ARTICLE

"Rigging
Painted Weight Rigging is the direction DAZ is going as opposed to Inclusion-Exclusion Sphere Rigging that the Poser product espouses. Defining what geometry moves when a particular bone is rotated. A Painted Weight Map assigns a value with each individual vertice in the geometry."

Uh oh......

Cheers

Weight rigging seems to the way to go forward, not just for DS but - I sincerely hope - Poser too. 

I really hope we don't get into the situation where V5 is incompatible with Poser. That's in no-one's best interests - not SM, not DAZ and most importantly not their customers.

Quote - Uh oh......

...from the company that:

1. promised that OptiTex cloth technology would be a revolution;

2. abandoned Hexagon (while still selling it :mad:);

3. derailed Carrara into yet another Poser clone

...just to remind some highlights.

First wait to see if, when and what they deliver, then bandage your head.

B.t.w., if this technology would not be mirrored somehow into Poser it would split the market and the question would become: how many 3rd party vendors/content providers would follow DAZ (especially if content creating tools were not free?).

Bye...

Quote - I really hope we don't get into the situation where V5 is incompatible with Poser. That's in no-one's best interests - not SM, not DAZ and most importantly not their customers.

get ready for it ;o). I've been thinking that for a long time now....lol.

The "uh oh" seems given in the absence of having read the several threads going around about weight mapping. Wolf - did you read what has been said elsewhere in the last couple weeks, or no?

If no - here's a quick summary:

Almost every user is very interested in this.

A few fear (mistakenly) that WM-enabled Poser and DS imply that old rigging will stop working. They have been enlightened several times but it keeps coming up.

Dan Farr (am I spelling that right?) has said DAZ is interested in and/or is already working with other vendors to ensure compatibility. Nobody in his right mind thinks he's not talking about SM.

SM has publicly said nothing.

In private, I know something I can't talk about. Infer what you will from that intentionally vague statement.

There ya go.

Quote -
get ready for it ;o). I've been thinking that for a long time now....lol.

The optimist in me says: common sense will prevail

The pessimist in me says: this is going to turn into a real mess

The realist in me says: commercial imperatives will come into play - can either of these companies really afford to alienate or even abandon a huge chunk of their customer base?

EDIT: cross-post with BB. He's probably told us all he can - and a little bit more. So it looks like it will be a win for common sense, the profit motive and... we the punters!

From the cgTalk article:

Quote - With the fifth generation, we are taking this a step further with a completely androgynous base Unimesh," explains Renfeldt. "Our morph targets are generalized to the point that you can give a beer belly or extra muscle-tone just by mixing morphs. Texture packs and morph sets can be added in lean the characters in a particular direction.

This basically makes detailed conforming clothing impossible, hypothetical weight mapping aside.

edit: well, "impractically hard", maybe not impossible.

Version 5 figures wont be on my shopping list anyway, I just cant justify the expense. I also cant afford to upgrade from Poser 7 for a hobby.  Daz went away from Poser with its dynamic cloth items , and its subdivision figures. Its been obvious for some time that maintaining compatibility was going to get harder.  V4 was not comparible with Poser 5 , lets see what Daz says about V5.

Weight maps is certainly a way to go, Lightwave uses them as does every other professional modeller application I know of.

3ds Max's Biped rigging is not all that different from Poser actually.

http://www.ehow.com/way_5990487_3ds-animation-biped-rigging-tutorial.html

Not saying one thing is better than the other, just that the envelope system that Poser uses isn't unique.

Just to Clarify  My "Uh oh" was because of what  Pjz99 asserted about legacy clothing content.
industry standard weight mapping will make for better Collada Exports from DAZ studio (Right now its basicly worthless for most but the simplest cases)

Cheers

Eh I'm not worried about how they handle legacy content, I wouldn't be surprised if they just implement some kind of flag in CR2 or other Poser file format that says "Use Weight Mapping" and if it's not present then default to the old system - just speaking as a clothing content creator, if the base morph is a featureless androgynous thing, and you're expected to morph the conformer to fit whatever target the user picks, that's going to be an immense amount of labor.  Content creators won't be excited to do that, and users won't be excited to pay for it.  Plus the results of that kind of thing cannot ever be made to mix well (even if you can make them look GOOD, which is dubious).

