Cineversity

Please help me understand “Character” in version 13.

I think I am almost there.  I can build an advanced biped, but with the attached model things go a bit wrong.

Once I hit “animate” in the character menu the head (a sphere) goes a strange shape as if it is connected to the arms section in some way.

Another problem is the dress is intersecting and looks jagged and messy, can this be fixed easily so it looks like cloth?

Please tell me what I am doing wrong.

Many thanks

Neil.

hey neilypeely.

It just looks like you have the default auto-weighting applied(via the Bind tab). Typically, it’s not going to give you perfect results, and you will need to go in and paint the weights to fix problem areas like the head and such(which is as you say, other joints have an influence on the mesh there that shouldn’t normally do that.)

As for the dress, it won’t really look like cloth when being bound. It should at the best just follow along as if it were like painted on the character, getting folds and such from cloth is difficult to achieve just through joints and weights.

I hope this helps.

Hi Bret,

Thanks so much for getting back to me.

Sorry for being dumb but where is the “Bind” tab??  Do you mean “Binding” tab?  If so I can’t find anywhere inside there that mentions auto-weighting?

Many thanks

Neil.

Sorry, yes the Binding tab.

Basically what happens is when you put a Mesh into that list in the Binding Tab, it internally runs the Bind Command(which is found in the character>commands menu). What the bind command does, is it takes specific joints, and then mesh, and then automatically adds a skin deformer as a child or sibling of your mesh, and then adds a weight tag to the mesh as well and fills this tag with all the necessary joints. Then it runs an Auto-weight command which applies weighting to the joints based on some algorithm. The problem is the algorithm isn’t always correct and some points on the mesh get bound to joints they shouldn’t. So you have to go in and fix them by painting weights with the weight tool or through the weights manager.

Brilliant thanks Bret.

OK that all makes sense and I am almost there…

My last question: I have added a texture to the sphere of a simple face but as the character moves the face/texture stays static and doesn’t move with the sphere.  Hope that makes sense.

It’s as if its set to “frontal” but its set to “spherical” so not sure why this is happening in the render.  Any suggestions to fix this please!

Many thanks

Neil.

Wrong screen grab.  Here you go…

Ignor this problem as I have now got the answer which was:

If you control click the material tag and then select, ‘generate UVW coordinates’, that should do it.