Hey guys...

I'm working on a new mesh using some of Al's shoes, and the lower leg is in .obj format. This is a pain in the butt to assign by hand, but in doing so, I made myself a handy dandy little chart of the assignments in the original lower leg and foot (I think I've left out a couple rows that were relatively straightforward a little further up) as I found it was very confusing once I got in there and started assigning trying to turn them off and on to compare one piece to another.

Dunno if anyone else will find it useful but it's what I needed for my own purposes, so maybe someone else will get some mileage out of it.

Wow! Cool! Very useful! Downloaded and moved to tutorial stash....

Now... What do you have on bone assignments for dresses or tunics that have been pulled down from above the knees to mid-calf or ankle?

Thx a lot downloaded and will put in use to make high heells!!!....oops me and the highheels
EDIT: dunno where to click for thx

HP:
That's some nice work to share with everyone.

Since we started, there have been a lot of golden nuggets of info like that which have been posted and aged out of view and out of mind. Some were on the old MTS2.

TiggeryPum started an infocenter to sweep things like this into. I hope she takes her broom to your post (not meaning a witch's broom).

<* Wes *>

porky - Nothing like this, but for that, I would look at a dress that is like that anyway. There is the one long gothic dress, and there are several aprons and coats as well that come down quite far. This chart was mainly made because... I normally end up doing something very much like it on little bits of paper, but... drawing circles around numbers near my sketched little mesh drawings, and cramped little notations of assignments, and it was just stupid. :D

I may share more of these as I make them - I found referring to this one hell of a lot easier than my coffee-stained hand-written notes, and hopefully clear enough to show to others.

Wes - I've posted it here first in hopes that... it'll get some visibility as a forum post and folks who might want to use it in future will see it. I'll copy the post and chuck it in the Infocenter in a couple days.

:0) This caused me to look at the vertices for my broken mesh - I'd wondered why there was no KNEE option. Knee vertices are assigned 50% to the thigh and 50% to the calf.

thanks! This poor porkypine needs to be led to the water... :0)

BTW, if anyone is doing Al's shoes...

I was using the 4" foot... and the front of the ankle will deform a little bit when the sim tilts forward on the leg if you use the original assignments. The front two vertices in the 86/14 row should be set to 50/50 to smooth that out. If you're using a rather high heel like I was, don't even bother with toe assignments. Just assign everything below the ankle 100% to the foot. Looks very realistic in heels and combined with the curve of the lower leg from Al's shoes, gives them a bit of a tottering look that's cute for a bit of a pinup feel.

Also, the ones I got that were separate from the leg were not double-sided, and pulled out from the foot a little - creating a transparency when looking inside the shoe close-up. Make sure to pull the vertices in on either side of the foot around the heel if you're using his shoes to avoid seeing air where you shouldn't. Doesn't make it perfect but it fixes it somewhat, and if it really bugs you, you could always duplicate and flip those faces.

Hello

I'm new to this (still sorting out my files) but I love meshing and used Al's 4" heels which of course look fantastic. What I was wondering about was if I should move the skeleton ankle/heel joint up a tad cos I'd attached high heels to a low heel skeleton?

What'd happen? or will the rotation of the foot remain roughly the same cos of the assigned vertices? Hmmm.....

Thanks,

Ursu

I didn't do any joint moving when I did my mesh with the 4" heel. Just assigned up the leg using the original Maxis assignments for each row, and then the whole foot is assigned 100% to foot all the way up to the ankle, to the 86/14 row, which has the front two vertices assigned 50/50 foot/calf. That seems to work pretty good - a fairly natural stance in all but the most extreme tiptoes kind of poses, no joint-moving necessary.

Don't try moving the joints on body meshes. It will only distort your mesh.

It is possible to move the joints on object meshes that have joints (it also requires editing the Resource Node) but it doesn't work on body meshes. I think the game pretty much ignores the joint information that is in the Resource Node of body meshes, editing it does nothing.

Hi!

Me again, I got my files sorted and decided to experiment
with the joint/skeleton, I was quite suprised!! - thinking
it would only affect the position of the bend of the ankle,
I moved the joint up 0.5 (meshB) and the heels seemed to
disappear somewhere....the first , 'MeshA', seems fine !!
does this mean theres a specific distance between joints
and vertices plotted somehow show in the 'comments'?

Thanks,

Ursu

Generally, when you move a bone the vertices go in the opposite direction. So the heels are likely underground. Here's how it works (geeky text alert):

When the mesh is loaded, the game establishes a distance/direction (a vector) from each vertex to every assigned bone joint location, based on the joint position recorded in the GMDC.