Also there's the question of how to package content rigged for a hypothetical new system - don't expect many content makers to be eager to do dramatically more rigging work (current system as well as any future weightmapped system) and charge the same prices.  I'd expect the great majority of content makers will simply pick one system rather than try to support both, probably the newest, which means pretty much those that don't buy into all the new tools required will not be getting much content to use.

I do not understand this hype about weight painting. From a mathematician's point of view, the falloff-zone poser uses are clearly the more general concept. With them you can easily differentiate between the geometry of the mesh and it's topology, with weight painting these are tightly coupled. Meaning: when you cut off your V4's arm and redo it in a modeling application with a different topology, you can still use your falloff-zones, but your weight-map is gone (because the weight-map is based on vertex-numbers, while the falloff-zones are based on location in 3-dimensional space). Also, if you absolutely need the weight-map, you can use your falloff-zones to create one, while the other way around is much more difficult and likely to result in one falloff-zone per vertex. The falloff-zones essentially say something like "the vertices around [origin of elbow here] are effected by bending", where the weightmap says something like "vertex 7,8 and 9 are effected by bending" the latter being far less useful for different figures than the former.

And what is the plan to actually create the weight-maps? Sure, one can export collada, from eg. wings or blender, but as long as one cannot do the armature animation within the same program as the weight-painting, the process would be rather uncomfortable (except for big fans of poser's group editor of course).

Hypothetically speaking, if Poser were to support a weightmap system, one would hope it came with tools to create said weight maps.  I am cynical enough to expect that such tools will be in the $500+ "Pro" version rather than in the base app.

About being compatible....

One CAN already use some kind of weight mapping inside POSER.

Not the real thing, but some alternative.

You Can move anything with a displacement map.
One can add flesh, muscles, weight, anything with a displacement map to any textured figure.

But then comes the problem..
How can one "gues the final shape", if it is not even visible before render time??

Conforming clothing will always be too small.
The same for dynamic clothing.
A Displacement map does not exist for the cloth room.
The cloth room calculates the draping around the obj.

Then, during the render, the displacement map comes into play, and gladly pokes through any dynamic cloth... 

If one alters the shape with any form of rigging, mapping, displacement, weight mapping, conforming and dynamic clothing will "HAVE" to know about it, before coming into action.

Just my 2 cents.

Nah displacement mapping has nothing at all to do with weight mapping in rigging, they're really completely unrelated.

Quote - The "uh oh" seems given in the absence of having read the several threads going around about weight mapping. Wolf - did you read what has been said elsewhere in the last couple weeks, or no?

If no - here's a quick summary:

Almost every user is very interested in this.

A few fear (mistakenly) that WM-enabled Poser and DS imply that old rigging will stop working. They have been enlightened several times but it keeps coming up.

Dan Farr (am I spelling that right?) has said DAZ is interested in and/or is already working with other vendors to ensure compatibility. Nobody in his right mind thinks he's not talking about SM.

SM has publicly said nothing.

In private, I know something I can't talk about. Infer what you will from that intentionally vague statement.

There ya go.

Why I worry...

SM won't say anything... publicly. They almost seem not only content but encouraging of people to form these types of opinions.

As for what's in companies best intersts to cooperate... my local Time Warner cable company is in a dispute with a company of local channels about carrying them on cable. Both companies benefit from the agreement, but on December 31, Time Warner has to pull the plug on the channels as per their carry agreement.

Time Warner has said nothing publicly about the dispute, but the channels, which are free over the air broadcast stations, are trying to paint the picture that TWC is being greedy, and manipulative.

Weight-mapping, if it's a single-skin solution (which DAZ have said theirs is and so, if we build on BB's comment, presumably Poser's will be) means that any bone can affect any part of the mesh - no more having to use body handles or morphs to get skirts and the like to work, and things like webbed hands and bat-wings that join all the way down to the hip become possible. Also, a weight-map can be arbitrary making it much easier to do things like epaulettes where part of the shoulder mesh needs to move and part needs to stay put (though the new P8+ falloff options should also help there).

Personally I can't weight for the wait mapping . I hope it will be somehow compatible with Max at least the ability to get it into max to use the rigging tools there.

Conforming clothes IMO have always been a sad idea anyway. Hopefully Poser /DS will adopt a sane aproach. IE no body under the clothes to poke through.

