Join Head To Body?

[Atom]

Hi All,

I am trying to attach the pig head to a body.

I have a group for the edge of the bottom of the pig and a group for the edge of the neck of the body.

If I use the PolyBridge tool it just makes a mess out of the connection even with ordered groups.

ap_pig_man.hipnc

Edited June 28, 2016 by Atom

[Atom]

Ok, abandoning that approach.

 

I am trying out the convert to VDB and back to polygons technique.

However, I am getting a lot of noise out of the isooffset node. It won't make a clean representation of the mesh as a volume. This produces voxel spikes through my object.

Does anyone know how to remove the noise generated in the isooffset?

 

ap_pig_man.hipnc

Edited June 28, 2016 by Atom

[6ril]

hey Atom,

I've tried with the polybridge, and if you go to pairing/interpolation and change it from "rotating frame" to "linear" then things are managable, i think...

 

[rbowden]

You gotta close those polygons to get rid of the spikes. Try using a polycap to do this. The back of his neck still looks odd though so you may have to play with those polys a bit.

 

ap_pig_man_RB.hipnc

[Atom]

Thanks.

I must have read your mind. I just figured out that you do have to feed isooffset a closed mesh. I added the PolyCap to both meshes and activated triangulate caps and the voxel spikes disappeared.

I am converting the combined VDB back into polygons then through a PolyReduce to bring the face count back down. I am left with triangulated mesh, however.

Is there anyway to re-quadify my mesh at this point?

[rbowden]

I haven't played with it myself but, give the remesh sop a try and see if that helps.

[6ril]

that body suit him pretty well !

if you still have a hard time with quadifying the volume method, check my previous post, the polybridge works (with a little poly job to get a nice neck).

[abvfx]

The best way i know is manually making sure points line up and are right on top of each other.

I also make a group of each border (to be safe) and fuse with a very low tolerance. Benefit being you can have all your blendshapes (if that's what you chose) are isolated to the head.

[Atom]

I broke the body into three major components. The torso, the legs and the shoes. I ran each one through it's own isooffset and converted them to VDB as well. This helped quite a bit because I capped each one too. This gives me a smoother conversion than just one single body mesh.

I still have some problems in the neck area. I wonder if that could be fixed in a sculpt program? Also my UVs are kind of a wreck, but hey I made a pig man today!

ap_pig_man.hipnc

[carlo_c]

I have nothing useful to add to what you've done Atom (would have tried the VDB route myself if presented with this problem) but reminds me of this article on Gamasutra 

[f1480187]

As @6ril stated, there is better options on Bridge node. With some smoothing, soft-editing and painting, it will give you very fast and decent results, non-procedural though.

sew_head.hipnc

 

Look at him. He is happy today!

Edited June 29, 2016 by f1480187

[Atom]

@F1: That looks great and does maintain the topology fairly well.

In my VDB approach I broke the body mesh into 3 parts, torso, legs and shoes. I am revisiting the PolyBridge technique trying to recreate what you have in your file using those 3 obj files. But I am not having success. I see what you have done. You have added a point edit to the head and to the neck with the soft selection slider. This gets the geometry better aligned before the polybridge.

When I added in the smooth and deltamush it rounds out my pigs head too much so I am leaving those out for now. Also when I add in my paint node it won't paint white for some reason? I can paint black and remove black but white never appears this causes the final attribute wrangle code to be less effective thus my seam is very ugly.

 

What is the trick to making the paint node work correctly?

How do I smooth the seam?

 

ap_pig_man2.hipnc

Edited June 29, 2016 by Atom

[f1480187]

White color is default, so, everything already white. Switch to Background Color and press Apply to All button. Then draw with white Foreground Color. You also may want to subdivide pig head, to match body's loop density better. It is unnecessary, but outputs better result.

Edited June 29, 2016 by f1480187

[6ril]

look at you body mesh, it seems to be subdivided already. won't match well with pig mesh density.

 

*edit*

oups F1 already posted about that.

 

it should alert you when you see such a mesh density difference before trying to connect those objects.

Edited June 29, 2016 by 6ril

[f1480187]

I just realized, that it was really simple from the start. There is no need to do procedural stuff like smoothing and surface fitting with Delta Mush, to manually paint color in the end. You sew head with bridge and then relax with a Sculpt SOP.

Smoothing, delta mushing and lerping stuff is useful when you do fully procedural body parts sewer. In later case you can propagate color from bridge primitives, instead of painting it manually.

 

sewing_new_head.hipnc

Edited June 29, 2016 by f1480187

[Atom]

That looks promising.

What node do I drop down to activate the first step of sewing?

Is that some kind of merge nearby vertices action?

.

.

.

Oh, I just noticed you attached a HIP file.

So the smoothing work gets done in the sculpt node.

Edited June 29, 2016 by Atom

[f1480187]

You mean procedural sewing parts? Try PolyStitch instead of Bridge. It may fail, but tries to do such detection. IMHO, bare minimum here is require border edges from user. In that case it will be simple "Soft Bridge" wrapper over Bridge SOP.

[Atom]

I got the connectivity working ok using PolyBridge. Some of my edge groups were messed up and making connectivity a mess. Now it is fairly close before a sculpt or smooth.

I removed the previous subdivsion on my body so it more closely matches the head.

I follow that up with a Sculpt and set the brush to Smooth, however, when I mouse in the viewport to sculpt on the mesh the drop down changes the brush back to Deform..?

How do I lock in the fact that I only want to smooth while sculpting?

.

.

 

Ok,

The Sculpt node by default, on my system 15.5, comes up with both mouse buttons set to deform. You have to RIGHT-CLICK while the pointer is in the 3D viewport to obtain a menu that allows you to choose another function for a button, such as Smooth. Now the sculpt smoothing works just like your GIF shows.

 

Thanks again for the help. After playing around with the sculpt node I was able to get an ok seam for my character.

Edited June 29, 2016 by Atom

[MrScienceOfficer]

 A bit late but I figured I throw my hat into the ring here, personally I think the easiest way to do something like this is to first, convert the separate pieces into a single VDB, then plug the mesh and the VDB into a topobuild node and simply draw out the seam.  This way you can then get a perfect seam, and smooth it against the surface of the VDB so you don't lose volume.

Edited July 1, 2016 by MrScienceOfficer

[6ril]

hey Tom, that sound very interesting !

I tired your method on this thread models, and I might be wrong, but the polybridge + relax is far quicker and easier.

Maybe in a different scenario with different models the topobuild process you described would be better/cleaner, so thanks for your post.