But can't I transfer her rig to this? As it stands, it is actually 12 separate parts, and using this in a cloth sim would be a bear. I could smart prop a lot if it, but I would rather rig it.

I would attempt it, but I don't do well with regular rigging. Any help would be great.

Thanks!

miki 4 dev kit, basically a stripped out .cr2 from which you can transfer the rig. I don't have Miki 4 but I'm sure that the kit comes with her, or can be gotten through SM, or somebody has made one for distribution. Should be pretty easy to find...

Edit_ oh yeah, weight mapped... That's a whole different situation I imagine. I'm still teaching myself set-up on a very beginner level (I'm just thrilled to have easypose dials at this point) so that stuff is out of my range of commentary. I'm sure somebody can point you in the right direction...

I will look and see if she has a DEV rig. I haven't really tried anything with weight mapping yet. And I have yet to successfully rig a clothing prop to be conforming.

I am going to poke around in the manual some more and see if I can get a clue.

There is a development rig in the Miki 4 package.

Demo Video on Youtube from SmthMicro on rigging weightmap.

Quote - Demo Video on Youtube from SmthMicro on rigging weightmap.

I will check that out. I may have seen it already, and I don't think I can create a weight map in Poser 9. But I should be able to transfer a DEV rig. I can transfer the older rigging; I've done that already.

I am already thinking my upgrade will be Poser Pro 2014 instead of 10.

I took the under armor into the setup room and applied Miki's DEV rig to it. I got really lucky too, in that the joints are lined up really nice.

Here is a render with some posing applied. Weight maps are cool...

I am going to do the same with the rest of the costume.

I'll post an update later today.

good job!

Nice project work, Rokket!

Thanks for the comments!

I am having issues with the rest of the armor. When it's been converted into a figure, the chest armor comes apart when I conform it to Miki in a pose. So I am trying to figure out how to make it work. I may have to smart prop the rest of it, or rework the grouping.

Progress report when I have some progress to report. 

     Try giving the armor pieces no falloff zones at all.

watching and listening with interest...

I only recently delved into rigging with a lot of help from a friend here, but was having a similar issue with my clothes going to bits when I posed the figure.  After you have grouped the figure and made it conforming, saved it to your library etc etc etc. open a new scene and reimport the item from the obj that Poser created and stuck in your figures folder.  Reweld all the groups again and save that obj back to your folder where it was under the same name.  Then again, start a new scene, bring in Miki4, load and conform the item, it should keep it from going to pieces. 

Hope that helps, if not, it is beyond my meager rigging skills.    

Quote -      Try giving the armor pieces no falloff zones at all.

I'll check that out. I am still thinking it's because the chest armor is broken into several different groups ( shoulder, bicept, collar, pectoral, breast, latissumus for right and left sides, plus chest, waist, abdomen, neck). In all, 16 different groupings on what is essentially a hard body. I am going to create a single chest grouping and see what that does.

I am going to load the BLLE armor for Ryan and see how that was rigged. I have used it in Renders (see my gallery) and it doesn't have those issues.

I loaded the boots into the scene and they loaded correctly in place, but when I took them into the setup room and applied the DEV rig and then conformed them to Miki in the pose room, they moved up.

Do I need to adjust the entire rig down?

I checked the BLLE armor, and it has chest, abdomen, right and left collar as groups. I am going to take her chest armor back in Wings and create those groups and see what happens.

By the way, I saw the poke through in the forearms of the under armor. I am going to fix that with the morph brush and resave it with a morph dial labelled "fix".

Quote - I only recently delved into rigging with a lot of help from a friend here, but was having a similar issue with my clothes going to bits when I posed the figure.  After you have grouped the figure and made it conforming, saved it to your library etc etc etc. open a new scene and reimport the item from the obj that Poser created and stuck in your figures folder.  Reweld all the groups again and save that obj back to your folder where it was under the same name.  Then again, start a new scene, bring in Miki4, load and conform the item, it should keep it from going to pieces. 

Hope that helps, if not, it is beyond my meager rigging skills.    

