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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 18th Jun 2018 at 7:41 AM Last edited by meraki09 : 18th Jun 2018 at 7:32 PM.
Default Wonky Phalanges (NEW 100% Custom Sculpted Body Mesh). Help Please!
Hello there my dearest friends! I've run into one of the very last issues (thus far) in creating a completely custom body for a character of mine in TS3! From designing and texturing and all the way down to weighting, the process has run so smoothly...until I reach the dreaded TSR Workshop stage.

TL;DR:
The fingers on my custom sculpted mesh are f***** up in TSRW (pic below) even though the bone weights appeared perfectly painted and blended in both blender and milkshape. I am absolutely happy to share the torso portion of my mesh to anyone who asks for it.

The character I've designed this build for has a specific body type (because ideally, she's from my novel and I wanted to create a realistic depiction of her. This means not only have I created a new body, but I've also molded a "concept" of her face to use in the game) and so of course to achieve this, I sculpted her figure with anatomically correct elements and more realistic proportions, including highly detailed hands. Gotta have those hands!

I've checked and triple-checked and a 1000x checked that my weight paints were perfect and everything assigned accordingly. I don't think I've even created a more perfected gradient tbh. So what's the deal?
The wonky fingers is literally the only obstacle between me and testing in game (and of course the final optimizations but that would be a breeze if I could just get past this >)

I've compared my (the model's) hands to the afbody rig to see if maybe I was just missing something. But the weights are nearly identical so I've ruled that out.
I've also come across something a little interesting.

As a last resort, I chopped off the hand from the custom mesh just so it was easier to work on alone, and I aligned it as best I could with the afbody's hand. When importing the final result into TSRW, the bone assignments were almost okay. Still a little wonky especially with animation, but the slenderman phalanges were significantly reduced to normal size and not nearly as warped.

I don't know exactly whats going on here but does that mean that the hands from the default bodies are so complex they have to be in a very certain position in order to avoid this? To me that just doesn't make any sense, because I've imported the bottom portion of my mesh before, and they certainly are not in alignment with the default body's feet and the animations were just fine. So what's up with the fingers? If it helps, I can upload the torso portion of the model.
Screenshots
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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#2 Old 18th Jun 2018 at 4:08 PM
Usually when having meshes that are pretty high poly (Not sure what the polycounts on your mesh is, but I know from experience sculpting meshes could make things quite high in poly especially with the details you added which for a game like ts3 might be better off being bump maps so it doesn't crash or lag a lot on you or someone else if you want to share it in the future. You want to make sure that the mesh is below at least 10k. The thing is, is that if there are more than 64 bones assigned, (Which you can see under mesh>bones.) The bones tab should show a value of something between 0 till 60. 64 is usually the limit.

To fix this issue is to use to groups instead With tsrw however, that would require having to clone a top (and bottom eventually ) with 2 groups. You split the mesh in 2 in milkshape or blender, make sure both parts are exported individually and when importing it into TSRW, you want to import both those separate files back together (With the popup you'll see what I mean ) Check if any of the groups uses 63 bones and it should fix it
Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 18th Jun 2018 at 7:54 PM Last edited by meraki09 : 18th Jun 2018 at 8:21 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
Usually when having meshes that are pretty high poly (Not sure what the polycounts on your mesh is, but I know from experience sculpting meshes could make things quite high in poly especially with the details you added which for a game like ts3 might be better off being bump maps so it doesn't crash or lag a lot on you or someone else if you want to share it in the future. You want to make sure that the mesh is below at least 10k. The thing is, is that if there are more than 64 bones assigned, (Which you can see under mesh>bones.) The bones tab should show a value of something between 0 till 60. 64 is usually the limit.

To fix this issue is to use to groups instead With tsrw however, that would require having to clone a top (and bottom eventually ) with 2 groups. You split the mesh in 2 in milkshape or blender, make sure both parts are exported individually and when importing it into TSRW, you want to import both those separate files back together (With the popup you'll see what I mean ) Check if any of the groups uses 63 bones and it should fix it


Hi Lyralei! Thanks for the response! Here's some general (but important!) info about the mesh:

Polygons: ~25K (ish). I know this is very high for a clothing mesh, and I do intend to reduce it. However, the mesh doesn't require any morphs because I only intend to use it for one character and so I just sculpted her body as-is. And after importing in game (with slendy-fingers and all), I didn't experience any exploding morphs even with other body parts! Plus, my game ran pretty well, my computer specs can handle quite a lot! Sweet! But nonetheless I will not ignore decimating the polycount. 25K is maybe just a liiitttlee necessary

# of Bones: Now here's the real shocker. The torso has nowhere near 64 bones! It has only 46 (pic below)! Possibly due to the fact I didn't use any of EA's bodies as a reference. My bodies are completely independent, even with their own UV maps. For comparison, most EA tops have ~50 bones. And they're all the right ones, I double-checked in Milkshape that the bone weights were all in the right order with their designated place on the mesh. The only difference I noticed while comparing my torso to EA's is that mine is missing the wrist bone. But I didn't think that would cause a problem because the weighted mesh animates just fine without it (my torso's wrist shares the same weights as the forearm). This wouldn't directly effect the fingers, would it? But maybe TS3 is just finicky that way. Seems to me just like the concepts of Mathematics- there is only one true right way to solve the problem. Am I right?

I will try your very good suggestions as well. I'll reduce the polygons, and split the groups into two (even though the torso doesn't exceed 60 bones, I'm willing to try anything at this point.) and I will update on this ASAP! Thanks!!

UPDATE: I reduced the polycount pretty significantly and split the hands and torso into 2 groups...no dice. I literally am out of ideas now
Screenshots
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#4 Old 19th Jun 2018 at 9:24 AM
Are you okay with me taking a look at it? Just a WRK file or WSO file should do
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 20th Jun 2018 at 2:46 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
Are you okay with me taking a look at it? Just a WRK file or WSO file should do


Yes, sure!! I will PM it to you!
Test Subject
Original Poster
#6 Old 29th Jul 2018 at 5:49 AM
Thought I'd give this a bump, even though it's been a month and I've yet to find a solution Hope someone can help me out
Test Subject
#7 Old 30th Jul 2018 at 8:41 PM
How did you assign the bones? Did you use the mesh toolkit with a reference full body mesh?
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