As long as Poser character figures and associated content remain in the 70k+ poly count range, and conformers are expected to have similar polygonal detail, weight mapping rigged content is going to be pretty immensely difficult. 

Quote - Conforming clothes IMO have always been a sad idea anyway. Hopefully Poser /DS will adopt a sane aproach. IE no body under the clothes to poke through.

That isn't what drives the DAZ market at all.  They are all about the Unimesh and conforming clothing, it's easily 90% of their money.

Oooh!  I suppose you have a point pjz99. But wouldn't it be great?  I see Poser as a much eaier way to pose and animate, but Max or C4D, they are tops for creating content. Of course you can animate and pose, set up scenes in the technically more advanced apps, but it is much more time consuming and complex than Poser. And not much fun IMO.

Quote - > Quote - Time Warner has said nothing publicly about the dispute, but the channels, which are free over the air broadcast stations, are trying to paint the picture that TWC is being greedy, and manipulative.

Ah there's the rub -- I notice the same thing, too.

o.k., then we can only hope the SM weight-mapping thing will be easy to learn and that it will be in the paid beta of poser 9.  maybe they'll fix the transparency issue in the final release of poser 8 patch.  I've never used weight-mapping or even seen it in use.  perhaps there'll be another room in poser to paint on the model, or else we use APS to paint on the UVmap or the obj file.  they didn't say anything about weight-mapping in carrara yet AFAIK (which also uses daz models).

Nah I've worked with both methods, and the current envelope system is way easier than weight mapping.  Not like weight mapping is conceptually hard to grasp, it just takes a lot of labor for a complex model.  The envelope approach certainly has downsides (impossible webbed fingers mentioned earlier e.g.) but it has the advantage of being a lot less labor-intensive, at least for most models.

Quote - In private, I know something I can't talk about. Infer what you will from that intentionally vague statement.

Obviously this means Poser will be skipping weight maps and going right to using simulated muscles and skins and soft body dynamic stuff, like at WETA.  Yay!  :lol:

Quote - Meaning: when you cut off your V4's arm and redo it in a modeling application with a different topology, you can still use your falloff-zones, but your weight-map is gone (because the weight-map is based on vertex-numbers, while the falloff-zones are based on location in 3-dimensional space).

Blender includes a very useful script which can copy weight maps between figures, based on closest vertex matches.  The same basic script could be created easily for Poser (although it might run a bit more slowly), if a built in tool for this purpose isn't included.

That's not too different from what Morphing Clothes/Wardrobe Wizard and similar tools do for morph conversion, and somewhat like the Group Editor's auto-group feature - while it will give you a starting point, if the conformer is not absolutely skintight, a lot of manual weighting is going to be required.

Quote - That's not too different from what Morphing Clothes/Wardrobe Wizard and similar tools do for morph conversion, and somewhat like the Group Editor's auto-group feature - while it will give you a starting point, if the conformer is not absolutely skintight, a lot of manual weighting is going to be required.

Yes, that's true.  Any of the processes for transfer between different meshes would seem to require manual tweaks in some cases.  In the case of lopping off a figure's arm, the basic weighting could be transferred by script if the shape of the arm hasn't been changed too much.  But if the shape were changed on some hacked actor on a figure which uses the current joint system, the joint parameters might still need adjustment under some circumstances.  I guess such a weight transfer script could be like joint insertion poses are now.  It might get the process started, at least, so every case doesn't require full joint-weighting from scratch.

Would something for Poser like DS's "Morph Follower" work? (I don't use DS, but my impression is that Morph Follower allows conforming clothes to fit even if they don't have the correct morphs.)

Ideally, you could use envelopes for basic rigging and improve deformations by creating custom weight maps where needed. The two methods aren't mutually exclusive (in Maya at least.)

That's a pretty neat idea actually, although I have no idea how hard it would be to implement - I don't pretend to understand the math or programming involved, just familiar with the practicalities of working with both methods.

Spheres -> weight maps would be trivial. After all, Poser and DS are in effect doing it already, it just needs to be output to a vertex map (which is just a list of values for each point). However, I believe that many if not all weight-mapped systems use a single set of weights per joint while Poser rigging has separate weights for each parameter - however, even if that's true there's no reason a new system shouldn't use a map-per-parameter (if you wanted the same values in each it would be a simple copy and paste at worst, and perhaps just a tick-box at best).

