Pegasus Modeler 3.0

Headwax

Roygee said:

@ head wax - can't tell for sure, but it looks as if the crotch group doesn't go all the way to the belt at the back? If so, it means that the two legs in the backside area have different parent groups - you don't want abutting groups with different parents, that will cause them to separate. :)

thanks Roy that's probably it, good call!

this is the backside as it comes out of poser without fiddling

the second image is a K4 bodysuit I pulled out of his mesh -as you do :) I'll post it in the render section but wanted to throw it in here

RoguePilot

head wax said:

the joints still need tweaking as far as the falloff zones
and the mesh splits at the groin when K4 does the splits

hmm, not sure why
maybe this thread would tell me http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2174/

Hi as Roy has said, you have the left thigh group in contact with the right thigh group.
That's a common problem with autogrouping the K4 rig due to its small size.

Use the grouping tool in poser to change the central polys to the 'hip' group.
The easiest way to do this would be front camera in wireframe mode. (wireframe in Poser allows the backfacing polys to be selected in the grouping tool)
Make sure you weld the hip group after you've done the re-grouping or you'll still get tearing.

Headwax

Thanks for that RoguePilot. Appreciated :) !!!!

Dartanbeck

evilproducer said:

Dartanbeck said:

Roygee said:

Never tried doing it Wendy-style - sounds pretty simple, but the weight-painting in Carrara is the pits for me:)

It's exactly as HeadWax just described above your post! It is simple... I just didn't know it was that simple... nor did I know the steps. So I'd imagine that I'd need to first apply a rig to the clothing obj, right?

Nope. The clothing follows the rig of the figure. You will most likely need to weight paint it, and you will want to make sure it is sized to the correct proportions. The more polys the better bends. You could even import the .obj file for Poser clothes and use the above methodto attach them. Very cool. You see... what I'd really like to try is to make clothing in Carrara - only for use in Carrara, that works on my figures. I actually guessed what you just said as I thought about the post you were responding to. It just suddenly made sense.
Through all of this, I just might have an answer to a question I've been asking for a very long time. Thank you HW, RG, EP, RP... This is just the push I needed in exactly the direction I wanted to head... Rock On!!!

Dartanbeck

HeadWax,
Very cool presentation of Pegasus. Thanks. I'll likely buy it for making Poser/D|S clothing and stuff.
A - Marcus Dunn just seems cool and valiant in his his cause - and should, therefore, be supported.
B - It's specifically designed for such a sole purpose - which I really like the idea of.

Marcus makes his presentation very well in his product page and it's very affordable. If I were to make just a few articles that work for what I need, it has paid itself off, right there.

Headwax

thanks Dart,

just to explain the second image is just K4, I morphed his mesh, didnt add anything with pegasus

you know that there is a save thingy for wieght maps in Carrara?
I don't know if it works.
interestingly, I found it without trouble this morning and then later, no matter what I did, I couldn't find it again :(
and still can't find it!!

to quote manual

To save a modified weight map:
1) After your weight map is modified, choose the
Bones tab in the Model room.
2) In the Weight Map section, click the Save button.
The Save Weight Map As dialog appears.
3) Locate the folder that will store your modified
weight map.
4) Assign a name to your file and click Save.
Weight maps are saved with a .cwm extension.

hmm I must be doing something wrong ;) not like me :)
and I managed to crash carrara with one mesh and two bones .....

hmm found it again, who knows what's going on ?

Dartanbeck

...and there it is again. Hmnpf.
Do you ever get the impression that Carrara like to mess with us from time to time? Keep us on (or off) our toes?

Thanks Bud...
I really appreciate this.
So on a side note... I really liked the stuff you presented somewhere taliking about Garstor's ship at sea render. You had some stormy sea with a ship...
Anyways... just wondering, How long have you and Roygee been Carraraists, and have you been rendering at all lately?
I sure would love to see more of your work.

Headwax

thanks Dartanbeck

!

