Normalizing meshes

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Normalizing meshes

Postby blindsaypatten » Sun Oct 21, 2018 3:06 am

If you're not in the mood for a rant stop reading now.

I know this is something that noone else would want to spend time on, but, it sure would be nice if the meshes were normalized so that a point on the body stays in the same place on the body as targets are applied. The most obvious illustration of the issue is to turn on the grid in MH and watch the grid on the lower back slide around as you morph from female to male. Why it is a problem can be seen by putting, for example, the tight jeans from the repository on a toon and then sliding back and forth between female and male; the back top of the jeans gets distorted as it follows the grid which is distorting. And it's not just the back that changes, a straight line around the waste will get distorted with individual vertices being moved up or down. And it's not just male/female morphs, as you increase the muscle slider on a male toon a straight waistline will take on an upward curve. There are many other random vertex movements but at the moment I'm focused on the waistline because it so drastically ruins clothing that could be unisex, as well as making it look bad after other morphs. I spent a lot of time on a speedo suit today but it basically only looks as intended on the "average male" toon.

While I'm ranting, something else I ran into today, when you narrow the hips the top half of the thighs also gets narrowed, but not the bottom half, so you get a bottom half that bulges out in a very unnatural way. And there is no other target that counteracts that. Hmm, looks like it was just scaled with proportionate editing turned on. It would have been much better to use the armature and scale the hip bones.

The really depressing thing is that even with the will to fix them they won't be fixed in order to be backward compatible. The saving grace is that one can create their own targets for their own use, although that requires any user contributed stuff to be adjusted to match before you can use it. :cry:

There, got that off my chest.
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Re: Normalizing meshes

Postby jimlsmith9999 » Mon Nov 12, 2018 8:04 pm

If it makes you feel better, I have run into the same problem mostly with low poly mesh clothing. I have been having a lot of trouble with getting my clothing to export correctly anyway so perhaps its just me. I use blender make clothes. Some things like Belts and Belt Buckles. The Buckle never keeps its shape. Haven't had time to look for a work around. If I find one I will let you know though.
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Re: Normalizing meshes

Postby MargaretToigo » Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:59 pm

I hear ya!

I've been working, with mixed success, on how to get a universal fit for quite some time now. It really depends upon how complex the clothing mesh is and what part or parts of the body it covers.

Defined collars/waistbands almost always break around the neck and waist when the human's age, gender, weight and proportions are adjusted.

The feet are weird because socks will fit almost any human but shoes with actual soles and heels don't usually have a very wide fit among genders and ages.

Now, in reality there are different clothing stores/sections for men, women, children and babies -- with petite, plus size and big and tall subcategories -- because their bodies are different. Such is also the case with MakeHuman humans, so some outfits need to be made into different versions for different genders/ages, while others may be of the "one size fits many" variety.

MakeHuman clothes seem to follow similar rules. The more detailed (tailored) an outfit is the narrower its fit range, while things like bodysuits and rompers without defined neck or waist lines are closer to OSFM. And shoe sizes can vary widely, even among a group of people who are the same age, gender and weight.

The thing about MakeHuman is that it's a very robust and powerful tool, but it's not the whole toolbox. When I import a new human with clothes and hair and everything else into Blender, it's about halfway to production, which is a really good starting point for just importing a bunch of meshes and a skeleton. But I still have a lot of adjusting and fine tuning to do in Blender before I have a human who's ready to animate and render.
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Re: Normalizing meshes

Postby joepal » Mon Nov 12, 2018 10:48 pm

It is unlikely that a change could be made in order to make all conceivable clothing pieces fit nicely on all conceivable body types.

However, what can be done is making designing for a specific body type somewhat easier.

To this end, I have today adjusted the new socket importer to work with MakeClothes. This way, it will be possible to design for a body type directly, rather than trying to guess what it would look like after designing for one of the base mesh templates.

The socket importer will be bundled with the next release of MakeHuman.
Joel Palmius (LinkedIn)
MakeHuman Infrastructure Manager
http://www.palmius.com/joel
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