SummersGone
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Blender diary #2
🕑 Added 2020-07-26 09:44:14 +0000 UTC
Hello
I did post one of these progress/diary updates before about my progress in Blender.
From now on I will call it "Blender diary"
Learning a 3D software is lonely and quite stressful. (Thank god I have a blender buddy.)
By doing these diaries I am kinda sharing my thoughts, problems, and achievements with you guys to relieve stress and also give you an insight into my work. (And if you can explain something, you understood it.)
For those who don't know... As soon as Where it all began and Summer's Gone reach Season 2, the games will be made in Blender.
These diaries are very technical and you might often not understand what I am saying. But I am trying my best to make it understandable.
I am dedicating 2-3h a day to learning Blender.
Since then I acquired a trainload of new knowledge and skills.
The further you go down in this post the more recent it gets.
I did post this picture in the last diary.
Since then, the skin shading made some steps forwards but it's hard to judge because this render is so dark.
A day later I rendered it in a brighter environment with some updated skin-shading nodes.
Then I converted the next char to Blender. It was Helen.
With Helen new problems arrived.
In Blender, you don't have a function to fit clothes to a character and because Helen has some very beautiful curves, it was a challenge to fit them to her.
In this render, I sculpt it onto her which lead to a lot of problems but I managed to create a decent fit.
(A friend told me about a much better way to do it and I gladly don't have to do it anymore.)
A big problem (Which might have been solved and this step will no longer be necessary) is that the DAZ geometry was off in some areas.
I am talking about the teeth.
I already worked on the upper row but the bottom teeth are untouched. As you can see there are some huge gaps between them and they look even worse rendered.
This means you have to manually fix the teeth in Edit mode.
The gum is also off and needs to be fixed manually.
The bottom row fixed.
This has to be done for every char you convert. (But as I said it might be fixed.)
This char up there is the new Miru and after I finished most of the work on her.
I obviously did put my newly acquired knowledge to use and gave her a better Skin-Shader than the one Dana has in the pictures above (Dana & Helen have the better one now, too.)
(This is a custom from the custom tier and this person has given me the permission to do them in Blender so that I can enhance my skills while being productive)
The next destination was to convert two Summer's Gone characters.
Here is the younger version of the MC from SG during my work on his skin shader. The arms haven't been modified yet.
I sadly got the idea of screenshotting my Blender stuff very late and the biggest challenge here was to fit the brows onto his face.
The MC here is a special case due to his texture maps.
The brows were on a separate map and Blender was only able to show one.. Either the face or the brows. As you can imagine, a huge mess got converted and it took me quite some time to figure out how to merge those two maps. (Sadly, I don't have screenshots of the mess)
Now that I had some characters on a decent shader level I wanted to slowly get into the part I most desire in Blender.
Animating.
My first test was with the Miru model and the first thing I wanted to do was some boob physics.
Animating in Blender feels super nice! It's 1000 suns above Daz.
I do have a huge interest in physics. This means that I don't have to manually animate certain parts like boobs, butts, and hair and it just simulates the physics of the movement.
And now the headache began.
After testing out different methods and realizing that every time I started a simulation, my whole PC froze because the Daz character creators are throwing around Polys like crazy.
(I discovered the solution to this (This will be shown in the next diary.) after I tried out a different method.
This different method was by simulating the boob-bones instead of the mesh.
And then this happened...
(Put the quality in these videos up. They start at 240p for some reason)
https://vimeo.com/441747153/6fa6f6b0a4
Suddenly every bone in her body was like Harry Potter's arm during the quidditch match in Part 2.
Everything had these physics on them and It took me a day to figure out why and fix it.
After I finally managed to get some physic only onto the boobs... I got this result
https://vimeo.com/441734964/90f13a85fe
As you can see this looks fucking weird. As if there was an illusion of movement.
I didn't know why the boob-bones were reacting like this and there was nothing I could do.
https://vimeo.com/441734973/bb0af90d50 - Here from a different perspective with different settings but still the same.
I did like 15 test-animations of this but no matter what I did.. It didn't work.
I first expected that something with the weight map was wrong and I tried to modify it in every direction. But this was a dead-end.
Until today and I finally managed to figure out how to make it work.
https://vimeo.com/441737918/23eaccca68
This is just a test animation so no worries about some bugs but I found out how it works.
I managed to make it work because I added 2 extra bones (red) to the boob-main-bones and did put physics onto those two bones.
The two big bones are now Child-bones and controlled by the small bones on which I applied the physics.
And now that I know how to make it work it's time to play around with it and find the most realistic settings.
Daz Genesis 8 characters do not have butt bones and I will have to rig the butts myself and I will do this in the near future.
I will end this diary here and with the next diary, you can expect some Boob, ass, and hair physic videos and some new renders.
- Ocean
Comments
wibble
here's one tutorial that goes through the process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5TeXW11TUw
wibble
Hey...I love Blender and have tinkered with it for a couple years. I built my own rig from scratch for one of my models and learned a ton. When it comes to breast and butt physics, usually the best approach is to setup low poly proxy meshes for the breast and buttocks with a cloth sim (pinned where you don't want movement). Then you use a mesh deform modifier on your main mesh so that the high poly mesh is driven by the motions of the proxy mesh. Finally, you parent your proxies to the relevant bone in your armature. This is obviously just a high level summary but, if you want to give it a go I could try to find a tutorial or example file for you that demonstrates it. This is much less resource intensive than trying to add physics directly to your main mesh.
Pax
Wow - props to you for trying to learn more about the different software that you are using to create immersive stories. You do a great job helping the uninitiated, like me :), to better understand what goes into the animations that we love to see in a VN. Thanks for taking the time to show us what Blender can do!