I think I started in anim8or about 2005-6?. Came over to carrara at beginning 0f 2008.

This was one of the first things I made in Carrara

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObdyqpL1s20&feature=share&list=PL1A984D8F4DC89629

the second thing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl_2W4ORr88&feature=share&list=UUXxTi7Roo-2kWioJIyVGd-g

This was one of the last things I made in anim8or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlcUcwb92rA&feature=share&list=PL1A984D8F4DC89629

Roy and I used to participate in a few 'contests" were you made animations to describe a theme and had to model all your own stuff.
When I came to Carrara after a while I went to the dark side and started using content.

Roy on the other hand has travelled to hex and remain pure and clean ;)

Do I render every day. ? At the moment I do most days.
Last year I spent about 12 hours a day on Carrara as I had an accident and was off work for three months.
For the time I was back at work I couldn't surf (ripped out shoulder tendon and had bicep cut off and redrilled) so I spent my spare time with Carrara as well.

I have an agent in NY presently trying to sell my last illustrated book and am in Limbo at the moment,
rendering aimlessly :)

cheers from 'ere ;)

Oh you can see most of my carrara work on my blog : link below

Roygee

Was it really that long ago - how time flies when you're enjoying yourself:)

Those were real fun days.

We both came into Carrara around C6.

Don't know about staying pure - I model because that's what I enjoy most. Before I retired and downscaled, I had a fully equipped workshop and did a lot of woodwork - I miss that and 3D modeling has taken its place. Any rendering I do is simply to illustrate my freebie models and some fun stuff for family and friends.

head wax always was a really good artist with a wicked sense of humour and has really bloomed in Carrara - I, on the other hand am not and have not, but enjoy it immensely.

You can see my freebies at Renderosity and ShareCG - just search my same name

head wax - when you send a cr2 model to the VM, you get an option to save the weight map - no-one has ever explained what the point of that is. You don't get this option with Carrara-rigged models - which is where you actually need to be able to save:)

Dartanbeck

This is one of those times when a person feels really glad that they've finally come out and asked!
HeadWax,
I think that the first link was supposed to be the last, as it says it's done in anim8or, and the two links are the same?
Very, very good work! I've seen "Fly" before - don't think I knew it was you at the time. I had to subscribe. These videos must be seen!

So you guys jumped aboard just before me, I guess. Not sure when I finally bought Carrara. I do remember that it was just a very short time before Daz stopped selling that "Figures, Characters and Avatars" book, that came with the DVD with full versions of Hexagon and Carrara 6.5 Pro. Carrara 8 was nearly complete, so they offered anyone buying C7 or an upgrade to it, would get C8 for free. If you had standard, you'd get standard free, Pro > Pro. Talk about financially lucky!

So the Storm pictures with the ship that I was talking about, was that referring to a book, one of yours?
Nonetheless... really glad I asked. I'll be checking that Blog now. Later I'll go scouring through you YouTube submissions :)

So that's why we don't really see that many Roygee render, yet he remains so filled full of wisdom regarding modeling and Carrara... ahhh.

Being a stone sculptor, I can totally understand how just modeling away, without the need to really render a whole lot would be totally satisfying on its own. Well... I should say that I'm a guy who has loved doing art my whole life, had many chances to sculpt stone, so I did - then ended up building stone hardscaping for landscape companies for a living. Along with that came designing and building waterfalls, streams, ponds and bird attracting water features, along with many other things. Luckily, I live in a place where bazillionaires come to relax and enjoy real life - before going back to the horrible existence of the rat race. They like how I prefer to look at what I do as "Nature Art" and accuse Mother Nature for holding the crown... but I'm working towards climbing that ladder! So they call me back for more stuff - no matter who I happen to be employed by at the moment.

So now I'm slowly escaping the man-handling of over 50 tons of stone per year into 3d art.

Hey, thank you both for taking your time to answer that question! You guys are awesome and I love seeing your endeavors! If you ever need someone to show something to... I'm here fairly often.

