Question about Making Proxies

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Question about Making Proxies

Postby MTKnife » Sun Jul 23, 2017 7:50 am

I made a proxy by loading up the OBJ file from the "Average female genitalia" proxy, and changed nothing but the UV map. I then created vertex groups, loaded the Average Female (without helpers), and used Makeclothes to create the appropriate files, which I duly renamed. It seems to work fine...except, for some reason, the shape is slightly different: in places where there's bare skin (for example, around the armpits), you can see that the shape is different from the original proxy, and in some places covered by clothes, it pokes through.

Anyone dealt with this before?
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby grinsegold » Sun Jul 23, 2017 9:58 am

MTKnife wrote:I made a proxy by loading up the OBJ file from the "Average female genitalia" proxy, and changed nothing but the UV map. I then created vertex groups, loaded the Average Female (without helpers), and used Makeclothes to create the appropriate files, which I duly renamed. It seems to work fine...except, for some reason, the shape is slightly different: in places where there's bare skin (for example, around the armpits), you can see that the shape is different from the original proxy, and in some places covered by clothes, it pokes through.

Anyone dealt with this before?


Have you tried setting your MH toon to full caucasian? I had a similar problem recently (at least i think it could be called similar) and i was told by blindsaypatten that the defaults (male/female/neutral) inside MH are not the same as what MT or MC use. The defaults are in fact defaults PLUS ethnicity. The MC and MT defaults are caucasian however. Maybe the targets that were made by Jujube could help you there.
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby MTKnife » Sun Jul 23, 2017 5:40 pm

I remembered reading something, but couldn't remember what it was. I just had a look at jujube's targets, and I have to confess I'm not sure how I'd use them in MakeTarget, let alone how I'd apply them to MakeClothes.
Last edited by MTKnife on Wed Sep 19, 2018 3:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby jujube » Sun Jul 23, 2017 8:12 pm

If you created the default human in maketarget to make your target, then applying my "anti-base" target in makehuman should get it back to how it looked in blender.

You can also load my "startup morph" in maketarget, apply target, and then that will be the new point of reference for making a target. (Targets are basically the difference between one state and another. )
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby MTKnife » Mon Jul 24, 2017 3:00 am

jujube wrote:If you created the default human in maketarget to make your target, then applying my "anti-base" target in makehuman should get it back to how it looked in blender.

You can also load my "startup morph" in maketarget, apply target, and then that will be the new point of reference for making a target. (Targets are basically the difference between one state and another. )


I understand the principle, but I'm not sure I see a viable workflow. The problem is that I never made a target: I made a proxy, which is made with MakeClothes, not MakeTarget. The problem does appear to be that I have a target, the "Average Female" in MakeClothes", that's slightly off, but I'm not sure I see a viable workflow to replace that target.

I could load up the startup model in MH, move the gender slider (to 100% female?), apply the anti-base, then export that model as....something. Do I export it as a Wavefront (.obj) and then use MakeTarget to make a target from it?

Or maybe I went wrong by importing the "Adult female genitalia" as a Wavefront file--but I don't see how else you could import it. I'm not really clear on what's contained in the .proxy file, but I don't see any way to import that to Blender: maybe I should have applied the proxy to a model in MH and then exported as a Wavefront, rather than importing the proxy's .obj file directly?
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby blindsaypatten » Mon Jul 24, 2017 1:55 pm

This is a bit of a shot in the dark but perhaps it is relevant. I recently was working on an eye replacement and I found that using MakeClothes it would get somewhat distorted, likely due to the vertex matching. In my case the solution was to use the rigid body route using * vertex groups, as described in one of the tutorials in the documentation pages. Especially in areas like armpits where there is the possibility of a vertex on the torso getting matched with a vertex on the arm I could see issues arising. Rigid body modeling clearly isn't appropriate for a complete proxy, but perhaps the underlying issue of vertex mapping is relevant and someone can suggest something.

It would likely be helpful to post an illustration of the exact differences you are seeing, that will allow people to either recognize something they have dealt with before, or at least be able to rule out some of the possible causes/solutions. "It is slightly different" is difficult to work with.

I wonder if there isn't a way to swap the UV without regenerating the mesh.
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby jujube » Tue Jul 25, 2017 2:18 am

@MTknife: makeclothes/maketarget says "average" male/female when it really means caucasian.

blindsaypatten wrote:I wonder if there isn't a way to swap the UV without regenerating the mesh.


I think I ran into some of this when I made my pupil-less eye; in the default high-poly eye, the ring/face/verts over the pupil are diamond-shaped. I used an addon to make them circular, but I didn't find an equivalent addon to make the UVs circular, and you could still see the dark center of the pupil texture leaking onto the iris for some eye colors.
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby MTKnife » Tue Jul 25, 2017 5:33 am

I've been trying to make a new target to replace "Average female"...and wow, the wiki instructions for MakeTarget are awful. I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to load up an OBJ file and make a target out of it, and I never did succeed. The fact the the video link is dead doesn't help (but I hate resorting to video in most cases anyway--it's so much slower than reading).
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby jujube » Tue Jul 25, 2017 10:13 pm

In order to be accepted by maketarget, a mesh has to have the same number of vertices, in the same order, as the maketarget meshes. You may be able to create a target from an exported human if you check "helper geometry" when exporting, to get the same geometry seen in the "fit tools"/helpers, and even then I'm not sure if it will work.

A reliable way to make a new target from an existing file is to download the makehuman source code in order to get access to the official targets used in makehuman. Then you can load target file, and combine official targets however you like (found in makehuman/data/targets of the source code).
https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman/downloads/

Another method of creating targets I use is to use the shrinkwrap modifier to fit the mesh to another object, then apply as shape key. But as far as I know, shape keys created outside the addon aren't recognized by maketarget, and so I get around that by making a copy of the human mesh with the shapekeys applied, then using "load target from mesh" to get it into maketarget.

(To load target from mesh, select the mesh you want to use as a target, then shift select the mesh you want to create a target on. This consumes the first mesh and creates a target on the second mesh.)

Also, when creating any target that affects the body, apparently you have to use the helpers/fit tools, otherwise the clothes won't fit later on.
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Re: Question about Making Proxies

Postby MTKnife » Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:32 am

Yes, of course the new target has to have the same number of vertices--I loaded up the default human in MH, set the gender slider all the way to female, and exported that, as a Wavefront file, imported it into Blender, then tried to make a target out of it.

The wiki instructions on how to do this really aren't clear, but apparently you have to load the original target first (I've tried both "Average female" and "Average female with helpers"), and only then can you select the imported object and hit "Use As Base". I did that, and then, as the wiki specifies, selected first the imported object and then the original target, and then hit "Load Target From Mesh". I invariably get this (with or without the helpers):

Screenshot (11).png


Obviously not what I was going for.
Last edited by MTKnife on Wed Sep 19, 2018 3:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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