jujube wrote:If your mesh has triangles in it, makeclothes complains that you can't combine tris and quads, and doesn't compile it. (This implies that you could make a mesh with tris if it was all tris. I tried this once and it complained about poles instead. )
I wonder why the developers put that restriction in.
jujube wrote:My approach was to create a proxy with the new ear topology, and makeclothes doesn't have a startup mesh in the dropdown list. (I assumed you couldn't fit clothes to things that aren't on the list, but come to think of it, maybe I'll try doing that. Create mesh via maketarget, then set as human in makeclothes.)
I had a go at making clothes on a morphed mesh, I have a T-Pose target and applied it to the mesh with helpers and then separated a copy of the mesh so it was in the same position and made tights. But the arms on the generated clothes stuck out in a T-Pose when the character was in default pose. Perhaps you'll have better luck.
jujube wrote:But I did also think of creating a separate ear model and using it as clothes. I want to make a topology with no ear, just a hole or flat surface where the ear loops would be. It would then be easy to exchange it with all kinds of ear clothing items with different topologies (animal ears, pierced ears, etc)
The problem is that I would inset a hole, change it to circle shape on base.obj, but then in makehuman it would be elongated and blocky. I could create an ear clothing and link it to an ear vertex group on the human, but if I did that, it might still have the same problem. Hmm.
If an ear clothing item can be morphed with all the usual targets, then that would be pretty much the ideal scenario.
I finally have the free time to make some targets again. Just now I created a proof of concept ear, which deforms with the ear and also uses the ears as a delete group. So forget the stuff I just said about making a "no ear" topology.
There was a forum user who asked about creating inner ear structures; I keep daydreaming about that kind of anatomical visualization.
Why do I have this horrible vision of making more realistic muscles as "clothes"?
jujube wrote:Did you get your exporting rigs/weights to load properly in makehuman? Your knee weighting looked great from what I can tell and I'd happily use it.
No. There was the mystery of the vertices that were in the default weighting but not in the generated weighting, which I think was related to the problems I had with the jammers. I figured that it wouldn't be too hard to write a program that read the generated weights and then adjusted the values in the weights in the default weights file, leaving any other vertex weights alone. But at that point I convinced myself that weight painting alone was only a half solution and that a better rig would provide a more accurate mechanism. But I don't know what the capabilities of skeletons in MakeHuman are, I'm not that hopeful that it supports bone constraints and/or drivers. There is an mhskel export option in the Blender tools but the files it produces have a slightly different format than the ones in the distribution, and the generated file won't load. And the mhskel file format is missing from the file format doc page.
Hmm, I just now found the wiki page on how to create an alternative proxy/topology. So I guess the mapping between topologies is just the closest vertex in the base for each vertex.
jujube wrote:There were problems with the bone rotation planes, where you have to copy it from the default skeleton, but I don't remember if the weights displayed properly. (I think you said the clothing didn't deform but that could have been an issue with just your jammers.) There are a few user contributed rigs available, and if any of them were custom created by users, then they must have found some way to get around the bone rotation issue. Since I currently have no idea how those bone rotation planes would be determined by hand.
I also need to ask CallHarvey3d how he created his lotus pose knee corrective target. Since I don't think you could use a posed human as a referene in makehuman. Is it just a painful process of trial and error where you have to keep checking how the target affects the posed human later in the pipeline?