Technical Slop

Pui Pui Entry 12

Been taking it easy this past while. Kinda had to with some sick girlies over here.

Left off right before the rigging. Shall we? Lets.

I'm going to cheat a bit with the rigging. I'm going to be using Character Studio. This is a pre-fab, almost all-purpose system. You start with a Biped template, shape it, then use Physique to "skin" the biped to the mesh. It can be a real time saver.

On the left is Pui Pui with the base Biped dropped over it. With some creative work on the graphic, you should be able to see that the Biped is no where near fitting in the mesh. :yech: So, with a lot of NU-Scale and rotation, we eventually end up on the right with Biped all set and ready to go. This process can be a lot of fun. One little thing can mess up the Biped in the hands or something.

Before I take this any further and actually use Physique, I have to take care of this face. Remember, this face is going to be a seperate object so I can Morph it w/out the rest of the body.

The problem with this is that his head will probably be moved a tad and then his face won't line up with the rest of his head when I merge it in. The answer: a face dummy!

So, seperate the face to a seperate object. Make a dummy box and line it up with the face. Link the dummy face to the skull. Then save out the face to another file to be worked on seperately and delete it from this scene. Now, if I happen to move the head, the box will follow. Then, when I merge the face back in, all I have to do is align and link it to the dummy face.

The hierarchy will look like this: skull > dummy face > face. Spiffy.

Physique the mesh to the Biped. Woohoo! Move a body part on the Biped, and the mesh moves along with it, sort of...

On Biped's body parts, there are envelopes that influence verts so much. A vert moves depending on the envelopes that it falls within. Envelopes are like spheres of influence or something. The problem with envelopes in this case is that I want certain chunks of the mesh to behave a certain way.

Take Pui Pui's head for example. I want the whole thing to be rigid, especially the verts around the face.

On the left is how his head looks from the side when he looks down a bit. The red verts mean that they are deformable (as oppossed to rigid). In the back of his head, some of the verts aren't influenced as much by the envelope, so they don't move as much when he looks down. Stretching that I don't want. So I had to select all those verts and make them rigid to the skull, which makes the verts turn green. See that on the right? Much better.

I also want his shoulder pads and armour to behave in a specific way. That means selecting all of them and assigning them by hand in the same way I did the head.

Here is a shot of working the verts in the armour:

Select the verts in the armour, make them rigid/green to Biped's chest part, and lock the assignments. Locking the assignments means that I can't accidently re-assign them some place else. Locked verts are represented with squares.

Yeap. Do the entire armour by hand and then the shoulder pads. Lots more nitty gritty work.

Problem time. Boy, did I mess things up.

His armour is not suppossed to deform. It's suppossed to be rigid. Right? Right. The problem is that Biped's chest piece wasn't made big enough for the armour. The pivot point was too high and the bottom of his armour was swinging out. Major Ugh!

That pivot point is suppossed to be at the *bottom* of the armour.

No easy fix. I tried. No go.

Blast Physique.

Adjust the Biped.

Re-Physique.

All that manual vert work I did on his head, shoulder pads, and armour? Gotta do it all over again.

Consider it a lesson learned.

:sigh:

Up next:
More problems. Pretty bad, but not quite as bad as the above.