Best skeleton/biped solution for an imported Poser actor?

[Anonymous]

Hey, all!

Okay. Strange problem; the solution I'm after may not even be the best solution. Hopefully someone can say so. (Searched the forums history, and only found one similar post. His solution didn't cover this.)

Been using Poser for a bunchteen years. Hate it; aside from the wide selection of models to use, it's horrific in terms of interface, and a total loss for serious animation. Studying Max now with an eye toward a demo reel in a couple of years. Heh.

Only thing that slowed me down in terms of actually making a vid (I have several scripts, and two start-of-storyboards) was having to make my own actors from scratch. Still something I'm practicing and learning, but I missed my Poser inventory.

Through serendipity (Smith-Micro's PoserMax (or whatever they call it) never worked (at all, let alone well), but I understand it wouldn't be what I wanted anyway, which was my Poser figure accessible to all controls in Max), found a way to get my Poser actors (with their clothing; I don't do Painted-On) into Max and Motion Builder, with their skeletons. I was a happy ferret for a while there.

However, on investigation (like, first time I tried to use 'em), I found that each figure that's coming over (in the illustrations, Girl, Girl Suit, and Girl Coat. The Girl Boots may be a separate figure too) has its own skeleton. It's frequently hard to pick the individual skeleton apart, too.

<Illustration Alpha - beautiful import, but...>

Have also found that although the proper skeleton(s) is there, it's not actually bound in any way to the model (some bones work, some don't. Dang). Not a problem; the current lesson I'm working is with skeletons and skin.

<Illustration Bravo - too many skeletons!>

I also notice than when the skeleton does move the mesh, it doesn't necessarily move it correctly, so I know if I keep any skeletons I'm going to have rigging work to do. Don't mind this.

<Illustration Charlie - don't wear stretch pants!>

First real question, though: is it possible to eliminate the 'extra' skeletons (some of my Poser actors have more than two actors per 'being'...) and bind all of the 'actors' (girl, suit, jacket, boots) to the main actor's skeleton?

Second question: if the first isn't possible, or isn't feasible, would I be better off not worrying about the skeletons, and simply take the actor(s) and create a Biped skeleton for them? In this case, is is possible to bind more than one mesh to a biped bone? I'd like to be able to move the figure and have her clothing and jacket (and boots!) move along with her.

Third question: if neither of the above is the best solution (or is best partially), would I be better off (in terms of the extra actors like clothing) using Dynamic Cloth? Most of the clothing I put on my actors could probably live that way (especially as I understand in Cloth Simulation that I can specify different types of cloths--stiff, soft, whatever), with me still rigging bones and binding for boots and mittens and such things. (I haven't tried dynamic cloth yet.)

Final Solution (so to speak): would I be better off if I simply combined the clothing meshes with the actor mesh? Or removed 'extra' geometry and made the whole actor-clothing mesh a single one, and then bipedded/skeletoned it? (Latest version of Poser has a Combine Meshes/Remove Hidden [basically, consolidate all the actors and clothing into one well-behaved mesh] feature, but it didn't improve anything I use it for, so the upgrade's a no-go. Max have any such feature?)

And yeah, I realize this is above my current pay grade (I'm working through the basic Autodesk Max tutorials even as I dart about more complex subjects like a brain-dead hummingbird), but sometimes doing something 'later' in the pipeline o' learning helps me figure out something earlier.

Thanks to anyone who can help with this!

Davey (noob, but working on it)

[ads_royje · Accepted solution]

Hi!

hopefully this can answer your question, at least in part.

For characters Autodesk has a cool librairy of Characters that you could look at too if that can help you get more characters.

https://charactergenerator.autodesk.com/

These can be imported into 3ds Max and turned into the Character Studio Biped rig for posing and animation.

The following is also valid for any characters.

For questions :

"First real question, though: is it possible to eliminate the 'extra' skeletons (some of my Poser actors have more than two actors per 'being'...) and bind all of the 'actors' (girl, suit, jacket, boots) to the main actor's skeleton?"

>>> absolutely! May not be a fast task depending on what's to achieve but is doable for sure. You can rebuild them, in whole or in parts as you see fit.

"In this case, is is possible to bind more than one mesh to a biped bone?"

>>> You can bind via 'Skin modifier' or by link (set parent) any amount of meshes to a bone, no limits.

>>> When imported your meshes form Poser, you have a 'Skin modifier' on them (for mesh deformation between bones), most likely they have that according to your images. With that on, you can retreive skinning weights from the old rig and port it to the new one. Using 'Skin Utilities' in the Tools panel. Skin utilities can help you get your skin weights of a mesh from one rig to another.

"(Latest version of Poser has a Combine Meshes/Remove Hidden [basically, consolidate all the actors and clothing into one well-behaved mesh] feature, but it didn't improve anything I use it for, so the upgrade's a no-go. Max have any such feature?)"

>>> Yes, using the 'Edit Mesh' or 'Edit Poly', you have the 'Attach' option that you can attach all your meshes into a single one. This may imply to (re)work materials and their IDs though.

About dynamic Cloth, I'd suggest to keep your meshes as separate one, that would be easier to work with. But that question I'll leave for others to answer, it is a more complex set up to do.

