5 replies to this topic

[ResolveThatChord]

I was wondering if someone with some experience with custom clothes, armour, or creatures may know the solution to a problem I'm having with vertex weighting.
I'm working on a custom set of clothes that features a floor length dress. I followed this tutorial as well as some hand weight painting for the vertex weights, and have managed to get the top and sleeves behaving correctly. I followed this other tutorial to export it to nif, and gave it a UV test grid for a texture. The UVs still need work.

Here's a lovely render in Blender:


The skirts do not behave correctly.
I've tried reducing the vertex weights, which seemed to have no noticeable effect. Adding very, very slight weight to different bones produced even more drastic distortions. It seems that Oblivion treats vertex weights differently to blender.

When walking, the train of the dress appears to follow the calf with 100% weight, despite being assigned a very light weight:


When running, the whole thing becomes a train wreck:


Has anyone had this problem before? Has anyone solved it? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I notice a lot of custom armor is very... form fitting; I always thought that was a matter of personal taste, but maybe this is also why.

Also if anyone knows exactly how Oblvion treats vertex weights, I am very keen to know.

[Lady_Nerevar]

Although I don't know how Oblivion handles the weights, behavior like that is pretty standard across all games. Just a guess, but are the bottom vertexes weighed to anything else, or only the calf? It may fill them in at 100% if no other bones are present.

[Hanaisse]

First of all, love your design. Can't wait to see it finished.

I too was banging my head against a wall to figure out weight painting on a robe I made, until someone told me a quick alternate method that worked perfectly.

Copy the weight painting from a vanilla model - in this case, a vanilla skirt. Or, a clean vanilla lowerbody would work too.

1. On your model, select the skirt. In the materials tab (F9) delete all the vertex groups.
2. In edit mode make sure all the verts are selected.
3. In object mode again, import the vanilla model.
4. Select your original skirt then select the vanilla model (order is important)
5. Go to Object > Scripts > Bone Weight Copy, make sure "update selected" is selected, click ok.
6. After it's run give it a test.

Or, have you tried importing a clean skeleton?

[ResolveThatChord]

Lady Nerevar: I suspected that it would be something like that, but I'm not exactly sure how it works. For example, how does he behaviour change as the sum of all the bone weights on a vertex changes? or should it always add up to 100%? At the moment I'm trying to work these things out by experiment, and the going is slow. I hope the behaviour is indeed universal; a frustrating aspect of learning to mod is that what you learn for one game may not carry over to others, and information on any one game is fragmented and eclectic.

Hana: Solid advice. That script has saved me hours of work. Unfortunately the vanilla floor length dresses stay quite close to the feet; there are no dragging trains. It seems the further the target mesh deviates from the source mesh, the trickier it is to get the weights right.
As for clean skeletons, that problem has been dealt with, but it was a real head-scratcher for a while. The symptoms were bizzare and hilarious:
http://www.fliggerty...php?id=1791&t=1

So, if Lady Nerevar is right, then all I need to do is weight to the right bones with the right proportional weight. That sounds to me like an extremely finnicky and arduous job. I guess you just have to know how clothes behave in relation to bones. If I want to be an animator, I gotta learn it, so I guess I'll just get stuck in.

Any advice, as ever, is enormously appreciated.
Thanks a million, Lady Nerevar and Hana!

[Artisanix]

If you have SI then you may want to look at Syl for reference and maybe even try to copy verts from her dress - she's a duchess of dementia, and has one of the longest dresses from all stock cloth models - picture.

Also from the game without expansion a shirt.nif mesh file located in meshes\clothes\upperclass\02\f has a dress that is long enough to cover all the legs and it ends on the ground like yours...

[ResolveThatChord]

Good suggestion, Trollf. copying weights from Syl's dress made the distortions far less severe, but introduced a lot of clipping during animation that was tedious to fix by hand.
Still, the outfit is looking a lot better. I think using several vanilla meshes to copy weights to specific vertices is how I'll do it in future.