Joints Bones Armatures - Boneless Bird - Help!

kathrynloch

Where do I start?

Okay, so I have this golden eagle mesh. I've had it for a long while so I don't remember all the ins and outs but I think I got it on Turbosquid. It came rigged, fully posable and even has an animation. I have different file types too. 3ds, 3dmax, FBX, and obj.

Well, I tried importing the obj into DAZ - sorted through a host of issues - the main one was that the bird was invisible. Okay, no problem, I've dealt with that before, it's usually an opacity setting gone awry. So took care of that. And got the textures in place -first screenshot.

Not a bad looking bird, although there was definitely something wonky going on with some included transparency mats so I just said the heck with that and went with the standard diffuse, spec, bump, and normals.

But the problem is, my bird is boneless. So no rigging and sure enough the little icon in the Scene panel just shows it as geometry. Now wait a sec. I saw bones on that thing, I know I did. Coming in at 0 opacity when I hovered my mouse over the bird, DAZ reacted to the regions - second screenshot.

I can very clearly see bones in there. So I look all over the place, not a chicken bone to be seen. ;) But under the Surfaces tab, I see "wire" with a number listed. What the heck is a wire? Well the opacity is off for these as well, so I turn those up and turn off the feathers for a moment. And that's the third screenshot.

Now I've done rigging before but it was a long time ago on my trial version of C4D. But those are definitely bones. But wait just one more second. If those are bones that's got to be one heck of a screwed up hierarchy. I'm not very experienced at rigging, but there's one thing I do know - I HATE rigging hands and fingers.

But with birds, my understanding is the wings are rigged like hands - heck even realworld bone structure the wing is similar with fingers and stuff. Anyway, that's one wonky rigging system.

But wait there's more.

When I clicked on the joint tool in DAZ to see what it would do, it revealed the last screen shot - I reduced the opacity of everything so you can see it better. It looks more like armor scales than anything else.

So I have no clue what's up with this.

I tried pulling the different files into blender and DAZ but things usually scattered into a million pieces - probably because it can't make heads or tails of the hierarchy.

Now all I want is to be able to pose old birdy here. I'm not looking to do anything fancy yet. But because of the hierarchy I'm thinking I might have to re-rig him from the ground up. I can probably do that since I'm not animating him. Can I do that in DAZ and if so can someone point me to the appropriate tutorials? I'm a lynda.com member and I think I remember seeing something about rigging a wing in Blender on there. Maybe that would be the easiest way to go? But I'm even less familiar with Blender than I am with DAZ. I have Hexagon and Poser Debut and the knowledge scale slides to absolute zero on those.

Any suggestions which way I should go? Thanks!!!!

patience55

An answer for one question: Don't be concerned about the "wire" reference, that is but a name given to the material. Very safe thing to rename to something normal.

Richard Haseltine

OBJ doesn't include rigging, it's just a static mesh format. You could try importing the FBX, which will include rigging, but I wouldn't hold out any great hope of getting anything usable. The cones in your third screen shot are probably there to help with selection for bones to pose the feathers.

kathrynloch

Thank you Patience and Richard! I appreciate the info. Yeah the FBX looked like the bird went through a tornado. Literally, everything was in a spiral shape scattered all over the place. I did figure out how to kinda sorta start rigging in DAZ but it was scary confusing and way different from what I know. Blender seems more familiar on this aspect. But maybe I can get something to work in Poser Debut? I don't know I haven't even looked at it yet. Thanks again though!

Richard Haseltine

I'm not certain but I think rigging was one of the things Poser Debut lacked. If not it will, I'm fairly sure, be only the old-style rigging which you can also do in DS. Unfortunately rigging is still not very portable, even with FBX and Collada as intermediary formats - I get the impression some work is almost always required, for varying values of "some"