need help turning a dog into a pony

Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#1

13th Dec 2017 at 9:42 PM

need help turning a dog into a pony

so I made a pinkie pie costume for large dogs, but I'm new to assigning weights, and I can't get her to move in a way that looks natural. I've tried many times. here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgoeENpFEiM

I think I'm going to start from scratch one more time, but if anyone knows this stuff way better, I'm hoping someone can volunteer to assign the weights if I send them the model. eventually I want to get her ears, mouth, and eyelids to move too, but the eyes themselves probably won't work because they don't work the same as sim eyes. but before I do that, I've got to get the entire body to move correctly. any takers?

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Inge Jones

One horse disagreer of the Apocalypse

#2

13th Dec 2017 at 10:09 PM

A lot of genetic engineering going on since Pets came out

"You can do refraction by raymarching through the depth buffer" (c. Reddeyfish 2017)

CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

staff: moderator

#3

13th Dec 2017 at 10:24 PM

That looks pretty good to me. What is it you don't like about the animation, keeping in mind it's going to move like a dog, not a pony?

Coincidentally I'm working on a horse/dog myself. As I make progress with that I'll have a better idea of what works. IMO getting the eyes and ears animated may work well after manual bone assignments - the horse blinks fairly naturally after auto conversion of the mesh but it needs tweaking. Once I'm done with that I'd be willing to help with the pony.

If you want to try auto conversion, I can upload my complete dog mesh that I used as the reference. You'd have to fit the pony mesh to the dog shape as closely as possible for it to work well

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#4

14th Dec 2017 at 1:23 AM

a lot of the polygons glitch inside of each other. I think I know what I did wrong, and that's that, the sims dogs are realistically proportioned, MLP ponies are not. their knees and elbows are actually closer to the torso, and their torsos are shorter. what is auto conversion?

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

staff: moderator

#5

14th Dec 2017 at 2:12 PM

I agree, it may not be possible to make the dog animations look right without changing the proportions of the pony mesh. You could try assigning the leg joints with more weight to the shoulders and hips, I guess.

CAS Tools has an auto-conversion function that takes an OBJ or Milkshape mesh and a similar EA reference mesh and copies the bones, uv1, vertex colors, etc. to the custom mesh.

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#6

14th Dec 2017 at 11:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmarNYC

I agree, it may not be possible to make the dog animations look right without changing the proportions of the pony mesh. You could try assigning the leg joints with more weight to the shoulders and hips, I guess.

CAS Tools has an auto-conversion function that takes an OBJ or Milkshape mesh and a similar EA reference mesh and copies the bones, uv1, vertex colors, etc. to the custom mesh.

that's wicked. anyway, what I'm doing is guessing where certain areas are on the pony based on her proportions, because I don't want to change the shape of her body. I got the idea from (and cloned) this: https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...ogs/id/1396586/

but it's hideous, so I thought, "I bet I could do better." I'm about to test pinkie's new weights, and i'll take a video of it to show how it goes.

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#7

15th Dec 2017 at 1:35 AM

well great, now it crashes my game before I can even select it. T_T

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#8

15th Dec 2017 at 2:06 AM

alright, it doesn't crash anymore, but the weights look even worse than before. CMar, would you mind having a look at it??

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

staff: moderator

#9

15th Dec 2017 at 1:39 PM

Sure. Please upload both versions - the first one might need less work.

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#10

16th Dec 2017 at 3:27 AM

actually, I deleted the second one I did because it was worse than the first, so I'm giving you the one that looked better.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Alg_w_piyWUqgR2usyAImQTohNMh

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#11

16th Dec 2017 at 9:03 PM

This package makes my game crash, possibly because the body mesh has 3 UVs - did you give me the one that works in your game?

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#12

17th Dec 2017 at 11:17 PM

yeah I did. I forgot though, you need this for it to show up: https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...ogs/id/1396586/

that's what I cloned it from, and that's possibly why it has three UVs. I wanted to clone something from the game, but I couldn't figure out what thing would make the entire dog's body disappear like this one does. when my game was crashing with my other one, I found that if I cloned the twilight costume again, it'd work. but that's still quite a hassle.

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#13

18th Dec 2017 at 2:36 PM

Okay, now I need to figure this out first, lol. BTW, it's not true that the tail can't be hidden, there's a flag for tails in the exclude parts flags in the CASP.

This may take a little while, with Christmas coming up fast I'm busy with other things.

Edit: It still crashes my game with that package from TSR added. Very strange.

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#14

18th Dec 2017 at 9:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmarNYC

Okay, now I need to figure this out first, lol. BTW, it's not true that the tail can't be hidden, there's a flag for tails in the exclude parts flags in the CASP.

well that's good to know! I was just going to make a "no tail" mod, but it seems I won't need to. I'm sorry it crashes, I have NO idea what went wrong. it was working fine up until my second attempt. I DID have to alter my first attempt though because I forgot to assign the clavicles and one of the spines, but that still doesn't explain what would be wrong. the only thing I can think of is doing what I did; remove all weights and reassign... and dude, no rush, I'm lucky you're helping me at all. XD

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#15

20th Dec 2017 at 2:05 PM

Hi again! It's definitely the body mesh that's causing the crashing somehow. I'm going to try converting it to .obj, reshape it to roughly fit the dog body, do the autoconversion to simgeom for bone assignments etc, then copy the shape from your original mesh. I've added a function to CAS Tools to do the copying but the rest will have to wait until I get back from Christmas travel.

