort of progress indication.

I did have a couple mail exchanges w/ AM and he indicated he was hoping to be able to export the Rman curves in a future version. Don't know if those could then be used in LW via FiberFX, but that would be ideal.

So, I had this idea of trying Paint Weights on the fur objects & it worked quite well other than the current topic. So once I get that sorted ...

Probably just as well I couldn't transfer in DS. The original geom has several sections as exported, and in the 100-200K file size. If I transferred wts to the overall fur item though, it would balloon up to over 2Gb & that would crash both layout & Modeler. Thus the need to split it up. Where I split was just a guess as to where the best divides should be.

Which of the OD Tools are you using? I didn't have much luck with the one.

[Greenlaw]

Sorry, I'm a bit busy at the moment to go into detail but here's some info that might help:

The tool in OD Tools is called Transfer Vmaps. I've only used it a couple of times, and that was mainly to check how it worked. At the time, I got it to work but I'll have to check if it still works in more recent versions of LightWave. (I'll also try to check Weighter 2 this evening and see if it works on my new computer.)

Here's another tip: This might not matter in your case but if you're using fur guides that are a separate layer from the skin mesh you might not get good results when using Sub-D surfaces with the character's skin layer. This is because changing the Sub-D level can introduce a slight mismatch between the skin and fur layers. The difference might be subtle enough and not very noticeable until there's more bending and twisting in the limbs. (On the Brudders character, this was mostly noticeable under the arms and between the legs.) To maintain a match, the guides should be based on the skin object at the same Sub-D level you will render at. Just something to be aware of.

BTW, this isn't an issue when using Edit Guides because the fur guides are directly attached to the skin. It's tricky to style with Edit Guides (as you probably know,) but, in my experience anyway, it's tricky to style hair/fur in almost any program (including ZBrush) and it takes a lot of practice to get good at it.

[Ma3rk]

Quite alright.

Ya, that was the OD Tool I was thinking of. Oliver even said that it's mostly for geom of 2-3K otherwise be horribly slow. There're enough polys in the main figure that Sub-D works fine. Pointless on the fur, just drastically increases the poly count w/o any appreciable difference.

That's one reason why AM's LAMH Editor is really a pleasure to work in, although I'm not proficient, easy to use to fine tune as needed. This hair is from a preset & the only thing I tweeked was follicle base from like 80 to 100.

[sami]

Sorry, I'm a bit busy at the moment to go into detail but here's some info that might help:

The tool in OD Tools is called Transfer Vmaps. I've only used it a couple of times, and that was mainly to check how it worked. At the time, I got it to work but I'll have to check if it still works in more recent versions of LightWave. (I'll also try to check Weighter 2 this evening and see if it works on my new computer.)

Here's another tip: This might not matter in your case but if you're using fur guides that are a separate layer from the skin mesh you might not get good results when using Sub-D surfaces with the character's skin layer. This is because changing the Sub-D level can introduce a slight mismatch between the skin and fur layers. The difference might be subtle enough and not very noticeable until there's more bending and twisting in the limbs. (On the Brudders character, this was mostly noticeable under the arms and between the legs.) To maintain a match, the guides should be based on the skin object at the same Sub-D level you will render at. Just something to be aware of.

BTW, this isn't an issue when using Edit Guides because the fur guides are directly attached to the skin. It's tricky to style with Edit Guides (as you probably know,) but, in my experience anyway, it's tricky to style hair/fur in almost any program (including ZBrush) and it takes a lot of practice to get good at it.

Hi I just bought Weighter2 from Liberty3D and it crashes Modeler 2020. I eventually broke down and installed 11.6.3 and it ran but didn't work with a fairly simple hand model trying to transfer highpoly weights to a lowpoly retopo.

Do you know anything that can transfer weights?? Why 3DCoat doesn't handle weights I'll never know

thx!

[Sensei]

Hi I just bought Weighter2 from Liberty3D and it crashes Modeler 2020. I eventually broke down and installed 11.6.3 and it ran but didn't work with a fairly simple hand model trying to transfer highpoly weights to a lowpoly retopo.

Do you know anything that can transfer weights?? Why 3DCoat doesn't handle weights I'll never know

VMapProcessor and/or VMapManager from TrueArt's Modeling Pack
http://modelingpack.trueart.eu
You can save weight map from one object, and load it in 2nd object.