When the mesh is displayed and animated, it is manipulated by the game moving the bone joint positions that were stored in the CRES to the appropriate locations (based on the animation) and then using the previously computed vectors together with the skin weights to place the vertices in the proper location relative to the new joint position(s).

Why you had the odd effect is that when the bone was moved in the GMDC, the relationships were changed (because oof the new joint position), but the bone joint location used for display (generally, the ones in the appropriate age CRES of the character file for your Sim) remain in the original locations.

I put a number of hours of work into the R&D to figure out how to resave the GMDC with altered bone positions... but at present it is a nearly worthless feature. I keep thinking that someone will one day figure out all the right steps to alter a human shape in-game, and then they will need a tool to make the altered clothes meshes for that shape.

<* Wes *>

It's certainly not worthless, Wes - in fact it works great with "bone animated" object meshes. It would be impossible to edit car meshes without it, for example.

The procedure for cars (and other boned objects) is to use your plugins to relocate the joints as needed, and then to manually edit the bone location info in the Resource Node to match the new positions.

But unlike boned objects, the game doesn't seem to use any of the bone location information in the Resource node of body meshes. No matter what alterations I have tried on a body mesh resource node, nothing ever changes in the game.

I think Maxis may have originally intended to use this data just like it is done with objects but later changed things around.

I guess I haven't paid enough attention to object meshing over the last year... if it serves a useful purpose, then I say it was worth the time to develop it (the math sometimes comes hard).

I had some limited success, I think, editing the CRES bone location in the Sim character itself. I also crashed the game a number of times trying because at that time I had to edit the CRES in an external Hex Editor (SimPE has come a long way since then).

I never went back to that project. I should, given how much easier it would be now (I had a vision of a sim that looked like a dwarf). I still think there has to be some way this is done, because of the StretchSkeleton cheat (and the fact that you can permanentize this for a particular Sim).

I believe your reported results for changing the clothing CRES joint positions, because I believe the game creates a copy of a template CRES when the sim is created, and uses the values in that copy, together with the joint/vertex spatial relationship from the GMDC, to 'dress' the sim, and the only purpose the clothing cres serves is to define it for creation and loading.

<* Wes *>

Wes, this is most interesting... Even if this throws me in quaternion hell again when I gladly forgot what little I understood of the subject! lol

If there is a way to alter the characters's skeleton itself, of course this wouldn't necessarily work with all kinds of clothing; I mean, if we manage to alter the joints to match high heels in the character itself, then flat-heeled clothing will most probably look a bit weird on that sim.

But this could be very useful for new bodyshapes, since the edit would need to be consistent for all clothing worn by the character. I'm thinking of this issue I'm meeting with a very exaggerated muscle/superhero mesh I'm working on (doing this so I can put muscle behind and move on to other things): the shoulders are far from the upperarm bones, so even if I managed workarounds to get nice animations most of the time, the axis offset is still noticeable in some cases and there's nothing I can do about it.

Now, any modifications of that kind would need to be shared with users of the bodyshape; I'm wondering if this could be done by just sharing the edited sim and tell people to clone it, in case the altered CRES is retained that way) - else this would imply sharing the CRES itself, which wouldn't be so convenient for most users. Mmm lots of painful experiments ahead it seems...

Marvine, Dr Pixel says that he's not seen any evidence that the game _uses_ the body mesh's skeleton data (even when he's changed it by hand). But it still could be useful for objects, and that is still a big win, if so.

Yes, Tigggerypum, I'm fully aware of that since Dr Pixel and I both tried to do that at the same moment a while ago, when it appeared that the method worked on objects; more exactly, we tried that on clothing meshes without any success. I'm not knowledgeable enough about 3D mathematics to be sure that I used sensible values, but Dr Pixel has some real experience of the matter and he came to the same conclusion.

But Wes mentions a limited success with editing the CRES of the character file itself, and also the fact that we are able to stretch the skeleton in this same file - this seems to indicate another approach, that is worth trying at least.

I noticed SimPE now does some of the math conversions. But the quaternions are difficult to work with for me also. If you google up Martin Baker he has some excellent explanations and code sample conversions.

This is a very much an experimental thing. But then, I know you are an innovator yourself. I hope you can report anything you find, even if I'm all wet, over in the R&D thread so it will linger as reference material for others.

<* Wes *>

Thank you bunches for this HP!!! That made it so much easier doing the bone assignments!! *hugs*