Weighting Armor

[Nephenee13]

I've got a good grasp on weighting stuff for BBB, but I've figured out that sometimes you have to weight clothes/armor in other locations as well, to help prevent clipping. Are there any guidelines to this, or do you just have to do trial and error?

 

I've found that butts are a big offender in this department.

[Striker879]

I wonder if a different tack may be easier. What if, rather than weighting the clipping body parts to the armor, you altered those body parts to not clip? Have a look at what Septfox did with the FLY Dark Brotherhood armor - Mesh tweaks and additions for an example of what I'm suggesting.

[Septfox]

Yea, that's pretty much the only way to 100% prevent clipping; make sure there's nothing there to clip in the first place. Remove everything that the player wouldn't see under normal circumstances anyway. Makes the GPU have to do less work when it comes to rendering it as well.

 

Otherwise, just make sure the two surfaces have as close to the same weighting as possible. When it comes to someplace relatively rigid (like well, the butt), try copying the weights from the regions that the armor is clipping through onto the armor itself. You run into other problems as well (like the tail end of your hard steel cuirass following your butt around like a lost puppy), but at least it gives you something to start with.

 

That's my two cents, anyway. I'm still pretty much a n00b when it comes to modeling, weighting especially; this is just what I've observed so far.

 

 

Soooo I guess the guideline in this case would be "remove what underlying faces and vertices you can without impacting aesthetics, play with weighting until it works". And remember that in simple modeling, and especially with Oblivion's relatively simple skeleton, it's not always possible to kill off every tiny little bit of clipping.

Edited December 24, 2011 by Septfox

[Nephenee13]

I said armor, but I'm really dealing more with clothing at the moment. Skirts especially I've noticed tend to have parts of the butt start clipping when you go into fighting stance. So far I've been able to fix it by tweaking a few vertices and weighting portions of the skirt.

 

I also had clipping on the underarms, I guess I could have deleted part of the torso mesh in that case, but weighting took care of it.

 

Is there any good way to check animations other than loading it up into the game itself?

[Septfox]

Well, again...generally better to outright remove things than to work around them. But, I have no idea what length of skirt you're working with, so you're in a better position to tell which way is better. Wow, I just used "better" three times. Bettererer. Hurr.

 

Also, if you're not using them already, I find the NaRae pose packs to be pretty decent for mesh-checking. They have a fairly wide variety of bending/twisting/stretching poses.

 

What modeler are you using? In 3ds Max, it's as simple as loading the armor/clothing (with the full skeleton intact, missing bones will screw the animation up) followed by importing a .kf. I'm not sure how gmax/Blender/etc handle it, but there ought to be plenty of information about it lying around in the case of Blender.

 

Edit: 'course, you might not want to import them in 3ds, since it seems that it's saving the pose with the nif on export, for some reason...hrm...

Edit again: Seems that re-importing the skeleton will fix it. Still, somewhat annoying that there doesn't seem to be a simple button anywhere to toggle whether the animation is applied to the bones, and it certainly shouldn't be exporting the transforms into the nif...

Edited December 25, 2011 by Septfox