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Workflow Advise on posing


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Hi there.

I have a character on T-Pose and simply want to make his arms rest by the side of his torso. If for some reason I need to change his arms position again, how can I do this? Everything is on the same layer, so there is no way of selecting only his arms without interfering on his chest with the selection.

Does anyone have a workflow?

Would be nice to be able to select his arms in retopo room and use this selection on sculpt room, for example.

Thanks!

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Thanks, but I don't think it suits my needs though. My arms are already posed but can't lift them without selecting the torso. :(

While the painting conditions are a good thing, for this specific task it does not work.

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When you make any kind of selection in the Pose tool, you can always switch to the PAINT select mode and use it additively or substractively. So, for example, if you use the LINE selection method to select a limb, but have some spill over, onto the torso....you would want to switch to PAINT select mode and use either a brush or shape marquee to remove the spill over. What I often do is...

1) Cache the layer and peform the Pose operation on a lower SubD level proxy

2) Use PAINT select mode > either freeform lasso or closed spline to select limb

3) Use a Brush draw mode in E-Panel > hold the SHIFT key and brush the area I want to smooth

4) Pose with either standard gizmo or FFD cage

 

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You can also save your T-pose selection before moving the arms closer to the body. When you are ready to move the arms to another position, reload the selection.

Another method to test:

Create a clone of the model or save as a different 3DC file name.

Use the split tool in a sense to create your own mannequin. That way you can transform the model. Merge the layers together when done and of course there will be some clean up necessary. Whenever I do posing, accepting some cleanup is just part of it atm in 3DC..

posesave.PNG

Edited by digman
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Thanks, @AbnRanger and @digman.

 

At first sight, the save and load selection looked like a good ideia. However, after doing some posing, I tried to reload a selection and this message is shown: "mesh structure was changed and stored selection can't be applied to the mesh"

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18 minutes ago, dimitribastos said:

Thanks, @AbnRanger and @digman.

 

At first sight, the save and load selection looked like a good ideia. However, after doing some posing, I tried to reload a selection and this message is shown: "mesh structure was changed and stored selection can't be applied to the mesh"

Darn,  it always pays to test, I normally do but very busy today... sorry about that... One would assume that it would not make a difference. I would like to see that changed at some point.

Edited by digman
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1 hour ago, dimitribastos said:

Thanks, @AbnRanger and @digman.

 

At first sight, the save and load selection looked like a good ideia. However, after doing some posing, I tried to reload a selection and this message is shown: "mesh structure was changed and stored selection can't be applied to the mesh"

It should work if nothing has been done to the model, like using LiveClay for  localized tessellation, switching to voxel mode and back, etc. But if you are loading it in the same setting and nothing has changed with the structure of the mesh, then getting that error message is a bug that should be reported.

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Just did a quick test on the default human figure and SAVE/RELOAD works. Something must have changed with the mesh. If you store a pose selection, then cache the layer, you have naturally changed the vertex order and thus 3D Coat doesn't know what verts to select since they have changed. 

A stored selection in a non-cached state will work on the same non-cached mesh. A stored selection in a cached state will only work on the same cached proxy. You cannot mix them. And if you make any kind of changes (that would alter the vertex order) to your mesh after you stored the selection, you nullify that selection.

149437286013.jpg

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 Save---Load does indeed work as expected. Testing would have shown my error in assuming on my part that transforming a selection would not affect the store selection. I assumed incorrectly...

EDIT--- I tested the Tweak room. There you can store a selection, do your transforming of the selected area, Remove the selection, then reload the selection you save and it works, you get no error message about the mesh being altered. Now the mesh is only being transformed, no reordering of the vertices so I see why that works.

Pose tool in the sculpt room is re-sampling the mesh to compete the transformation altering the vertex order... The surface representation in voxel mode (triangles) gets their vertices reordered. Surface mode true polygons the same. Being busy, I did not let my brain catch up... :blink:

Edited by digman
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I can't not work in Tweak Room. Tried to transform something there once without any sucess. Can't any tutorial on 3D-Coat Youtube Page as well. :(
Do you guys @digman and @AbnRanger have some vídeos for Tweak Room?

Also, I will try again store selections.

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I was just mentioning the tweak room as to arriving at my conculsions not that is where you want to work, sorry I did not mention that clearly... 

Tweak room is best for lower polygon models... 

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1 minute ago, dimitribastos said:

Yeah, I know. I was trying with some retopo mesh.

The Tweak room is really just that. Just for minor tweaks. It is an old legacy toolset, that does even have matching transform gizmos. Andrew doesn't want to do any work in that room because he said he may remove it entirely from 3D Coat. It could be useful for posing, since it has gradient selection, but your cannot gradient select multiple objects at the same time, and you cannot manipulate the transform gizmo like you can in the Retopo or Sculpt room.

I've asked Andrew to consolidate the Retopo Mesh and Paint Mesh, so what you eliminated the Tweak Room and the UV room. That way it's just one mesh. If you want to pose, or edit the geometry, there is no need to send copies or replace meshes. It's all the same mesh. He agreed it would be a good idea, but it's one of those things that would require a lot of deep coding work, so he will be reluctant to do it. He likes to work on things that he can get done quickly and move on to the next.

