Help or tips with understanding the autoskinning

[thicbear]

Hello,

I work in the doing modelling / rigging / skinning & texturing work flows - been doing this for over a decade now and all in unity. I've been working through understanding a bunch of different things in VAM and over the weekend I started working on cloth work flows for males. I'm also using marvelous / 3ds max / Daz / Substance

One thing I can't wrap my head around is the auto skinning during import. It seems to be doing it's best to weight the vertex to the right bones but the textures buckle along straight lines. Wondered if anyone had any tips or help?

It was worse until I quaded the mesh up, this uses the quaded mesh.

Substance painter

VAM

Usually I can adjust the vertex weights to fix these issues - is there anyway to do this?

Thank you.

 

[meshedvr]

Clothing in VaM is using a wrap system and not a skin weight system. What it does is it takes the clothing mesh and the base Genesis 2 figure mesh and tries to bind each vertex on the clothing mesh to a face (quad or triangle) on the figure mesh. Then when the base mesh is morphed or joints are moved, the clothing vertices move accordingly based on the figure face they are bound to. This can cause some distortion in cases where the clothing mesh density doesn't closely match the underlying figure mesh. In addition to this, VaM is using a smoothing algorithm based on Laplacian smooth for both post-skin figure mesh and the wrapped clothing mesh. This can cause additional issues, but in most cases helps with the mesh distortion post-skin and wrap. You can try messing with the smooth passes control found in User Preferences to see this. If you use sim clothing, it can also do a bit better with this issue because the simulation tries to make the clothing comply to its original form through physics. You could try turning on sim for the item to see if it helps. You can actually have a blend between wrap and sim weighting by messing with Set Uniform Sim Texture. This is shown here:

2.X will likely have an all new subdivision and smoothing system that should work better than what 1.X has, but I'm still planning to have "Wrap" clothing as an option because it makes clothing work seamlessly with figure morphs and figure posing.

 

[meshedvr]

I looked closer at this and then remembered that clothing has smooth passes always set to 1 regardless of the user preferences. The user preferences smooth passes only affects the person skin mesh. I'm going to look into adding support for setting smooth passes on clothing (on the Adjustments tab), because this could be used to smooth out this issue by setting passes higher. The sim option I show, however, is a viable option for additional smoothing.

I have attached 3 images with varying smooth passes on the clothing: 0, 1, and 2 so you can see how this might work. Current version of VaM forces 1 pass for clothing.

0 pass:

1 pass:

2 pass:

Lastly here is a pic with Sim enabled with Uniform weight of 0.6 and smooth passes at 1:

Note if you use the sim option but don't care about collision with skin (which can cause bulging), you can set Collision Power to 0 on the Physics tab and this will make the item less costly to simulate but still allows sim smoothing to happen.

 

[thicbear]

2.X will likely have an all new subdivision and smoothing system that should work better than what 1.X has, but I'm still planning to have "Wrap" clothing as an option because it makes clothing work seamlessly with figure morphs and figure posing.

Thank you! It's a solid setup that allows clothing content to just work "out of the box" without deeper knowledge in the "how it works". Also appreciate you explaining how it works, that makes sense and will allow me to fix certain things up. I have a simtexture setup and I'll play with the uniform weights next to see how it all works. The smoothing pass option looks excellent too!

For the male pelvis area's it's a tricky balance of sim and non sim data because it looks like the pelvis colliders don't interact by default and the only thing holding it in place are the genitals. Haven't really looked into closely yet either.

Thanks again, this is a lot of good information that will help.

 

[thicbear]

I did a few more test using test pattern and did out 3 different models that increased in mesh density and with every step the distortion was less. I posted the results below.

Substance painter	Mesh Distance = 5 (6k)	Mesh Distance = 10 (3k)	Mesh Distance = 20 (1.5k)

After going over everything you mentioned I understand more about how it works and I think I'll just up the mesh detail in problem areas and find a balance between detail and performance.

Below is the near final result.

Last thing is the collider information, I've heard from others that the male colliders in the pelvis area don't interact yet? Is there any work around for this? or is it a 2.0 thing? All good either way, loads to learn

Thank you.

 

[meshedvr]

Male colliders won't likely be improved until 2.X.

Wrap clothing in male groin area is especially problematic because the clothing vertex might get bound a leg vertex if it is closer.

 

[Hunting-Succubus]

this made me work countless hour eyeshadow cloth but stll has issue. I guess every user have to use smoothing 1 to work correctly.

 

[thicbear]

this made me work countless hour eyeshadow cloth but stll has issue. I guess every user have to use smoothing 1 to work correctly.

I've started doing a pass where I do retopology after the cloth sim and match / line up the verts and faces to the base model. It seems to be creating a lot less distortion when importing but it's so much more work. This can also help though.

So much cool stuff to learn though. Good luck.

 

[Hunting-Succubus]

I extracting mesh from original daz female daz body, it should perfectly 1000000% match and bind but their is still issue. must be force smooth thing during binding process.