For easy and fast posing and animation, I'd suggest to use Character Studio Biped rig, it is easy to use and filled with powerful tools to animate and to pose; create, save, load and mirror poses, ik/fk, save and load animations, animation layers and other productive tools.

Another cool thing you may be interested in, with Character Studio Biped you can find a variety of .bip files on the net, like in this link 

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/downloads/caas/downloads/content/3ds-max-2010-biped-u...

The zip file contains a lot of cool animations that you can re-use or extract poses.

Have a look at Character Studio biped, try it out and see if it can help you pose and animate. If you like the controls and tools, you can then adapt the CS biped to your imported characters and transfer the skin weigths to it.

From what I can understand in your post, this is the biped rig that can help you achieve your goals the fastest.

If you're into rigging yourself, have a look at the IK solvers that you can apply directly to your imported bones, this can also be a very valid way of doing it. It does require more work in rigging.

Hope this can help you get started! 🙂

[Anonymous]

Howdy, Jean-Thierry!

 Bloody frickin' absolutely outstanding answer; thanks! (Also kudoed you; enjoy. And it's probably The Solution® as well.)

 Right after posting the question (which still needed posting) I discovered the online version of Character Studio. Went over and gave it a try with a couple of sample characters. In all honesty, it seemed to have problems; being the noob in the equation I'm willing to say that said problem was me, but still, it was odd. The characters came through remarkably ugly (mesh and bones, and one had a script that just seemed to mess stuff up); I'm thinking I'm supposed to do some heavy modeling on them to make them look nicer? (It's certainly another excuse for me to mess with Mudbox!) The bones and the figure didn't match up well at all; for that, I'm thinking a lot of work is involved (fortunately it's where I'm tutorializing right now anyway, but still, the figures were oddly uncompleted for an Autodesk thingy).

 I'll definitely check out the .BIP files you recommended I look at. Anything I don't know yet's an opportunity (maybe in disguise, but still... 🙂 )

 The imported Poser figures are a whole lot prettier, in my opinion (hence my reluctance to let go of them). 🙂

 I knew about Attach; I'd kind of tripped over it while doing another tutorial. Seems like an intermediate step between Group (which no one encourages) and Weld (which seems like overkill). Right now if I have an object with multiple separate subobjects, I use the Scene Explorer and drag the items to whatever they're supposed to be 'children' of. It's not an IK solution, but it works to make it possible to have the silly things stick together if I want to move them all without CTRL-Aing or doing a selection swipe.

 What I actually meant by the "get all the meshes together" feature, though, was Poser's new Remove Hidden Geometry feature. Take the example fem, for example: the girl herself is a single mesh, all outward-facing normals. Cool. Her suit, though, is a two-sided deal; you see the outside, but if the suit were by itself, you'd see the inside surface as well. Same for her jacket and boots. As I understand it, the Remove Hidden feature joins girl, suit, jacket and boots by "physically" joining the geometries. Thus, the 'girl' mesh would end where the 'suit' mesh actually touched or came close enough to touch the 'girl' mesh (ditto the other stuff), resulting in a single mesh that'd look like I'd modeled the girl from the ground up with her super-suit, and thus (again, in my noob theoretically universe) result in a smaller, easier-animated mesh.

 (On the other hand, it's another "opportunity." If I can figure out how to get to and delete the internal faces for the clothing objects, attaching or welding them to the human base figure might not be so time-consuming. Okay. Something else to figure out a solution for. Cool!)

 Which leads back to your whole "Biped's lots better" answer. I hear you, and I shall give that some focus for the nonce. I don't mind if I have to figure out weighting all over again; I anticipated such when I started looking at tutes for rigging characters, and have gone through a couple. Figure it'll be a nightmare if I have to actually bone the toes, but again fortunately most of my characters wear boots, so that should be a distant nightmare. 🙂 Still, "Skin Utilities" sounds like a good first stop in this exploration; I'll go look it up and see what it'll do for me (and how to use it!).

 (My biggest problem, now that I'm working with bones and their systems, is figuring out how to get to them. They wind up buried inside the mesh, and I have a dickens of a time getting to them. I usually work in Shaded + Edged Faces mode; is wireframe recommended for direct access to Biped bones?)

 IK Solvers. Yeah. I was reading up on that (either in the Max Bible or online, I forget now where), wondering why I'd need them. Apparently this is a really good "opportunity" to learn those, too. Outstanding!

 Yeah, I figured the suit/jacket/possibly boots, if Dynamic Clothied, would need to be separate; I couldn't conceive of such a simulation working with only part of an all-items-combined mesh. But honestly, right now if I can produce a video that looks like a good video game I'll be happy (we don't all want to start at the top, after all 🙂 ).

 Monsieur (I assume; if I err, I apologize), your response was helpful and packed with good stuff. Since I knew doing what I wanted here would involve more work (nothing's one-button any more 😛 ), this points me to stuff I need to look at/focus on, and that's what I was after. Many thanks to you. May all your Max problems be big, twisty ones so you can learn more and keep sharing with the community like this. 🙂

Davey