Quote - Spheres -> weight maps would be trivial. After all, Poser and DS are in effect doing it already, it just needs to be output to a vertex map (which is just a list of values for each point). However, I believe that many if not all weight-mapped systems use a single set of weights per joint while Poser rigging has separate weights for each parameter - however, even if that's true there's no reason a new system shouldn't use a map-per-parameter (if you wanted the same values in each it would be a simple copy and paste at worst, and perhaps just a tick-box at best).

IMO the 3 joint-zones are a good fit for poser's euler-angle posing system (not that i am friends with it). With weight maps, you really want to have only one value per joint, not three, so when switching to  weight-mapped posing, it is very likely and advisable to disband the euler-angles for a slightly more unambiguous system, e.g. quaternion rotations or axis-angle, so that multiple maps would not be needed. Everything else would probably be sheer nightmare-horror for content-creators.

Quote - Ideally, you could use envelopes for basic rigging and improve deformations by creating custom weight maps where needed. The two methods aren't mutually exclusive (in Maya at least.)

This idea would make the most sense...imo. Gives you the best of both worlds.

Quote - In private, I know something I can't talk about. Infer what you will from that intentionally vague statement.

There ya go.

 That's funny I can sometimes talk about about things that I don't know- and be unintentionaly vague! :-)

I am looking foward to weight maps- and I do believe they can just offer the "old fashion" method as well.

Quote - Nah I've worked with both methods, and the current envelope system is way easier than weight mapping.  Not like weight mapping is conceptually hard to grasp, it just takes a lot of labor for a complex model.  The envelope approach certainly has downsides (impossible webbed fingers mentioned earlier e.g.) but it has the advantage of being a lot less labor-intensive, at least for most models.

Well it`s all about how good the tools are implemented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJfUie-bBko

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvQm6nGEZIg

For actual figure modelling, I would rather see a displacement map that actually moves poly's.
In preview, and it solves another problme too.

In the current setup, a displacement map comes last.
AFTER the cloth room calculation.

If a displacement map would actually move the polygons, you could morph a figure-prop with a displacement map.
That woud be a novelty!!!

I think being able to bake in displacement might be interesting or useful in certain cases.  A displacement map can have much more detail, however, than is actually present in a model on the polygonal level.  Displacement baking would only be able to move the vertices which exist on the model.  Poser already seems to use much higher-resolution figures than most other apps, and the current implementation of displacement is one of the key ways to make a low-res model look like it has more detail.  Personally, I'd prefer to see Poser move toward tools which could improve handling of lower resolution geometries, starting with better rigging and some sort of subsurface smoothing.

Displacement is also limited to deforming a surface along its normals, so the types of baked deformations would be limited.

But being able to see the displacement in preview while posing could be useful.

I think displacement baking could probably be done via a Python script, right now.  (I'm not volunteering, though.  :lol:  Anything with UVs in the mix is too much of a headache for me.  )

And, edit: You can bake in displacement using UV Mapper Pro, too.

The whole point of displacement mapping is that it's a render-time effect.  If it's important to you to have displacement in preview, and to have it interact with dynamics, then it's actually a lot simpler and would require less overhead to just use higher poly content.

Baking a displacement map that has very much detail on it to polygons (if I understand you correctly) would give you a figure with a poly count in the hundreds of thousands for sure, probably more like multiple million.

mark mentioned that poser has already got python cmds to handle weight maps, but apparently nobody has tried 'em yet and publ. results here.

What I would sugest is to make a displacement map to move existing points relative to the existing mesh.
So you only influence existing points.

For fine work you can use a "real" (the current existing version) displacement map, at say 4096x4096 per material. (Thus giving zillions of micro points.)

But using a proposed displacement map to move exiting points in real life would allow to morph the figure-prop by a map. (if only relative to the surface)
Allow the cloth room to drape around this morphed figure-prop.
Allow the hair room to "hair" the thus morphed mesh. 

Quote - Displacement is also limited to deforming a surface along its normals, so the types of baked deformations would be limited.

stewer (Stefan Werner - SM's maintainer of Firefly) told me that Firefly displacement is actually 3-dimensional. It accepts a vector, much like normal maps do. But only a simplified form (equivalent to bump mapping) was exposed in the material room.

Correct if wrong, 

my experience is, that a displacement map works in full 3D Space.