 

[thicbear]

I thought I would post here again. Was wondering if you might think about dropping the smoothing options in the next release? I've been working on thin geometry lines and it looks like the default smoothing is really aggressive.

So single poly stripes are smoothing to become thinner lines.
I added an extra loop in the main chest poly stripe and it remained similar to what the output was.
The rectangle above the right pectoral smoothed a bit - noticeable on the edges where the verts have moved in.

It's crazy example but I was testing to see how fine the polygons needed to be to match the underlining model.

Thanks again for all you hard work too.

 

[Hunting-Succubus]

you will have to add those edge loop where thining is accuring. a dense mesh dont thin.

 

[TToby]

Thank you, this intresting thread helps me to do better shoes / feet clothes. Shoes are always extremely distorted by complex custom feet and toe morphs. Turning away from high poly shoes and doing low poly meshes instead plus better textures, helps a lot to have much less distortions with different mixes from different morphes. This should holds true for most Genesis 2 body area with many polygones/vertexes. Now I only have to trade off ugly meshes against ugly distortions ;-)

 

[thicbear]

Thank you, this intresting thread helps me to do better shoes / feet clothes. Shoes are always extremely distorted by complex custom feet and toe morphs. Turning away from high poly shoes and doing low poly meshes instead plus better textures, helps a lot to have much less distortions with different mixes from different morphes. This should holds true for most Genesis 2 body area with many polygones/vertexes. Now I only have to trade off ugly meshes against ugly distortions ;-)

Yeah, I've been noticing this as well when making the model morphs on the larger side.

One thing I was going to try is export the final morph and then make the clothes for it.
Then I would skin wrap these clothes and morph it back to the original base model.
Sure the clothes would look Janky but they should fix when the morphs are pushed back in VAM. Should?

On another note though making sure the edge loops flow on arm holes, neck holes and so on make all the difference. So I'm winning with less distortions now

Good luck!

 

[TToby]

Hi, I did this with some of my more "custom" models. I imported the VaM figure in DAZ3d, fited some DAZ clothes (I am lazy) to it and then saved them and imported them in VaM with that custom model. This surely helps a bit (especially for some more extreme morphs), but short after this, I completely changed my figure design (as I always do) and the clothes were more or less obsolete . So, for me it would definitely be really nice to have one-size-fits-all clothes. I am more than curious for all the VaM 2.x changes. Thank you for the helpful hints!

 

[thicbear]

@TToby I finally figure out how to get clothes to not warp much or at all on more extreme morphed looks. The biggest issue is it looks really bad on the base model but perfect on the

Base Model - Front View The collar bone area to the adams apple is very wonky along with the straps from the armpit to the belt.	Morph Model - Front View The collar bone is now curved naturally along the pecks while the straps from the armpit to the belt sit flat.

Base Model - Back View Armpit area is a mess but that's also due to the A pose converted to a T pose for import. But the hip and shoulder area has some wonk in it.	Morph Model - Back View ​ Armpit area is fixed a bit more but along the shoulders and hips we have straighter lines.

I'm using 3ds max and skin warp is your friend. You have to make the cloths on the final morph target and then in 3dsmax you have invert the morph back to the base mesh.

If you're interested I can run through it in more detail but I'm just glad I found a fix for more extreme morphs.

 

[TToby]

Hi, thank you very much for your kind and detailed description!
Question: Is this new cloth item working correctly only on the extreme morph model, or does it work correct on the standard model, too?
As I understand, it has now distortions on the standard model?

I did something similar, but without 3dMax which I do not own:
- I first created a combined morph from the extreme morph model.
- Then I imported that combined morph into DAZ3D.
- In DAZ I prepared my cloth items as usual, then I dialed in the imported morph, so that the Genesis 2 model looks like the extreme morph model in VaM.
- Then I auto-fitted the cloth items to this morphed figure and saved this for the VaM cloth-import as usual.
- In VaM I load my extreme morph model and then I open the cloth-importer to create the clothes for this morphed model.

That did it quite OK. The new clothes have much less distortions now.
Problem: If I want to use this clothes on one of my hundreds of other model or the standard figure, They have distortions again. They only works correctly for that single model I made them for, or quite similar ones.

As I said above, it would be ideal, if one cloth item would fit every figure, as all thet steps are quite time consumpting and I can't make new versions of clothes for every figure.

Till now, the only way to archive this without using physics, is AFAIK to make clothes with very few polygones... because on import, VaM joints points of the figure's body to polygones of the cloth-item. Less jointed points = less distortions.

 

[thicbear]

NP!

Yeah, exactly what you've said will happen. Just due to the nature of how it uses the poly / verts of the base mesh to lay the cloth down. Until you SIM it, on male models it's harder because the whole hip/butt/groin area doesn't collide with cloth so I'm going to have to lay the clothe with no-sim on the thiccer models and just sim the groin area.

