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Separating head and body

globallyglobally Posts: 122
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hello,

I have been tweaking a custom character for a couple of months now using a mix of morphs and custom morphs I made through blender. I was really happy with the results so i exported and made a single full body and head morph (I think this was a big mistake). I then made a few more tweaks over the next few weeks and am finally at the point where I'm 100% happy. Now my problem is that I'm getting some weird wrinkling in the forehead when I have the characters eyes looking up, even slightly. I've been working round this by using hair with bangs but I’d like to fix it properly. I had read on here that I could fix the problem by dialing in individual morphs to see which causes the problem but I think I have too many baked in for that to work. I’d now like to split the head and body morph (this is gen 8.1 so I don't think the dev tool weight map head split would work) so I can use the body I'm happy with and start fresh on the head. Does anyone know the best way to do this or any other way to sort my wrinkly forehead issue?

thanks in advance.

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,728

    It's probably a demonstration of one of the reasons that exporting an OBJ and importing that as a single morph is a bad idea - you lose any links to corrective morphs for joint bends and morphs, such as expressions. If you still have separate OBJ files for the tweaks, or the final tweaked result as OBJ and the original mix of settings and new shapes you could roll back - load in the figure with the pre-consolidated set up, then import the final shape as a morph with Reverse Deformations enabled - that shoudl give a new morph to add to al the others that will get the same end-result, but with the pre-existing corrective links still in place.

  • globallyglobally Posts: 122

    Richard Haseltine said:

    It's probably a demonstration of one of the reasons that exporting an OBJ and importing that as a single morph is a bad idea - you lose any links to corrective morphs for joint bends and morphs, such as expressions. If you still have separate OBJ files for the tweaks, or the final tweaked result as OBJ and the original mix of settings and new shapes you could roll back - load in the figure with the pre-consolidated set up, then import the final shape as a morph with Reverse Deformations enabled - that shoudl give a new morph to add to al the others that will get the same end-result, but with the pre-existing corrective links still in place.

    yeah now I've done it I can see that joining all my morphs in to one was a bad idea and unfortunately I no longer have any of the many OBJs or any idea which of the million other morphs I used. I am really happy with my character so the only issue is the wrinkling forehead. As I can't easily "roll back" the only way I see to fix this problem is to split the head and body, dial in the body morph on a new gen 8.1 and then start the head from scratch again (easy enough as I think it was just one character and a couple of tweaks). Is this at all possible or do you know of another way? Would this involve making my own head/body split thingy with a weight map d-former? As you may be able to tell if this is the only way I’d probably need to be pointed to a good tutorial to do this.

    thanks for the reply Richard.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,728

    If you are going to be working it over the simplest option might be to click the heart icon on the slider to make it a favourit, unfavourite any others, then use the Geometry Editor to select the bits you don't want in the morph (you can probably just click the +s next to the bone group names in tool settings), right-click>Selection Mode>Vertex selection (which should then convert the selection you had), right-click>Morph Editing>Clear Selected Deltas from favourites. You can then save that out as an updated morph and edit from there, probably needing to smooth the transition at the neck a bit.

  • globallyglobally Posts: 122

    Richard Haseltine said:

    If you are going to be working it over the simplest option might be to click the heart icon on the slider to make it a favourit, unfavourite any others, then use the Geometry Editor to select the bits you don't want in the morph (you can probably just click the +s next to the bone group names in tool settings), right-click>Selection Mode>Vertex selection (which should then convert the selection you had), right-click>Morph Editing>Clear Selected Deltas from favourites. You can then save that out as an updated morph and edit from there, probably needing to smooth the transition at the neck a bit.

     

    Thank you so much Richard. I think this is the kinda fix I was looking for. Just gave it a quick go and the head did remain as the stock gen 8.1 and the body morphed, but the head stayed in place (in space) while the body morphed resulting in a very squashed neck. Is this the neck issue you were talking about? I should be able to fix it in blender.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,728

    globally said:

    Richard Haseltine said:

    If you are going to be working it over the simplest option might be to click the heart icon on the slider to make it a favourit, unfavourite any others, then use the Geometry Editor to select the bits you don't want in the morph (you can probably just click the +s next to the bone group names in tool settings), right-click>Selection Mode>Vertex selection (which should then convert the selection you had), right-click>Morph Editing>Clear Selected Deltas from favourites. You can then save that out as an updated morph and edit from there, probably needing to smooth the transition at the neck a bit.

     

    Thank you so much Richard. I think this is the kinda fix I was looking for. Just gave it a quick go and the head did remain as the stock gen 8.1 and the body morphed, but the head stayed in place (in space) while the body morphed resulting in a very squashed neck. Is this the neck issue you were talking about? I should be able to fix it in blender.

    Yes, that or a sharp step as the size of the figure changed - any big diference between base shape and morph is going to cause an issue with this method. It is possible to use a weight map (from a dForm) to filter the loading of an OBJ morph (if you exported the final shape as OBJ) but that wouldn't hae done much for the neck length issue in your case (not that I am prescient, it just seemed extra fiddle given that you were not wanting a final result from the process).

  • globallyglobally Posts: 122

    Richard Haseltine said:

    globally said:

    Richard Haseltine said:

    If you are going to be working it over the simplest option might be to click the heart icon on the slider to make it a favourit, unfavourite any others, then use the Geometry Editor to select the bits you don't want in the morph (you can probably just click the +s next to the bone group names in tool settings), right-click>Selection Mode>Vertex selection (which should then convert the selection you had), right-click>Morph Editing>Clear Selected Deltas from favourites. You can then save that out as an updated morph and edit from there, probably needing to smooth the transition at the neck a bit.

     

    Thank you so much Richard. I think this is the kinda fix I was looking for. Just gave it a quick go and the head did remain as the stock gen 8.1 and the body morphed, but the head stayed in place (in space) while the body morphed resulting in a very squashed neck. Is this the neck issue you were talking about? I should be able to fix it in blender.

    Yes, that or a sharp step as the size of the figure changed - any big diference between base shape and morph is going to cause an issue with this method. It is possible to use a weight map (from a dForm) to filter the loading of an OBJ morph (if you exported the final shape as OBJ) but that wouldn't hae done much for the neck length issue in your case (not that I am prescient, it just seemed extra fiddle given that you were not wanting a final result from the process).

    Thanks Richard, that seems to have sorted it.

  • lukon100lukon100 Posts: 803

    Here is a product that might help you in the fututre, with making morphs for head and body separately: https://benalive.gumroad.com/l/TzIXe

    I say it MIGHT help because I really don't know precisely what it does or how it works. I'm only just begining to understand the process of making rigged figure morphs in external modelers like Blender.

    There is a link to a video totorial that I just now viewed about how to use the product that shows it's value to be in assuring that the head morphs will end up in the right place (the right position in the Y axis) when you make the head morph separately.

    But while watching that video, I also begin to see how morphs can be made for head and body separately.

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