VaM 1.x Mesh smoothing: Any tips and tricks to offset/counteract effect of smoothing on person atoms?

Hi,

I brought a VAM figure into DAZ for morph-making..
Was absolutely astounded how ROUGH the mesh was in DAZ, whereas in VAM it looked gooood!
Do use smoothing of 4 in VAM for better hip-thigh deforms.
Have found when i make DAZ morphs at 1.0 strength, make sure to set the range to 2.0 before export, and find in most cases I have to use 2.0 in VAM.
So think your thoughts about heavy exaggeration is 100% the way to go.
There are no masks to disallow smoothing on this or that, unless it's an unpublished feature?
Do find normal maps don't get smoothed as much. Just have to dial in the strength under one of the skin tabs. So if you are good at baking, that may be worth a try?
Only downside of normal maps...is all layers use that same strength - limbs, torso, face. So if one layer is a bit 'granular', well it means rebake or manual paint which is extremely laborius and near impossible for some physical aspects. But granularity dulling would work. Have done it.

FantasiWrapper said:

Hi,

I brought a VAM figure into DAZ for morph-making..
Was absolutely astounded how ROUGH the mesh was in DAZ, whereas in VAM it looked gooood!
Do use smoothing of 4 in VAM for better hip-thigh deforms.
Have found when i make DAZ morphs at 1.0 strength, make sure to set the range to 2.0 before export, and find in most cases I have to use 2.0 in VAM.
So think your thoughts about heavy exaggeration is 100% the way to go.
There are no masks to disallow smoothing on this or that, unless it's an unpublished feature?
Do find normal maps don't get smoothed as much. Just have to dial in the strength under one of the skin tabs. So if you are good at baking, that may be worth a try?
Only downside of normal maps...is all layers use that same strength - limbs, torso, face. So if one layer is a bit 'granular', well it means rebake or manual paint which is extremely laborius and near impossible for some physical aspects. But granularity dulling would work. Have done it.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.


I'm mostly concerned with facial features for models sculpted in Blender. A lot of defining features around the lips, nostrils, philtrum, septum, etc... Get smoothed out — actually feels like the mesh gets relaxed first — and the identity of the face can get a bit muddy due to smoothing.
Authored faces, especially, are a lot less forgiving of very minor changes.

I don't ever go above 2 smooth passes, I find more than that is just too much, and with 2 passes, all of the skinned mesh physics still behaves well, without any nasty triangle shadows showing up.

And you mentioned that there is no cancel mask for this feature. I would be amazing if there was a greyscale cancel mask to dial up and down the amount of smoothing by UVs, similar to how you can paint the sim texture for clothing rigidity. I hope VaM2 implements something like this.

It would also be amazing if I could export the run-time smoothed version of my mesh, so that I could at least re-bake my textures in Blender. Take out some of the bends and kinks that can show up when the mesh gets relaxed.

And yes, good topo discipline can go a long way, but I feel like I'm squeezing all I can out of the G2F at this point, and something's gotta give.



I've currently set up a little scene with two buttons that swap between Source morph with zero smooth passes, and the second with 2 passes and a running morph preset that updates as I edit it, so I can toggle between the two and make micro adjustments with the hundreds of targets morphs I have in my library.

Ultimately I think the best way to deal with this is to author small morphs in Blender based on the source morph, so the deltas are the same, but isolated to, say, the philtrum, nostrils, or something. A lot of work, sure, but more precise than guesstimating what features to exaggerate in the sculpt, then go thorough the process of turning into an in engine morph just to see what VaM's smoothing does to it.

It's all a work in progress I guess. And thanks for the feedback, a bunch of better artists than me have been making VaM looks for a lot longer, and I'm sure more people have run into and found methods for offsetting the smoothing passes.

This confused/bugged me too. I made a tragus adjustment morph for this exact reason. Smoothing passes destroy the shape of the ears, as there is not much geometry to work with. I think you are correct that having a collection of little adjustment morphs could be useful to make modifications within Vam and then combine the result.

I did see that there is this plugin to make morphs from within Vam, but I've not really tested it out. Could be useful for refining details though.

