Transferring Weight Maps

mtl1

I have one figure (Figure 1) dialed into the shape of a completely different figure (Figure 2). If I use the transfer utility to transfer the weight maps (with merge heirarchies on), shouldn't the transferred weight map be accurate, give or take a few minor inaccuracies? Most of the weight maps transferred over correctly, but some vertices were completely missed or just plain wrong -- around the mouth, for instance. I was under the impression that weight maps were transferred by projection and would interpolate itself to nearby vertices...

I got around this issue by manually fixing the errors post-transfer, but I'm trying to figure out why the transfer didn't work as expected.

edit: I've tried using adaptive tolerance and near vertices, but they crash DAZ Studio...

Thomas Windar

An automated process will never be perfect - is my usual answer to such things.

Someone more in the know can probably explain this better than me - but the main idea is that Transfer Utility in a lot of cases is "guessing" where to put its stuff. It will never be 100% perfect, especially if the mesh of the Source figure does not match the mesh of the Receiver EXACTLY. (meaning that even the position of each point is precisely that of the source figure).

Transfer Utility is there to do "most of the work" but you will always have to fix stuff. 

mtl1

Thanks for your reply... that was kind of the answer I was expecting.

What kind of bugs me is why adaptive tolerances and near vertices would cause DAZ to crash...

Thomas Windar

My best guess there is that you entered too low or too high a value for them. This caused it to calculate something ridiculous and it crashed the program. You can check the error log to see if it did something stupid there. 

mtl1

Yeah I'll take another look at it later tonight and see what the results are. The results from my experiments were actually shockingly good, but it's the weight-map transfer that is a bit quirky.

Mythmaker

But the thing is....is our idea of 'nearby vertices' also Transfer Utility's idea of 'nearby vertices'?

I'm curious too but haven't touched the newer (post 4.8?) adaptive tolerance/ nearness stuff much, settling for manual post weight edit for now. But no crashing when marking around.

mtl1

@Mythmaker, to shed more light into this problem, I encountered it when I autofitted G2F onto G3F -- even with the transfer utility. Eyes and mouth rigs were corrupted the most. What's worse is that there's seemingly no reason why the mouth/lips would turn all melty -- there are enough nearby vertices for the lip weight maps to transfer... unless projection doesn't work too well for internal anatomy?

Mythmaker

mtl1 said:

 why the mouth/lips would turn all melty -- there are enough nearby vertices for the lip weight maps to transfer... unless projection doesn't work too well for internal anatomy?

Autofit is too crude for this. I've never gotten the inner mouth to TU transfer properly so far. Kinda expected things won't work where verts are just too close.

Don't plan to TU a full character with G3 as source anyhow. Too many face bones to deal with afterwards. 

mtl1

Mythmaker said:

mtl1 said:

 why the mouth/lips would turn all melty -- there are enough nearby vertices for the lip weight maps to transfer... unless projection doesn't work too well for internal anatomy?

Autofit is too crude for this. I've never gotten the inner mouth to TU transfer properly so far. Kinda expected things won't work where verts are just too close.

Don't plan to TU a full character with G3 as source anyhow. Too many face bones to deal with afterwards. 

@Mythmaker: for reference, check out my thread in my signature. I've gotten it to mostly work, but the mouth rig (and now the eye rig) needs some manual weight-map adjustment.

I have another hypothesis concerning weight maps and how I can transfer it over, but I'm not sure if DAZ is actually capable of it...