Native Dancer: Adding Motion
Author: Ariann Rousu – Native Dancer Digital Artist
The Native Dancer Project is making progress in several areas, such as in design development with male regalia designs, and adjustments being made to the previous female Jingle dress Regalia. We have also made some exciting progress when it comes to moving clothing from Marvelous Designer(MD) back into Character Creator 4(CC4), as well as testing out motion in I-clone.
This past week, I spent time on the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks campus in the AI and VR Lab to work on moving the clothing from MD into CC4, and seeing how the skin weights would transfer over. As seen in my previous blog post, there were some issues with moving the clothing from one program to the other. I was overlooking an important aspect when it came to having the patterns show up in the right areas. Upon some troubleshooting and research, I was able to find a solution. When transferring 3D objects with textures like the clothing made in MD, there are UV maps which overlay those objects to create the textures. Upon learning more about UV mapping, I was successfully able to open up the UV editor in MD, lay out the materials in their proper placements and have them transfer over to CC4 with less issues.
Another issue that arose while moving the clothing from one program to another, was the hanging elements of the jingles weren’t being exported. If I tried to export with the jingles individually selected, I would experience a crash with the program. From there I put the jingles on hold and focused on getting the clothing to move properly once in I-clone.
The clothing with skin weights successfully moved with the motions available in I-clone, however the leg would stick out or the skin would show in areas on the arms in certain positions. to fix the issues with the clothing, I have been readjusting the skin weights to move differently with the character body. I also have been rendering the mesh of the clothing in areas, so to move more smoothly with the body of the character. I am now fixing the clothing, so it doesn’t stretch the designs so much when the characters legs are apart.
Moving forward with the jingles, I have successfully imported and placed one directly in CC4 on a Jingle dress. However, it moves more flowy than a real Jingle would. I will be planning and implementing different ideas in the future to try to simulate the bouncy movement of the Jingle Dress.
As I receive feedback on the first few sketches of male regalia, I have started planning out how I will implement the final designs in marvelous designer. While taking into consideration all the technique learned making the female regalia, I plan on constructing the regalia similarly with less focus on hanging elements as Obj at this time. I will add those later as I troubleshoot the current problems; I am facing with hanging elements.
