[mark polaski]

I am new to Lightwave. I downloaded an open source .obj file of a human male. I set my skelegons in modeler. I pushed my object into layout and coverted the skelegons to bones. When I tried to pose the model..some polygons seem to 'stick' and cause rips.

I have had similar problems of this nature with models that I laid bones
to in layout and even had weight maps applied.

I would really appreciate some help. My Ablan book only describes rigging
models in a perfect world.

Thanks,

Mark 'Rushinfox' Polaski

[NoStr0m0]

This is because the influence for the upper leg bone (femur) and the hand bone probably goe beyond what they should, into the hand/ upper leg polys. That's why most 3D models are constructed with their arms in a 'Christ' pose and their legs slightly apart... so the bones only influence the regions they should.

What you could do is either select the arm polygons and rotate them a bit, then create the skeleton or, like you said, create some weight maps, which is a bit more tedious, but yealds better overall results.

On the matter of the weight maps... there are some situations, and trust me, I've met them a few times this week, where points are very close to each other and when you select them to create your weight map, you might miss one or two, which is more than enough to annoy you for some time, before you realize the true problem.
What I recommend is to open modeler and go the the problem area, hide everything else but the region where you think there might be some 0 weight points. Select groups of points in that area and hit I(nformation) and you'll see an entry there for each point called weight.
Now there are two cases:
1. Some points won't have this entry, meaning that you never assigned them a weight map, either intentionally or not, and you'll have to decide what to do with them and if they're the problem.
2.They have the entry but when you click on it you'll see the weight at 0%, which you can easily correct by changing this value and see if it makes the model deform better.


One more thing: if you use Influence Range (or what's it called) in layout, you might want to consider lowering it and see what happens.

My 2,5 cents. Hope they help.

P.S. Welcome to the club :attn:

Cheers! :beer:

[mark polaski]

Thanks for the tips. I'll give them a go tomorrow. I've been pretty frustrated by this stuff. I'll keep y'all posted.