Tri-ax rigging puzzle

Roygee

Hi all :-)

With Richard's help I rigged my first home-made figure and it works just great.

For my next one, I thought I could save some work by altering the milbaby to a merchild by deleting the legs and replacing with a tail.

Imported the figure into Hexagon and kept all the groups, did the tail and cut it into groups. Opened the FST as tri-ax did the hierachy, created and set the bones. All working fine, but when it comes to allocating weights, I can't expand the selection to smooth between groups - it is as if each face group is discrete and the mesh is not welded. There is no option in the FST to weld to parent, as there is in the legacy FST.

Is there some way I can get around this, or must I weld the figure into one in Hexagon, then re-do the grouping in DS and re-do the rigging from scratch.

I tried doing the legacy rigging, but the weighting is such a pain after getting used to tri-ax.

Richard Haseltine

Not being welded shouldn't be an issue in gneral, as far as I know, and anyway the mesh all belongs to the root node rather than being split among the bones as with parametric rigging. However, expanding the selection does depend on having contiguous mesh - do you have any morphs yet? If not, you might try importing the OBJ into a scene, then exporting with the weld option on (just make sure that doesn't also weld the eyes to the head, or the lips to each other), then use the Transfer utility to transfer the rig and such weights as you have from the unwelded figure to the welded OBJ..

Roygee

Thanks, Richard - this looks like it could be the solution. Did it and the groups, weights and bones were transferred. Still can't expand the face selection, but painting does help, although it is very laggy and slow.

Obviously need to test various settings - maybe empty the weights and start again - the main thing is that the heavy lifting has been done.

I notice there's a setting to convert general weight to tri-ax weight - what is that about - surely not that simple to convert a Gen 4 figure to tri-ax?

Richard Haseltine

Actually gen 4 (or other parametric rigs) to TriAx is that easy - just Convert to Weight map - but be aware that it doesn't seem ideally tuned for things like body handles (I was thinking of using something like the MFD to get a feel for how a good set of handles looked as weights, but it converted the first hadnle at full strength and then divided the left overs between the other handles until all had a weight of 1 - I haven't checked this in the new version).

However, general weightmapping is different - that's th system used in most applications, where there's a single weight map for each joint instead of one for each axis. Converting to TriAx is easy, just assign the weight map to each of the individual weight maps, and there's also the option to go in the other direction, which averages the values I think.

Roygee

Well. Richard, you were right - Transfer utility did the job. I'm still working on getting the parameters right because a very wierd thing is happening - as soon as I click on a parameter slider, the mesh balls up and disappears up the milbaby's backside, then reappears in the right position when I release the mouse. You can imagine how that adds in a bit of guesswork getting the rotations right.

It is working, though, so thanks for the assistance.