CGTalk - rigid binding, topology, and shoulder woes

View Full Version : rigid binding, topology, and shoulder woes

Tiberius

09-11-2002, 11:29 PM

Here is an image of some shoulder woes I am suffering with Renderware's animation system.

Renderware uses a rigid binding system that allows blending of up to 4 links to influence a vertex (that translates to roughly 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%). That isn't a problem usually, but since this is my first high-poly character using Character Studio and Renderware, naturally the shoulders (and butt) are looking more like twisted rags and broken glass than human body parts.

I admittedly made the mistake of thinking I could grab an old 18,000 poly character and reshape her into a 4,000 poly PS2 friendly model with no problem. It seems my modeling methods have changed dramatically since the old 3ds DOS days and I had a heck of a time untangling that old poly heavy mesh into anything usable. Given the chance to start over, I would simply go the "from scratch" route and save a lot of headaches, but hindsight ...you know the rest.

I am just looking for suggestions to help alleviate the shearing problem evident in the small bottom center image.

Thanks all.

davemcd

09-20-2002, 05:19 AM

hmmm....

I'm not sure i quite get what you are getting at with the percentages you mention.... YOu should be able to have any combination of weights across up to 4 bones for it (adding up to 1). For example bone01: 0.12, bone02:0.36, bone03:0.25, bone04:0.27. I cant see any reason why your shoulders should look that bad. What i tend to do is set verts on a characters pose. So i'd typically add a pose key at about frame 10 (keeping your initial pose at frame 0) and intercatively up the vertex weights etc to get the look i want.... you typically have to skip between a few poses and change the weights around to get a balance.

DaveMcD

Tiberius

09-21-2002, 09:02 AM

Actually this topic has turned into a huge discussion over on cgchat.com. The problem seems to be that no one is entirely sure what Renderware is or isn't capable of supporting where vertex assignments are concerned. I am, in fact, biting the bullet and trying manual vertex weights with the hope that they will translate properly. The documentation seems to imply that blended links may be set, but that each link gets an equal share of the vertex influence pie (hence the 25%, 33%, etc.). I don't know for a fact that this is the case, hence the vertex weight test (which would be great if it works).

--Tiberius

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