I think the problem was I auto grouped the chest armor because I was looking for a short cut, and it broke it up into too many groups along some places it shouldn't have. I am going to redo the grouping in Wings so that it only has the necessary groupings in places that make sense. Then it should be ok. If not, I will try out your suggestion and see what it does.

HARD SHARP face palm

I figured out one thing I was doing wrong: I didn't check the hierarchy before I entered the setup room. I should have this one done by the end of the day. Grouping is going to be interesting on a 8000 + polygon model...

Ehhhh.

Too many issue with the chest armor. I am going to have to remodel it, being much more careful and group it as I go.

One more attempt, grouping it manually in Poser, and the I will be back to Wings. Crap.

why don't you group it in wings (as materials, poser doesn't recognize the groups created in wings by select/new group, even though mysteriously the g line is present in the file created by wings) and then run the obj through uvmapper to adjust the materials or groups by the assign commands, save back out. Although I'm not certain this will work on a non-mapped .obj as I've only ever done this on UV'd things. Many times the groups you assign via materials in wings to do the rigging in the end don't necessarily correspond to the final material regions you want on the figure so it's necessary to do file editing or adjustments with UVmapper. The only reason I say this is because you mentioned using the grouping tool to establish your groups and then heading back into wings, sounds like a nightmare. don't use the auto-grouping for something like this, you want the ability to decisively assign your groups for predictable, precise results.

...not sure my comments apply to what you're trying to do but I figured I would comment as I saw it...

Quote - why don't you group it in wings (as materials, poser doesn't recognize the groups created in wings by select/new group, even though mysteriously the g line is present in the file created by wings) and then run the obj through uvmapper to adjust the materials or groups by the assign commands, save back out. Although I'm not certain this will work on a non-mapped .obj as I've only ever done this on UV'd things. Many times the groups you assign via materials in wings to do the rigging in the end don't necessarily correspond to the final material regions you want on the figure so it's necessary to do file editing or adjustments with UVmapper. The only reason I say this is because you mentioned using the grouping tool to establish your groups and then heading back into wings, sounds like a nightmare. don't use the auto-grouping for something like this, you want the ability to decisively assign your groups for predictable, precise results.

...not sure my comments apply to what you're trying to do but I figured I would comment as I saw it...

Actually, what I said was I just went back into wings with the original .obj file and attempted to assign groups that way, but the model is too detailed and assigning new materials became the nightmare.

I am going to attempt it one more time by just assigning the whole thing to one group: chest, and see what happens. It's supposed to be a rigid surface, so I don't want it to bend. I don't want the shoulder group to move with her shoulders, etc. I tried it by just doing the smart prop route, but that has limitations too.

I will figure it out. I will revisit a couple tutorials and see where I am going wrong.

good luck, man.

I got it!!!!

I changed the material in Wings to just one: chest.

I imported the model into Poser, went into the group editor, spawned a prop and brought that into the setup room. Now all I have to do it tweak the fallout zones and I will have it!

Progress report later...

Thank you for all your hard work. It is appreciated more than you probably realize.

Quote - Thank you for all your hard work. It is appreciated more than you probably realize.

Thank you for the kind words! If I had an ego it would be inflated right about now...

It is coming along nicely.  Can't wait to see this available.  I've been going back to Miki recently, especially Miki 1020 & Miki 2.  Got to give the others equal time.

Quote - It is coming along nicely.  Can't wait to see this available.  I've been going back to Miki recently, especially Miki 1020 & Miki 2.  Got to give the others equal time.

I took the chest armor back to the drawing board and restarted it. I got carried away with the design and didn't stop to give functionality a thought. Now that I have, I am redoing most of the armor, and trying to make it look better and most of all WORK when it's on the figure and posed.

Even the under armor needs some attention. There are poke through issues to fix when it's conformed to her, even in the T-pose.

It might take a little time, but the results will be worth it, I feel.

Great project Rokket... just caught up with this thread, watching with interest :)

Thanks!

As soon as I get the parts remodeled and rigged, I am going to package it up and put it in the freebies.

