Skirt
Sections:
- Generate a New Skirt Object
- Move Mesh To New Skirt Object
- Weight Paint Transfer to Mesh
- Delete FFXIV & Unused Skirt Vertex Groups
- Move Skirt Bones and Meshes to Armature
- Generate Skirt Rigid Bodies
- Generate Skirt Joints
- Vertex Group List
This will create a skirt object called 'skirt_obj' with it's own cone-shaped mesh called 'new_skirt_shape', and cone-shaped armature with all the included bones under 'new_skirt_arm'.
- The cone-shaped bones are intended to be your new skirt's bones for using leveraging MMD-style physics with rigid bodies & joints. These skirt bones will be transferred to your model's armature once this whole process is complete.
- The cone-shaped mesh will have weight painted pre-applied to the bones. This cone-shaped mesh needed in order to perform a 'weight paint transfer' to your model's skirt mesh. This cone-shaped mesh will be deleted upon completing this whole process.
2023-11-02.22-39-10.mp4
The paramaters are as follows:
- Bone Chains - Specifies the number of bone chains that will encircle the circumference of your model. For example specifying '4' will have a bone chain starting on your model's left side, back, right side, and front.
- Bone Chain Children - Specifies how many bones will be added for each bone chain from the top of the skirt to the bottom of the skirt.
- Mesh Segments - Specifies how 'round' the circumference of your skirt mesh will be. Specifying a higher number will add more verticies to the circumference your skirt. Lower numbers will make your skirt object look like it was made in Quake
- Mesh Subdivisions - Specifies how many face subdivisions should be on the cone-shaped mesh. The higher the number, more faces will be on your mesh, and the more accurate/detailed the weight painting will be.
- Top Height - Specifies the XYZ's coordinate height of the top of the skirt from 0. Ideally this should be placed where you expect the new skirt's weight painting to be transferred onto your model
- Top Radius - Specifies how large/small the top of your skirt is
- Bottom Height - Specifies the XYZ's coordinate height of the bottom of the skirt from 0.
- Bottom Radius - Specifies how large/small the bottom of your skirt is
Upon pressing 'OK', it will create the skirt_obj and remember the parameters upon the next time you press the 'OK' button. IT IS PERFECTLY FINE TO PRESS 'OK' EVEN IF YOU STILL WANT TO MAKE CHANGES because every single time you press the OK button, it will replace the current skirt_obj with a new skirt object
Will move the currently selected active object to the 'skirt_obj' object. To prevent accidentally breaking things on the armature, all the weight paint transferring occurs only on meshes that exist within the 'skirt_obj' object.
2023-11-02.23-18-44.mp4
Will transfer the weight paint from 'new_skirt_shape' to the currently selected mesh, assuming it exists in the 'skirt_obj' object.
Please note: Weight paint transfer will ONLY work if the selected mesh is as as physically close as possible to the new_skirt_shape mesh. If they are physically too far apart, the weight paint won't transfer properly.
You can see if weight paint transferred properly by scrolling through the vertex group list:
2023-11-02.23-25-05.mp4
Note: After running this, you may want to test if the weight paint was transferred properly by going into 'Pose' mode and applying some simple rotation & location bone testing. If there are any issues with weight paint transfer, you can always start over from 'Generate a New Skirt Object'
Deletes any of the FFXIV vertex groups that start with 'j_sk_', or any vertex groups that start with 'skirt_' where it's corresponding bone can't be found. This is to prevent any weight paint conflicts between the new weight painting that was applied in the previous step and the old FFXIV skirt bones.
Will move the meshes and bones contained within 'skirt_obj' object to the currently selected armature, while 'new_skirt_shape' mesh will be deleted.
The parent for all the skirt bones will be either 'lower body' (MMD English bone name),'下半身' (MMD Japanese bone name) or 'j_kosi' (FFXIV lower body bone).
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If you used all the above steps to create the skirt bones and successfully transferred them to your armature, this will create a rigid bodies with all with gravity/friction/size/collision group settings preapplied. By default, these settings are configured for a somewhat 'heavy' skirt.
2023-11-02.23-52-29.1.mp4
If you used all the above steps to create the skirt bones generated the rigid bodies, this will create joints with all the joint linear & angular parameteres preapplied. By default, these settings are configured for a somewhat 'heavy' skirt.
Searches for a rigid body named 'lower body','下半身' or 'j_kosi' first. If it does not exist this will not work, as the skirt's rigid bodies needs to be physically pinned to this 'lower body'.
2023-11-03.00-14-07.1.mp4
Lists all the vertex groups for the currently selected mesh. Useful when trying to see if weight painting was applied correctly while in weight painting mode.