But only, vertical to the mesh: In and out relative to the mesh surlace.

if at all possible with R, G, B, values, one could mathematically speaking, have: in-out, up-down, left-right, again, relative to mesh surface.
But that would complicate things beyond . . . . ., even beyond usability.

Morphing points in-out, relative to mesh surface would be very uselfull and help the rooms calculate around this point displacement.

One could use the same "gray" map ond in this node only re-calculate, and effectively displace the points.

You'd need a modeling/sculpting app to actually make use of a feature like this, but that's all kind of beside the point - you are talking about pretty much defeating the purpose of using a displacement map (not having to cope with the extra overhead that the polys produced by the displacement map creates at render time).  I don't understand how this could possibly be preferable to just working with a higher poly model.

Quote - stewer (Stefan Werner - SM's maintainer of Firefly) told me that Firefly displacement is actually 3-dimensional. It accepts a vector, much like normal maps do. But only a simplified form (equivalent to bump mapping) was exposed in the material room.

That is interesting.  So the displacement vector isn't wholly inherited from the polygon normals?  Or what? 

I've tried Poser's normal maps and they didn't seem to be able to move the surface against the polygon normals, but only along them.  I assumed I was doing it wrong.  Hmm.

Quote - But using a proposed displacement map to move exiting points in real life would allow to morph the figure-prop by a map. (if only relative to the surface)
Allow the cloth room to drape around this morphed figure-prop.
Allow the hair room to "hair" the thus morphed mesh.

This does sound like it could be useful, to prevent poke through in dynamic simulations on areas of a mesh which are highly displaced.

Why use a high poly model when you can do the same, and a lot more with a lower poly model?

For 3D X-Y-Z- morphers, high poly models are worse then low poly models.
A mosquito net mesh does not morph well at all.
You simply do not have the room between the points to move them left-right, up-down.
Lack of space, the mesh crushes, ripples, breaks.

The latest models have great obj files, but close to impossible to rig well, mainly due to excessive poly count.
Each and every bend crushes the mesh.
Every morph (worth the name) crushes the mesh.
Then, pose, twist and bend, and bye bye mesh. Try to cloth a crushed mesh, and cloth room goes bananas too.
Use lower poly meshes, morph the hell out of them, there is room to morph between the points, and use bump-displacement.

Anything over 25K is pure pollution for a serious XYZ morpher. No room any more, no space left to move the points around in…
Take any high poly mesh, and lower the breast to a normal real world altitude with her arms down. “Lower breast-nipples about 2-3 inch”.
The Posette or Judy mesh are about as high in Poly count as one can go.
I do not like those balloons that are closer to the chin then to the chest.
I even have a hard time calling then breasts.

But:
The main reason for the “proposed” displacement map is to displace existing points into a new position in 3D Space.
Creating a point displaced, real world morph using a map, and one that, if needed, the cloth room understands for its calculations.

Simple example.
All modern models are build in the "T" pose.

Most of them include morphs to lift the breast when the arms go up.

NONE include morphs to lower the breasts when the arm lower.
Now, my wife does not go shopping with her arms in a "T" pose you know.

When modeled in a "T", the upper breast skin is already under tension, and breasts are already halfway lifted.
When the arms go down, skin relaxes and breasts go down too.
Well my wifes ones do, and my moters did.

Well, on this side of the world anyway.....

For this you need 3D room, and lots of it.

It can be done with a high poly mesh, but pay attention to morphing, twisting, bending and combining everything.

But??
I have not seen it yet.

I don't get it - if the polys are there for collision and morphing, then they're just polys whether they came from a displacement map or from the base geometry.  This concept of translating them to and from a displacement map just means more overhead (a lot more) than dealing with a high poly mesh, because you want the conversion to be realtime as you work with the model in preview and in dynamics.  Even Zbrush does not attempt to do this on the fly, it treats creating a displacement map as a single action that you do with a finished model.

And that is too late for the coth room.
The poly's need to be dispaced, morphed before the cloth room calculations.

And lastly I added an untouched Alyson as reference.
Sorry, that are no breasts.
That are helium filled balloons :-)
Sorry my dear ladies, for the expression.

See why we need X Y Z Morphs ?
See why we need ROOM to morph.

Do this on a high poly mesh, and she does not twist or bend, without breaking or crushing any more.

PS, the lady on the right is, ahum, was,  the PoserPro female. :-)