The second chest armor is almost done. It's much nicer than what is in the picture above. It actually looks like it could be Halo armor.

I reworked the chest armor, added some padding to the abdomen area of the under armor, added a hood under the helmet and redid a lot of the coloring I am going to use on the whole thing.

I attempted to UV map the chest armor to see what it would look like. It was a mess. Going to retry that one later on.

I am going to redo the shoulder and arm pieces next, then redo the thigh armor and the boots.

The whole thing will be conforming when it's done.

There are still some artifacts I need to fix with a control edge or two, but it's coming along nicely.

Nice.  Can't wait to see the final product.

Of course there are no textures on this yet. I am still trying to fix the UV map so I can add some flavor to this armor. I don't want it to look too plain. Maybe have a couple different texture maps, one clean and one battle damaged...

There are two more pieces to add on to the back of the armor to give it that distinctive look. I am toying with the idea of leaving them off, or changing them around. I don't want a copyright violation.

Quote - Nice.  Can't wait to see the final product.

Thank you, sir!

I am taking my time with this one. I don't want to release a POS, even if it is a freebie. Depending on how this one fairs, I may finish the one I started for Ryan 2.

I want to create the seams, snaps and hooks and other things with texture maps and displacement. If I can't get the UV maps to behave, I will have to go back in and model them.

I am not looking forward to that, so I hope the UV maps work...

Looks good. I appreciate your dedication to quality. Too many have a tendency to say "It's a freebie who care if it doesn't work well. It's not like they paid for it."

Quote - Looks good. I appreciate your dedication to quality. Too many have a tendency to say "It's a freebie who care if it doesn't work well. It's not like they paid for it."

Yeah, not me. I value my reputation. Plus, if I ever decide to become a vendor, who would buy my stuff if my freebies suck?

The belt has been tweaked to fit better, and the shoulder armor is done. The Miki in the pic is her .obj file that I have been modeling on. It seemed easier to just import her back into Poser than to scale and move everything, especially since I am not done tweaking it.

On to the gauntlets. I am sticking with my original idea of separate gloves, mainly because it's easier to model them that way. The original armor has the gloves as part of the under armor as far as I can tell. I've never seen a Halo character with their gloves off, so I can't be certain.

More updates as they happen. This render shows the hood in place with the helmet off.

Fantastic - this is really coming on! :)

Quote - Fantastic - this is really coming on! :)

Thanks for looking!

I am about to start on the thigh armor. I didn't like the last parts because they didn't match the rest of the armor. They had a more organic feel to them which would work if everything else did...

Updates when they happen...

Question for the rigging gurus:

Should I attempt to rig each part separately, or should I export the whole armor (without the hood helmet and gloves) as one .obj file and rig it that way?

I am going under the assumption that the end user would use the armor as a whole, with maybe removing the helmet, hood or gloves to fit the scene.

Which way would work better, and obviously, which way would be easier?

Thanks!!!!

Ignore that helmet. I am going to redo it.

The thigh armor is done, and I am formulating a plan of attack for the boots. The nice thing about Wings is that I only have to model one of them.

Progress report when there is more to report!

Yep, like the remodeled helmet.  Thigh armor looks good.  Did you mention that you will be texturing the suit?  It would be nice to see some procedural shaders made for it.  Maybe leave it up to the users.

rokket, thx fr yr work on this.  your attitude is positive and friendly, and I want to commend you on your participation here.  addtionally, you may try this metallised glass visor shader, should you desire it.

Quote - Yep, like the remodeled helmet.  Thigh armor looks good.  Did you mention that you will be texturing the suit?  It would be nice to see some procedural shaders made for it.  Maybe leave it up to the users.

Yeah, I am going to UV map it. The first attempts at it weren't do hot, so I am going to try cutting it and seeing what that will do. Wings in good, but the UV mapper in it sometimes make a real mess of things.

Once I do get it mapped, I'll create templates. What you are seeing there is probably what it will end up to be, with the rivets and whatnot added in as displacement maps. I'll include the templates so users can do whatever they want to it.