Headwax

Roygee sayeth

head wax always was a really good artist with a wicked sense of humour and has really bloomed in Carrara - I, on the other hand am not and have not, but enjoy it immensely.

thanks Roy :) but I think you are being too modest about your own work!

Dartanbeck

I know! I was thinking the exact same thing!

Headwax

Dartanbeck,

So the Storm pictures with the ship that I was talking about, was that referring to a book, one of yours?

Ah sorry I missed the question! Oh no that was just a book mockup, just my sense of humour :)

It t'was here http://andrewfinnie.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/suspending-my-disbelief.html

Just mucking around with postwork. If you can get Ron Deviney's brushes on fast grab go for it. They are very pro, tho not always big enough for the resolution I work at (say 4000 by 6000 pixels - I usually render at 12 inches on the small side at 300 dpi) . I used to think I had to do everything in my primary program (carrara) but as you know, using the right tool for the job makes a big difference - so fog brushes, bird brushes, moved the man around till he was in the best compositional place using the clone brush , the ocean is just a flat vertex mesh pulled around a lot.

Sculptor? I used to do a lot of meshbuilding in anim8or and found that it really helped me think in 3d and I reckon it would help one's sculpting in real life very much. To make a mesh in 3d then print out all the elevations would be a bonus as a reference to work from.

I'd be keen on working with wax -... cheers

PS thanks for your kind words too!

Rhian-Skyblade

Question:
Can this Pegasus Modeller be used with existing Meshes from Games into nice Poser clothes?

I am still slinking around those cloth and armor meshes from the Elder Scrolls Game Skyrim. Though the original mesh is very "rough" since they use normal maps to add verticles inside of the game for a smoother look...

Headwax

Hya

Yes, but ....
if you are just going to use the clothes in Carrara.
You are probably just as well off with using the Carrara modeller in the assembly room.
Just bring in your person figure in the zero position and arrange the mesh around that using softselect etc.
You can add more geometry by subdividing if necessary.

Advantage of Pegasus - your clothing mesh will be centred if you use Poser. So it will be the right scale etc.
It has a clean cut tool - eg select a loop of edges and hit "c" and it will cut them all with a new edge loop (don't think carrara does this)
It does simple mirroring of the mesh and will weld the selected verticies - I'm sure that Carrara does this but not for me (Carrara's directions tell me to stand on my head, eat my lunch backwards and hold onto the little toe of my left foot very hard before I hit duplicate)

The modeller is streamlined so its simple to hide eg parts of a mesh by hitting a tick box. In carrara you have to select those polys by a dropdown menu, then chose select by shader or polygon name, then scroll down a list in a very small window.

so Pegasus is streamlined but it doesn't do anything you cant do in carrara except maybe group ???

Rhian-Skyblade

It's more the "comforming" and "moving" correctly thing - I want to work over and also clean the Game-Mesh and then rig/conform it and behave like armor. I do not want my armor to bend in the wrong places and behave like rubber when my toon is posed.

I tried the attack skeleton in Carrara - but that does not really work nice - except on boots and helmest. Gloves for example just miff the hell out of me. Most of the time the index and thumb do not work properly and act as if glued together, despite the fact that they weren't even touching when I added the skelli.

So far I know from reading various merchant posts about their work, the really good quality poser clothes/armor take a lot of time (many weeks, if not months) and are mostly done by studios who have more than just one professional person working on it.

My passion is creating scenes and textures/shaders and already there I am very often in conflict - creating a new texture or doing the scene first ^^ if I add modelling I doubt I ever get a scene done at all. I mainly use the Vertex Room or ZBrush for remodelling or adding detail to something. The utmost I am going to do from scratch are single inanimated objects like gnarly trees, organs (hearts and such) and other creepy things. But not really clothes.

So, even if it sounds silly and lazy - I am looking for something that helps me turning existing objects/meshes (e.g. exported from a game) into comforming clothes or armor that bend and behave correctly. Some sort of assistant which guides me through the fitting, rigging/conforming process - helps me cleaning up the mesh.

