Blender Underground

... Ya, I noticed that ztransp wasnt' selected in the illustration, but also notice that your eyebrows still worked in 3D view.

I guess I'd have to revert to an earlier version to appreciate what you mean by, "did away with UV Mapping as a 3D view type" as relates to how I gotta copy the alpha to the other faces of the eyebrows and eyes patches. Is that the simplest way to seeing the UV stuff in 3D view now, as a result of that design change?

Before the design change, you didn't have the option to work directly in edit mode for the mesh. I don't think you could view the tex space in the 3D window either but I could be wrong on that. They also did away with LSCM unwrapping at the same time and introduced Bone Heat (which you will hit in Part III of this tutorial).

You can see the old instructions in this older tutorial:

http://biorust.com/index.php?page=tutor ... l&tutid=85

Note #2



That step is no longer valid.

[EDIT]

Here is where they announced the merge:

http://www.blender.org/development/rele ... v-editing/

Hi, I am going through Part 2 and I have a couple of observations.
First, a slight change to the details:

1. After importing a Collada file from MH, the meshes and armature are lying down. Grab All with A and rotate with R, X, 90, return. Next go into top view and move the whole thing so that the longest fingertip is on the X line.

2. But just grabbing all and rotating is not enough: Select only the mesh and Apply the rotation with CTRL A, 1. Do the same with the Armature.

3. Now carry on, parting the mesh with P
---------------------
Question:
After applying the rotation to the armature as above I noticed that some of the bones have rotated.
This is what it looks like:

Hopefully it won't mess up the animation later, but it does seem odd that the leg bones and shoulder bones havde rotated on their axes.
Has anyone else seen this happen? Will it mess up animating? If so, what can I do about it?

Observation/question:
When I ALT- j to join all the tris to quads the result is not 100 percent consistent in left- right symmetry

How much of an effect will this have on animating the mesh later? Should I delete the bad half and mirror or is it not necessary?

The roll angle got off when you rotated it. That will be fixed when you apply CTRL-N->Z Axis up with the roll angle in Part III....



That is artifacts in the mesh that I don't correct. For the tutorial purposes, it won't affect it. If you were doing shape keys, then it would. We don't get down to that level in these tutorials.

Thanks. I haven't got to part 3 yet.

I'm assuming that we don't use shape keys for this any more, right? And the mesh will deform fine with weight painting etc. regardless?

That's a correct assumption. I don't do shape keys at all in any of these tutorials. The mesh can be fixed though if you want to do shape keys. The way is to apply ALL the UV images to the mesh THEN split the mesh in half deleting the right half (left as you look at it in front view) and apply a mirror modifier. That should take care of about 90% of the issues with the mesh which is enough to deal with shape keys. The thing is, you have to have the UVs associated before cutting out half the mesh or you lose the mappings.

Can I give my characters facial expressions without shape keys?
Which way is simpler and quicker to set up assuming there is another way?

Bear in mind that I'm not making a hollywood blockbuster here.
I would like simple expressions and mouth moves would be nice but that's still not looking too promising if it takes a month to set up one head, anyway.

I have not UV'd any characters yet: I am hoping to get away with minimum mappings.
They look good, yes, but they also take time and complicate things so maybe I'll stick with Manga style hair and blender shaders for the most part.

Expressions are the sole domain of shape keys. No way to avoid it without having the face look unnatural. The other way to do it which uses minimal shape keys is tracking with empties. I don't recommend this method because you can't use the NLA editor with empties which will be needed with facial expressions. You can do it with armature bones but that would require fancy rigging which is tough for beginners. You are talking multiple constraints and such. No, shape keys are the easiest way but they are still an advanced topic.

[EDIT]

If you want to learn shape keys, I recommend you use a simpler model such as a subdivided cube to experiment on first. You need sufficient geometry to do shape keys right so give it a like 2 hits on the subdivide. Keep in mind, shape keys can be bound to bones which allows you to setup a rig to control the shape.

Thanks Penix, guess that leads me into another research exercise !
(So much to learn!)

I understand that you were running out of gas when you got to texturing the final components, but could you answer a couple easies so I can finish the texturing?

You say, The eyes are mapped in the same way as the body but map the eyes_reflection.tif to specular. This implies that, just like for the body, I should map the eyes_*.tif images to the Eye Object's mesh with Map To of Col, Csp, Cmir; and Spec.

Then at the beginning of the part III tutorial you say, the iris image mapping has to be scaled up to cover the entire iris. Except, I have used the entire eyes_color.tif image for the Eye. Am I supposed to use eyes_color.tif for the Eye, for the Iris, or for both? Unlike the head image, this image file contains a single image.

If the goal is to apply eyes_colot.tif to the Iris and eyes_reflection.tif to Eye, then it would be good to mention this, since the file names imply otherwise.

More generally, what purpose is achieved by this Iris object? Our goal is to give a realistic appearance to the front surface of the eye. There is only one front surface of the eye. Can't we zap the Iris component and apply all texture mappings, and even bones wieghts to, the Eye meshes?

The texture mapping for the iris is not correct on import. It needs to be scaled up. You use the same images as you did for the eyeball itself. Personally, I don't like the ones that come with MakeHuman and wind up replacing them with procedural ones I made from a tutorial on the net.

when i imported the person i made, her bodyparts weren't seperated. i imported her as a wavefront obj. what do i do

First, you may need to de-select it after importing and click on it again to select it properly. The button window will tell you since it will update.
Next, press tab to get it into Edit mode.
Select all the verts with A so that they are all orange. Press it again until it is.
Press P to split the mesh into parts. A menu will appear with different choices, pick one and press enter/return.
Wait . . . . . .
and presto, you have your separated meshes.
It's kind of the opposite of Control-J.
You probably know a lot of the stuff I wrote here but it can't hurt.
Does that help ?

Almost prof...



It isn't pick one because if you choose "loose parts" you have a trillion meshes. He needs to choose "by material" to get the correct parts to apply the UV to which is associated with the material.

it still didnt work. i did everything you told me to and i selected separate by material but it still wont separate.