It is not easy tbh but possible.
You should then read this:
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=16927You do not have to think about a new base mesh, but I needed a solution to create bones "outside" of the normal skeleton. The ground cube is part of the mesh, so an ik bone can also be placed. So you can skip all what I wrote about wings or tail. But the rest should explain what is possible.
Some of the questions you might have I already had myself. I wrote this before I became member of the team.
When you correct the positions of the bones, you can do that different as you can see, when you look at the breast or face bones.
And: rigging is not an easy task.
You need a weights file, when you rework the skeleton (different bone position) but not when you rename or group the bones like you did here:
- Code: Select all
"ball_l": {
"head": "ball_l____head",
"parent": "foot_l",
"reference": ["toe1-1.L"],
"roll": -0.013643646612763405,
"weights_reference": ["toe1-1.L","toe1-2.L","toe1-3.L","toe2-1.L","toe2-2.L","toe2-3.L","toe3-1.L","toe3-2.L","toe3-3.L","toe4-1.L","toe4-2.L","toe4-3.L","toe5-1.L","toe5-2.L","toe5-3.L"],
"tail": "ball_l____tail"
},
here the weights for the bones toe1-1.L to toe5-3.L are summarized. But in the weight file it is not checked for ball_r, makehuman still searches for then toes.
All bones not carrying weight are not mentioned in the weights file, so you can leave the ik-bones out. ik-bones do not own vertex-groups, and the names of this file will be the vertex groups in Blender later.
I appended your corrected files, for the weights I took the new symmetric version in the branch, which was merged yesterday. Do not wonder it looks different and is shorter (and not only because of the zip).
Just for a workflow: try to place the bones first, then do a new weighting. As long as the weights are assigned to the old bones, don't do an own weight file.
After you export the character one time to Blender (use MPFB or MHX2 but add the helpers), you can change the weighting in Blender (especially for the spine, because you character will not bend smoothly now) and then save an mhw file. This file then will have weights for ball_l instead of the toes btw. The plugin I wrote can be used for the weight copies left to right etc., If you are ready with that, delete the weight-references in skeleton file.