Headwax

hmm, doesn't sound silly :)

the guy who makes Pegasus makes these http://3dutils.com/products/qc.htm

I imagine they would help

I have a large content library - why spend a week making soemthing you can get for a 1.99 ? ;)
Cross dresser is really good for converting from one figure to another but it does have stray verticies which can be corrected in poser by adjusting the spherical fall off zones
but you can't correct them in Carrara that I have found - adjusting the bones etc makes no difference,

as far as Poser, it's pretty hit and miss for me adjusting fall off zones - but maybe I should read the manual :)

so what you need

1) an auto grouping tool: Poser 2012 will steel the bones from one figure and put them on your mesh
but you need to adjust the groups a little and the falloff zones
2) soemthing to transfer the eg M4's morphs to your new conformed figure

in Pegasus you can make groups by hand but if you can get an autogrouper it will make life easier

someone like Rogue Pilot is the person to ask.

for gloves - there are so many bones in the hand it would be a nightmare,
for armour, from looking at some I have in my runtime, the more bits it has the more it will work in Carrara

ie if you had a chest plate made out of one piece it will bend like a toon

to exepriment I just took Celestial armour arm pieces, turned it into an object, reimported it to Carrara, attached it to the hip - and it worked "perfectly" with carrarra rigging.

the other choice with armour is to parent each piece to a bone in M4 , but there will be a lot of poke

PS how do we get skyrim meshs?

Rhian-Skyblade

head wax said:

PS how do we get skyrim meshs?

Thanks for the tips. I will check those tools.

I have picked the Daedric Armir from Skyrim apart and re-used what I could use. Was not much :-/
As you can see here: http://rhian-skyblade.deviantart.com/art/Seeing-Red-366849610?q=gallery:rhian-skyblade&qo=0

I got gloves Left and Right extra (but I turned them into bracer because of the finger issue)
I got the shoulder pieces Left and Right Extra
I got the Boots Left and Right extra

The chest-piece (which I haven't used in my picture) is more or less useless for me, because it has a skirt like tails around the legs and one center tail in front of the leg. (dunno what it is called in English... apron?)

In order to get the chest piece work I would have to treat those seperately - giving them their own bones and morphs so they do not entirely move and act like sticky rubber.

Skyrim Armor Export:

At You Tube were some nice guys who uploaded plenty of 3D Packages containing "all" armor and weapons including textures. Some of them are also rigged in CD4 format - but I can't import that into Carrara and I have no idea if a CD4 rigged Skyrim Armor would be of any use.

Here's the Link where I got the armor from because I was too lazy to export them all myself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCRN57YMQUQ

Just check for 3D Skyrim Download or Objects at YouTube. There is a lot more :)

As for exporting Skyrim Meshes yourself out of Skyrim you need the following:

TES Skyrim

Step 1:
BSA Exporter (Skyrim Nexus has this)
this tool can read the BSA files of Skyrim and you can select what you want to export.
The BSA Files are seperate for each "theme" - Meshes, Sound, Textures and so on... so you need to go through the export process twice. Once for Meshes and once for the Texture/Normal/Specular Maps.

Ste 2:
NifScope (take it from SkyrimNexus if possible or from the original website where it comes from - not from any other website or you get Trojans)

You need this tool to convert the NIF files into OBJ format (only needed for the meshes)
I heard Blender also has something for that... Modder who do not work with stuff like we do, use this for their Mods.

That's pretty much all you need to know :) the worst part is searching the database for what you want with the BSA Exporter.
No search function in there.

If you have questions about it, let me know. And if you like, I can send you the Daedric armor Pieces I have picked apart via mail as Car Files :D

Headwax

thanks Rhianna, that's very kind of you to list those links and method! Obliged!

and what a great render this is!

http://rhian-skyblade.deviantart.com/art/Seeing-Red-366849610?q=gallery:rhian-skyblade&qo=0

:)