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#16

21st Dec 2017 at 8:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmarNYC

Hi again! It's definitely the body mesh that's causing the crashing somehow. I'm going to try converting it to .obj, reshape it to roughly fit the dog body, do the autoconversion to simgeom for bone assignments etc, then copy the shape from your original mesh. I've added a function to CAS Tools to do the copying but the rest will have to wait until I get back from Christmas travel.

the body shape shouldn't need to be changed. do you want me to send you the mesh without being connected to the dog? because my game didn't crash at all when testing her the first few times. I think there's a way to hide the dog's body parts just like a sim's, maybe the twilight costume is causing problems. maybe we can try cloning something from the game so we don't have to rely on that one package. I could probably do that if it would help.

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#17

21st Dec 2017 at 12:35 PM

I'm changing the shape only for the autoassignment - it needs to be close to the dog shape so the vertices are assigned to the nearest bones. After that's done I'll copy the vertex positions back so it's the pony shape again. Interesting that it didn't crash at first, maybe it's an incorrect bone assignment. I've already cloned a new package to work with and import the meshes and texture into, so I think I'm all set. Will get back to you after Christmas!

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#18

24th Dec 2017 at 7:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmarNYC

I'm changing the shape only for the autoassignment - it needs to be close to the dog shape so the vertices are assigned to the nearest bones. After that's done I'll copy the vertex positions back so it's the pony shape again. Interesting that it didn't crash at first, maybe it's an incorrect bone assignment. I've already cloned a new package to work with and import the meshes and texture into, so I think I'm all set. Will get back to you after Christmas!

enjoy the holiday

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#19

24th Dec 2017 at 2:09 PM

You too!

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#20

2nd Jan 2018 at 6:49 PM

Back after various family issues and general laziness.

Well, at least after I got rid of the third uv it shows up in CAS without crashing, and after I fixed the textures it's no longer showing up as solid black. (Either or all of the shadow, specular, and bumpmap apparently have to be the standard dimensions for a dog body.) And after I reduced the number of bones it no longer has weird spikes sticking out of it. (Maximum bones in a mesh is 60.) It still has a strange thing coming out of its head that may be an ear, and the legs don't work right. For what it's worth, in the horse/dog I'm also working on the the ears are strangely distorted so I may not be understanding how to assign them.

Still working on it!

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#21

4th Jan 2018 at 2:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmarNYC

Back after various family issues and general laziness.

Well, at least after I got rid of the third uv it shows up in CAS without crashing, and after I fixed the textures it's no longer showing up as solid black. (Either or all of the shadow, specular, and bumpmap apparently have to be the standard dimensions for a dog body.) And after I reduced the number of bones it no longer has weird spikes sticking out of it. (Maximum bones in a mesh is 60.) It still has a strange thing coming out of its head that may be an ear, and the legs don't work right. For what it's worth, in the horse/dog I'm also working on the the ears are strangely distorted so I may not be understanding how to assign them.

Still working on it!

that's so strange! if you have the twilight one in the mods folder, the texture should come up fine. still, no rush, I know these things are complicated. I wish they weren't! I wish it was simple!! especially with my latest project with a costume for kids, I got everything else to move as close to my liking as possible, but they arms do weird things, even when applying the fix using CAS tools. it's like... DO AS I SAY, TECHNOLOGY!!

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CmarNYC

Ms. Byte

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#22

4th Jan 2018 at 2:14 PM

LOL!

Having done more experimenting, I'm starting to think the distortion may be unavoidable because the pony shape just doesn't fit the dog skeleton and animations. The front legs work sort of okay and the ears are better but the back legs look awful in CAS when sitting. Possibly I could do a bone morph to fit the skeleton to the shape but there's no way I know of to compensate for the legs being so much thicker.

I'll have to look at the textures again. Maybe the ones in the twilight package were overriding yours?

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Reitanna

Field Researcher

Original Poster

#23

5th Jan 2018 at 11:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmarNYC

LOL!

Having done more experimenting, I'm starting to think the distortion may be unavoidable because the pony shape just doesn't fit the dog skeleton and animations. The front legs work sort of okay and the ears are better but the back legs look awful in CAS when sitting. Possibly I could do a bone morph to fit the skeleton to the shape but there's no way I know of to compensate for the legs being so much thicker.

I'll have to look at the textures again. Maybe the ones in the twilight package were overriding yours?

... I dunno if this will help, but the pony model does have its own skeleton for animations in things like source film maker and Gmod, would that be useful to you? aslo, in my game, the two packages don't conflict with each other in any way

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anoncrinkle