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23 minutes ago, dimitribastos said:

The new improvements on Paint Room are wonderfull. Hope to see the same love on Sculpt Room.

Better posing tools are needed... My opinion here but something similar to Mudbox's armature setup... You create the armature and you have weight painting as well. The armature is saved with the file and can access it through all subdivision levels... It is not an advanced armature in Mudbox but atm better than what 3DC has currently. I use Mudbox as a companion software to 3DC. It has posing, a good autopo as well, subdivision and sculpt layers plus creation of true vector displacement. 3DC has more extensive tools for sculpting but for 80 bucks a year, how can you beat it as a companion software to 3DC.

 I just hope Autodesk does not kill it off like they do with a lot of their software or merge it into Maya and Maya LT.

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2 hours ago, digman said:

Better posing tools are needed... My opinion here but something similar to Mudbox's armature setup... You create the armature and you have weight painting as well. The armature is saved with the file and can access it through all subdivision levels... It is not an advanced armature in Mudbox but atm better than what 3DC has currently. I use Mudbox as a companion software to 3DC. It has posing, a good autopo as well, subdivision and sculpt layers plus creation of true vector displacement. 3DC has more extensive tools for sculpting but for 80 bucks a year, how can you beat it as a companion software to 3DC.

 I just hope Autodesk does not kill it off like they do with a lot of their software or merge it into Maya and Maya LT.

They pretty much have killed it off. It's not had any upgrades for about 3yrs now. This is how they treated Combustion and Toxik. They are just trying to milk what they can out of it before officially putting the kibosh on it.

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Thanks, @AbnRanger.

A couple of questions regarding this workflow:

Is it possible to use a retopo mesh with UVs on the cloth tool? Or is it better to use AUTOPO on the new cloth and then proceed to painting?

 

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2 hours ago, dimitribastos said:

Thanks, @AbnRanger.

A couple of questions regarding this workflow:

Is it possible to use a retopo mesh with UVs on the cloth tool? Or is it better to use AUTOPO on the new cloth and then proceed to painting?

 

You can use any mesh in the Retopo room. Whatever is visible will used as a cloth object. The nice part about it is, after you run the cloth sim, you can send a copy of that sim'ed mesh to the Retopo room as your new retopo object. That is shown in the last video in that series.

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Great series. The cloth tool is really powerfull.

So, I'm thinking on a workflow for my character.

1- Sculpt torso and arms in separate layers
2 - Retopologize each one and later make all the polygons into one layer, conecting them
3 - Use this new retopo layer with the cloth tool in order to create folds
4 - send it back the result to the retopo room and continue with baking and painting.

What do you think? @AbnRanger and @digman

 

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First, I would like to applaud AbnRanger for his deep knowledge of 3DC. Anyone viewing his fine tutorials will learn the many powerful features and functions of 3DCoat. I am sure AbnRanger will stop in and add his very experienced knowledge. Also some of the below information you might know already but I put it here just in case and for newer users...

I create a backup copy of the original 3DC file in case something goes wrong which you might do already.

1. Sounds good. Able to pose the arms that way.

2.Thumbs up.

You might know this but you can conform the retopo mesh to the transformation of the voxel or surface mode object using the Pose , Transform or Move tool.  The pose tool  and Move tool allows transforming through all volumes if needed. 

Conform Retopo Mesh and Though all Volumes is the left top part of 3DC's GUI.  

There generally is some mesh relaxing in the retopo room after the operation plus sometimes manual cleanup.

For FYI-----Even after you bake for your normal map you can send the retopo mesh to the sculpt room. Do transformations and then rebake those transformations back to the paint room keeping your normal map intact plus any textures created. Not sure if AbnRanger has made a video on that yet. I used the method recently to create several different poses for a character... without losing the normal map or original photogrammetry textures. They do not get stretched but re-baked to the new transformation.  I would show you but they are under a NDA agreement.

3. Another sounds good.

4. Bake away...

5. Do not forget to use "Names Correspondence" under the bake menu when baking so you do not get occlusion errors when the baking the body layer and cloth layer. AbnRanger has a video on that. The retopo layers and the voxel / surface mode layers names must be name the same for this method to work correctly.

Picture relates to transforming bake retopo meshes

update_mesh.jpg

Edited by digman
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6 hours ago, dimitribastos said:

Great series. The cloth tool is really powerfull.

So, I'm thinking on a workflow for my character.

1- Sculpt torso and arms in separate layers
2 - Retopologize each one and later make all the polygons into one layer, conecting them
3 - Use this new retopo layer with the cloth tool in order to create folds
4 - send it back the result to the retopo room and continue with baking and painting.

What do you think? @AbnRanger and @digman

 

You could use  the HIDE tool in Voxel mode to hide parts of the body that you don't want auto retopo'ed, when creating a quick cloth mesh. Similar approach as you see here:

 

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