Messiah Project Log - Mech by Layer01 - WIP

#7

Great to see this - I don’t know how you find the time?! Keep it up!

#8

Hey Peter, the problem with your metaeffector influence is that you have some bones that haven’t any weight assigned to them, thus they take influence over the whole mesh, on top of the weighted bones. You should assign an effector to every bone in your scene, this should solve your problem.

#9

even with direct weighting on?
ok thanks i’ll keep that in mind as i finish “MetaEffecting” the mech :smiley:

#10

Make your skeleton. Disable the influence of bones on the mesh of the robot.

parent each piece of the robot to the corresponding bone, keeping the orientation and position.

Dont worry about meta effectors. you will save yourself alot of time…

#11

You got Joe Cosman CDs on metaeffectors?

#12

Is that adressed to me?

I dont understand why weight and metaeffectors are even in the picture, even if you do hafve something on your mechanical mech that deforms rather then pivots, most of the rig can be just parent based and save you ALOT of time and effort.

#13

I was going to suggest this to Peter too, but the objects go all over the place when I parent it to the bone.

Stooch, is there something like ‘parent in place’ in Messiah? So when I parent something it will not follow the parent’s transformation/rotation.

I’ve been dying to know how to do this in Messiah.

Thanks!

#14

I always thought weightmapping was for organic stuff… and Mechs like these are better off with parenting.

But I want to see someone pull it off anyway, so hats off to you Peter. :thumbsup:

#15

setup -> items -> parent items

check Keep Position and/or Keep Alignment

hope that’s what you’re looking for?

#16

yep thats the stuff. for some reason you must use those buttons in messiah, otherwise if you drag and drop it wont parent in place. just a quirk of messiah that i hope is addressed in the future.

#17

Thanks Jipe… however… I think I’m missing the block for the Parent Item:

Weird… maybe I should re-install. :curious:

#18

Hmmm wouldn’t this only work if i had the seperate parts of the mech as different onjects? cause as it is it imports as one big object…as far as messiah seems to be concerned its leg is the same mesh as its head etc etc
unless i’m missing something here.

i thought about re exporting it in chuncks, but i got into this battle with the effectors and wanted to not give in lol :wink:

which one is that? the “rigging 2” one…with the dog and tate? i have that one, but i’ve only done tates body, notb his head yet…i need to do that i know lol, its just so hard not to just jump into it straight away.

anyway thanks for all the support guys :beer:

and shadowfork, its odd that you seem to be missing the block, i’ll check in a bit if i have it too.

#19

But isn’t this better in the long run? I mean, setting this up will be quicker than modifying each part with a metaeffector.

In theory (if i only got that parent block working)…
you would just have to :

  1. parent each object to the bones
  2. Bam! All set to be animated.

Against Metaeffecting (6 steps):

  1. Add an effector
  2. Add mesh to weightlist
  3. Add metaeffector tool
  4. Grab the metaeffector tool and parent it to the bone
  5. Set the area of influence of the effector
  6. Assight the Metaeffector tool on the bone block (weight)

But then again, if ‘metaeffecting’ is faster for you, and you can make it work, then I would definitely like to see your workflow.

:applause:

#20

yeah you have to make separate objects. but honestly thats far far far less work then what you are doing. and really, i admire your will to solve it, but it shouldnt be your method of choice, why make it harder on yourself?

#21

when you say seperate objects, do you mean he has to save out seperate files for each piece of the model? ie. head file, leg file, arm file, etc… ? Is it possible for messiah to import a file that has all the meshes and for messiah to recognize them as being seperate?

George

#22

In Modo if I save an LWO file out with each piece on a separate layer it will bring it in to messiah so that each piece can be used separately. So one LWO file, but separate parts. I assume that an LWO file from Lightwave would work the same way.

#23

Hmm… i wonder if that works the same way with maya…

#24

well my original reason for sticking with the MetaEffector was this:

In silo the mirroring is a little lame atm, so i had to merge the leg into one single object so i could mirror it (it was that or mirror each individual piece seperatly). add to that, that i had neglected to keep the object centered properly and so the mirroring didn’t work automaticaly, so each bit would have to be eye-balled, which would take yonks to do.

and then i’d have to pair them off into sections and save them out multiple times…my lazyness kicks in about here :wink:

That was until Alex_K kindly pointed out, in IRC, that i had it all wrong lol, in fact its going to be a piece of cake to seperate the objects in Silo and i wont have to re mirror and re scale etc etc…so yeah, i’ll let the effectors drop now…now that i am satisfied that i have them under control and Could use them if need be :stuck_out_tongue:

so atm i’m preping the mesh…and then the fun really begins :cool:

PS:
ShadowFork i checked and i do have the Parent block, so something wierd is going on in your messiah :surprised

#25

Well, I am glad I could be off help. Can’t wait to see that robot moving. :applause:

#26

OK new update time.

i’ve exported my object into individual sections of mesh (all 43 of them) and imported tem into messiah, parented them…so far so good…then i run into this problem

notice how the bones are not visible…except for when they are seen “through” certain mesh :surprised

thats a problem obviously lol.

the solution being to use expressions, this one in particular

but on top of that the object manager gets a bit messy with bits of object breaking up the bone sections etc…just not as nice visually :p, with the parenting option. so now its a question of whether writting an expression 43 times would be faster than the original MetaEffector way ack

anyway here is the scene file to pick apart