Origin69 said:

I did see that there is this plugin to make morphs from within Vam, but I've not really tested it out. Could be useful for refining details though.

Instant Morph - Plugins + Scripts -

(Experimental) Instant Morph Plugin. Create morphs using only VaM. without using Daz or Blender. No need to be in a T-pose. Make the morph directly with your current appearance. Tip: when the Target Mesh is set to Body, creating a simple crotch...

hub.virtamate.com

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I just checked out Slimy's plugin. It looks like it can't capture just the deltas of an already morphed shape, only the manual vert position edits you make in the plugin, which is super neat, but not quite what I'm looking for. Basically a plugin that was a combination of Instant Morph and MMAS would be the gold mine.

Will definitely see if I can get something out of it though. In the end, I think capturing the deltas of weighted verts in Blender is probably still the most accurate way of trying to deal with this.

Just want to keep a record of the different methods I've attempted to try to address this issue.

Learned how to create shape keys in Blender, based off my initial sculpt. Isolated specific areas that were being over corrected by the smoothing passes. Shows promise, but a bit fiddly and the turn around time to in engine feedback is a multi-step process through Daz, etc... Deltas from the shape keys are absolute, not relative to the current shape. Manual translation, similar to proportional edit, can be done using the Hook modifier, but again it can get a bit fiddly, and multi-step process to compare feedback.

So far, I've had the most luck with the setup I mentioned above: A scene, using UI Assist, with two buttons, where one button sets smooth passes to Zero and load the base morph, and the second button sets smooth passes to Two, and loads another morph preset where edits are saved in real time as they are made (using triggers and logic bricks).

I think the most progress can be made with a toggle set up like this. Then, for any remaining trouble spots, use a combination of the Instant Morph plugin mentioned by @Origin69, as well as maybe authoring some corrective morphs in blender.

One thing that would make this effort a lot easier would be the ability to export a raw version of the smoothed mesh, so that comparisons can more easily be made in Blender or a similar app. Unfortunately, the smoothing system is embedded in MeshedVR's native code, and is not accessible any of the plugin hooks, probably breaking ToS if a tool was ever distributed.

Metix said:

Just want to keep a record of the different methods I've attempted to try to address this issue.

Learned how to create shape keys in Blender, based off my initial sculpt. Isolated specific areas that were being over corrected by the smoothing passes. Shows promise, but a bit fiddly and the turn around time to in engine feedback is a multi-step process through Daz, etc... Deltas from the shape keys are absolute, not relative to the current shape. Manual translation, similar to proportional edit, can be done using the Hook modifier, but again it can get a bit fiddly, and multi-step process to compare feedback.

So far, I've had the most luck with the setup I mentioned above: A scene, using UI Assist, with two buttons, where one button sets smooth passes to Zero and load the base morph, and the second button sets smooth passes to Two, and loads another morph preset where edits are saved in real time as they are made (using triggers and logic bricks).

I think the most progress can be made with a toggle set up like this. Then, for any remaining trouble spots, use a combination of the Instant Morph plugin mentioned by @Origin69, as well as maybe authoring some corrective morphs in blender.

One thing that would make this effort a lot easier would be the ability to export a raw version of the smoothed mesh, so that comparisons can more easily be made in Blender or a similar app. Unfortunately, the smoothing system is embedded in MeshedVR's native code, and is not accessible any of the plugin hooks, probably breaking ToS if a tool was ever distributed.

Click to expand...

This have been a problem even for me for a long time, and i was quite tired to let vam fucking up my chars faces with that uncontrollable smooth pass.

However I recently noticed Skynet SSS plugin contain also the tessellation option which work like the smooth pass.
The difference is, in this case you have the full control on what to tessellate and what not by choosing the mask textures which can go from pitch black (no tess) to full white (full tess).
In this case I set the smooth pass to 0, load Skynet SSS plugin, load my custom tess textures masks and I obtain exactly what you said.

Keep in mind tho, the recent SSS v6 is a session plugin and apply the SSS on every person in the scene.
If you need to use custom masks for just one char perhaps you want to use the previous version 4 or 5 which is still loaded as a person plugin.