I'm just going to work with bigger models so I'll be set and just make sure I let everyone know it doesn't work with GENERIC male types.

Anyways, thanks for the chats on this - it's great knowing other people are dealing with the same quirks of the system

 

[fubar_life123]

Clothing in VaM is using a wrap system and not a skin weight system. What it does is it takes the clothing mesh and the base Genesis 2 figure mesh and tries to bind each vertex on the clothing mesh to a face (quad or triangle) on the figure mesh. Then when the base mesh is morphed or joints are moved, the clothing vertices move accordingly based on the figure face they are bound to. This can cause some distortion in cases where the clothing mesh density doesn't closely match the underlying figure mesh. In addition to this, VaM is using a smoothing algorithm based on Laplacian smooth for both post-skin figure mesh and the wrapped clothing mesh. This can cause additional issues, but in most cases helps with the mesh distortion post-skin and wrap. You can try messing with the smooth passes control found in User Preferences to see this. If you use sim clothing, it can also do a bit better with this issue because the simulation tries to make the clothing comply to its original form through physics. You could try turning on sim for the item to see if it helps. You can actually have a blend between wrap and sim weighting by messing with Set Uniform Sim Texture. This is shown here:

View attachment 2147

2.X will likely have an all new subdivision and smoothing system that should work better than what 1.X has, but I'm still planning to have "Wrap" clothing as an option because it makes clothing work seamlessly with figure morphs and figure posing.

I noticed that with the stock glasses that come with VaM there is no influence from eye morphs, yet with glasses created by community members, morphs are distorting the vertices of the glasses, even with blinking.

Is there a way to disable vertex binding selectively and just SCALE the clothing asset (X,Y,Z) according to the scale of the connected body part? This would be useful for ridged or semi-ridged clothing accessories such as shoes, eye-wear, belts, jewelry, etc... Better yet, it would be nice to have a float, dialing the amount of binding occurs relative to the original "shape" of the clothing asset (as the reference), much like you can dial the amount of "skin joint strength" or "stiffness" if physics sim is enabled.

So essential a morph float between original clothing asset vertex arrangement (shape) and the host body parts vertex arrangement.

Moreover, when creating the clothing asset it would be useful to zone-off sub-parts (of a whole) that behave differently than the rest of the geometry (ex. belt buckle vs the belt or toe of a shoe vs the heel and ankle part of the shoe - for open toe shoes).

Laplacian smoothing is helpful but does not deal with more extreme morphs like toe bends or eye movement morphs. I know physics sim helps to conserve the original form. Maybe this is more of an issue with the content creators and how they construct the clothing assets and not really a game engine issue? Because it seems that physics sim already is capable of doing what I'm describing (as you alluded to above). Complicated stuff!

 

[urukyay]

I'm using 3ds max and skin warp is your friend. You have to make the cloths on the final morph target and then in 3dsmax you have invert the morph back to the base mesh.

If you're interested I can run through it in more detail but I'm just glad I found a fix for more extreme morphs.

Hi,
How exactly does the VaM result match what you made originally, or did you edit the mesh at all after skin wrapping to the base figure, like smoothing it or something like that? I'm trying something similar with blender, and the surface deform modifier - which is supposed to be the equivalent to the skin wrap modifier ( ? can't really confirm ) - and it's not exact.
There are some expected weird artifacts in the wrapped mesh, which I hoped would revert back to normal in VaM, but they don't quite. I guess it's to be expected with anything other than the exact inverse of what VaM does to wrap?

As for the process, it's exporting the morphed figure, then zeroing it out and exporting it again as base, then importing both in the 3d editor and joining as morphs or shape keys in there, right? Or maybe there's some quicker way?

 

[thicbear]

Hi,
How exactly does the VaM result match what you made originally, or did you edit the mesh at all after skin wrapping to the base figure, like smoothing it or something like that? I'm trying something similar with blender, and the surface deform modifier - which is supposed to be the equivalent to the skin wrap modifier ( ? can't really confirm ) - and it's not exact.
There are some expected weird artifacts in the wrapped mesh, which I hoped would revert back to normal in VaM, but they don't quite. I guess it's to be expected with anything other than the exact inverse of what VaM does to wrap?

As for the process, it's exporting the morphed figure, then zeroing it out and exporting it again as base, then importing both in the 3d editor and joining as morphs or shape keys in there, right? Or maybe there's some quicker way?

Hey!

You're right, as in, it's not an exact science. I've also noticed new / different results over the last few updates of VaM. I can't quite put my finger on it. I did find a different approach, when I get some time I'll do a step by step on it. I've also broken the body up into upper and lower.

Upper (tops and so on) I use the final morph to sim over.
Lower (pants and so on) I use the original base model.

For a jump suit I've got a hybrid model where the Lower blends into the original base model and I sim across that to create the best results.

Good luck, I'll put something together later on - on the other approach I found.