Hatsune Miku WIP

Works in progress and technical screen shots.

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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby brkurt » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:35 am

Oscalon wrote:It'll be some time yet. Once I have it all done, I'll be doing a breakdown of everything I used and the general theory. But I have a fair amount of rigging problems to solve first.


My sympathies on the rigging work. I have two questions: (1) are you going to create a 'wig rig' (it can be parented to the body rig in Blender 2.7x); (2) are you going to animate your clothing using Marvelous Designer?
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby Oscalon » Fri Apr 17, 2015 7:44 am

I am using MD to sim the clothing, and also the twin tails. The clothing is easy, but the hair is difficult.

The problem is that the geometry that sims well for the hair doesn't look right, and the geometry that looks right doesn't sim well. To get proper anime style mesh hair requires very specific topology. The solution i have arrived at is to let the hair sim in MD, then transfer it to the hair mesh that will be rendered. Deform modifier is not able to handle this job. The solution is to constrain bones to the simmed mesh, and let them drive the real hair mesh. But the number of bones needed to do this is significant.

So I have spent the last few weeks working on a script that automates generating bone chains and constraining them to vertices. I do not know either python or blender's api. Despite having help from a friend who is a coder, this has still been an exercise in frustration. Blender's API is maddening. But its worth it, as this allows me to build the full ~1500 bone rig that I will need in order to not lose quality in the hair in 20 minutes, instead of more hours than I can even estimate. It looks like this (not finished, test version, but you get the idea)

MikuHairRig.jpg


And here's another test from an earlier version showing it driving a strand (in red)

Hair-Rig-1.png


Currently the bones are locked to the simmed mesh, but I'm working on a system so that I will be able to run the sim, choose a frame I like, and then tweak the bones by hand (with simplified controllers) to get the best position. It's all been quite a hassle to get working, but I'll be able to use the script for a lot of things (it's good for far more than hair. There's many times when you want to transfer motion from a simple mesh to a complex and deforms won't cut it.)

Does that answer both questions?
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby brkurt » Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:04 pm

Yes. That definitely answers both questions. :)

I've been working on a simpler solution to hair and clothing animations, but then I have to go the 'stop animation' route to acheive this. Since my goal is to create stills for a graphic novel, and some short videos, my solution works, but it is a limited one.

I'm under the impression your design goals are to create a character that can operate in many digital formats, and that is clearly much more difficult. :)
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby Oscalon » Fri Apr 17, 2015 8:41 pm

A big pet peeve of mine is that many Miku models, even the ones they use for giant stage shows, only have a single bone rig on each tail, often with visible joints (so not even proper curve bones.) I decided I wanted to find a solution to this problem. I hope to do a music video with this model (a friend of mine has been making vocaloid music) but given how time consuming that is, it may not happen. At the least, I'll do a few short animation tests to show what this looks like for use in my portfolio.
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby brkurt » Sat Apr 18, 2015 7:35 pm

Oscalon wrote:A big pet peeve of mine is that many Miku models, even the ones they use for giant stage shows, only have a single bone rig on each tail, often with visible joints (so not even proper curve bones.) I decided I wanted to find a solution to this problem. I hope to do a music video with this model (a friend of mine has been making vocaloid music) but given how time consuming that is, it may not happen. At the least, I'll do a few short animation tests to show what this looks like for use in my portfolio.



You've piqued my interest. I'm nearly finished setting up my render farm (four substations running Yafaray, four running LuxRender), next, I'll take a crack at the 'curve bone' solution. Luckily enough, the Blender Summer of Documentation has a tutorial on just this topic.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Tutorials/Animation/Armatures/BSoD/The_Bones-on-Curve_Spine

I'll create a headband with three ribbons, each a meter long, and animate it in the 'Heavenly Sword' style.
Should take about a week to fine-tune it.

Thanks for sharing your struggles; to me, this is when and where Makehuman is getting truly interesting. :)
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby Oscalon » Sun Apr 19, 2015 11:29 pm

Sounds good. But I'll warn you, the method in that tutorial is out of date. It's now much easier to do. You don't actually need to put bones on a curve, you can just use the Curved Bones options under Deform. Note that Curve Bones used to be called bbones, and lots of stuff still refers to them that way.

You also don't need to parent to empties anymore. That was necessary in the days before you could constrain to a vertex group, but now constraints are the better option and need less pieces.
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby brkurt » Mon Apr 20, 2015 3:17 am

Oscalon wrote:Sounds good. But I'll warn you, the method in that tutorial is out of date. It's now much easier to do. You don't actually need to put bones on a curve, you can just use the Curved Bones options under Deform. Note that Curve Bones used to be called bbones, and lots of stuff still refers to them that way.

You also don't need to parent to empties anymore. That was necessary in the days before you could constrain to a vertex group, but now constraints are the better option and need less pieces.


Yes, I ran through the tutorial, and quickly discovered how far back in the past the tutorial was. Even with 2.49b, it was obsolete.

So...I'm looking at several solutions for ribbons. What is working right now is a combination of Wave modifier and Dupliverts.

I'm designing 'bunches' of ribbons on the temples and at the back of the neck, that wave gently in the breeze. Very 'Heavenly Swordish'. :)
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby duststorm » Mon Apr 20, 2015 8:16 am

That's a very interesting technique.
Would it work for realistic looking models as well? Would you need even more bones?
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby Oscalon » Mon Apr 20, 2015 8:01 pm

duststorm wrote:That's a very interesting technique.
Would it work for realistic looking models as well? Would you need even more bones?


It should work for any instance of needing to transfer motion from one mesh to another based on verts/loops. It should work for hair, cloth, or anything else. I don't see any reason it couldn't work for realistic models, although I'm not sure what you'd need it for (on hair) since for realism you want to use particle hair, which won't need it at all, or alpha hair, which can already be based on the same mesh you are going to sim. But for clothing, it could definitely come up a lot.

The number of bones really depends on the detail resolution that you need. In the case of my hair here, I'm probably going to use less than in the picture I posted, but more towards the roots where it needs a big bend. But if I was doing something that needed to pick up every little curve and bend, then I'd need more bones. It would theoretically be possible to just place a bone on every vertex for something like cloth that needed to note lose any detail.
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Re: Hatsune Miku WIP

Postby Oscalon » Sun May 10, 2015 11:53 am

Texture development. Just a few tweaks to the face, shoulders and collar bones, and this will be ready.

MikuWIP-Textures-1web.png
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