Just to be sure, you actually meant Blender v2.49, isn't it? Also, by armor, you meant armature, right?
Would you like to create animations or only set up an armature/skeleton?
Hi Evac!!!
Thanks for answer!
Yea the version of my blender is 2.49!
My main problem is the time to assign the vertex to the objects in the right place.
My current object is a necklace
1-
2-
my question is how to assign vertex puedeo know and where it or if the program has some method to allocate.
Thanks again!!!
Oh, I see... I believe you're having problems with vertex groups and weight (influence) of the bones over the vertices that will be animated. Incorrect settings would make the objects move in a weird manner when they're animated (is that what's happening to you?). I'll try to write something about armature/skeleton setup as well (but I'll need some time to do that...).
Since you asked for instructions about textures too, I wrote a basic guide on how to map textures to your model (didn't know how much you already knew about the software... xD). It's been some time since I used Blender 2.49, but I hope this can be a good/clear reference for you or whoever wants to give Blender a try. That said, here we go...
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Texture mapping
To map a texture, you'll need to attach a material to your object (an object can have multiple materials attached to it, and a material can have multiple textures attached as well). A material specify mostly the lighting/shading properties of the surface, like how much light it absorbs, reflects, refracts, etc. To create a material, open the Material menu (F5). On the Links and Pipeline menu, you can select existing materials (1), create new ones (2), name them (3) and check the data block they belong to (4).
OK, we're ready to start mapping a texture! Open the Texture menu (F6) and you'll see a list similar to that of the Material menu, but now, of course, you'll use it to create your textures. On the Texture Type list, you can set your texture to use procedural/noise-based effects or directly load the color data from an image. To load an image, select texture type Image (1) and two new tabs will appear (2). Press Load (3) on the Image tab to load your image. xD
Now that your image is loaded, go back to the Material menu. You'll see the texture is now being shown on the preview window, meaning it's already attached to your current material. Now press F12 to see how your object is. Something seems to be wrong...
That's because when you're rendering an object, you need to set the texture coordinates for each vertex of your model so that the renderer will know how to calculate the colors of each pixel. Blender can calculate texture coordinates for you automatically! As an example, try clicking on Map Input (1) on the rightmost tab, click Cube (2) and press F12 again... Seems better now, right?
The problem is that it doesn't work well for arbitrary surfaces, so you'll often have to set the texture coordinates manually. There are a few commands you use to make the work easier, though. We'll see them ahead.
Let's see first how to attach multiple materials to a single object. Usually, you'll have one complete mesh that will receive multiple materials/textures. Although you can split it in multiple objects and attach materials individually, that's not a good practice, mainly because of animations using armatures, I'd say (you'll understand why once you start playing with them).
Then, let's move to the Editing menu (F9). We'll focus on the leftmost section, Link and Materials (1). Press Tab to enter the Edit Mode. You'll see the current data block (2), the current object (3) (both are named Cube here, but whatever...), the Vertex Groups options (4) and materials from the data block you can attach to the object (5).
I won't go into details of vertex groups now, but they are important for animations.
To add new materials to your current list, click the arrows to the left of the material's name and select the materials you'll want to attach. This will increase the material count on the little box below (from "1 Mat 1" to "2 Mat 2" and so on). You can use the arrows to select the material to be attached.
Now move your eyes to the 3D Window. Let's select some faces (press Ctrl+Tab and select Faces) whose vertices will be attached to our material. Click the Assign button (1) to apply the current material (2) to the selected vertices.
OK, first material attached. Now just select the next group of vertices to receive a new material and repeat the process as many times as necessary and there you go! You can also use the Select and Deselect buttons to select/deselect the vertices attached to the current material, which really helps on bigger models.
To arbitrary surfaces, though, you'll notice that the automatic calculation of texture coordinates won't work... In this case, you'll use the UV Calculation to manually distribute the vertices' coordinates over your texture. You can do this using the UV/Image Editor. First, split the 3D Window (press the middle mouse button over its border and click Split Area) and, in the new viewport, select the UV/Image Editor mode.
Now go back to the Link and Materials tab on the Editing menu. Select the material whose texture coordinates you want to edit and press the Select button (1). Now, on the 3D Window, press U, and you'll see the UV Calculation menu. Select Unwrap and you'll see the selected vertices projected on the other window. Now, on the UV window, click Image > Open (2) to open your previously loaded texture for that material. You can cycle over the loaded textures using the button to the left of the image's name (3). Now press Alt+Z on the 3D window to set the Viewport Shading to Textured mode. You'll now be able to see the mapped texture directly on the surface of the object. It seems a bit odd, though...
But try pressing F12 to preview the scene. It didn't change your last render, right? You still need to tell Blender you want to use your own texture coordinates. To do that, go back to the Map Input tab (1) on the Material menu (F5). Instead of Orco (Original coordinates), select UV (2) for the corresponding material, then click Flat (3) to have your coordinates mapped by yourself. Press F12 again and you'll see your texture coordinates mapped as shown on the 3D Window, and your surface messed up... xD
Try using other projection methods (U on the 3D Window) to achieve different mapping effects. For seamless textures, like in this example, the Cube Projection is the best method. On more complex surfaces, though, you'll need to use the Unwrap method in association with special edge commands. The most useful is the Mark Seam, used to "cut" the surface. Select the edges (press Ctrl+Tab and select Edges) you want to mark and press Ctrl+E on the 3D Window, then select Mark Seam (they are now marked with orange). Try unwrapping the vertices again and see the difference.
With this basic setup at hand, you can now fine tune your texture coordinates to fit the surface's vertices on the texture. You can do that by selecting the desired vertices on the UV Window and placing them where you want. It's simple, but requires some practice to achieve the best results.
Then, with the UV layout defined, you can use it to paint the texture directly using the Save UV Face Layout script. Click UV > Scripts > Save UV Face Layout... to save an image containing the vertices and edges as they're seen in the UV window. That's a good feature to help you with saving some operations with multiple textures on the GPU, because you can organize your vertices in one big layout, export to an image and paint using your image editing tool of choice.
Yeah, that's an Arwing from the Star Fox series (modeled based on DS's Star Fox Command low poly version)... I exported the layout and used GIMP to edit the image. Then I opened the image on the UV window and made some final adjustments to achieve this final result. It's pretty amateur, but whatever... I'm a programmer, not a designer. xD
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There's a lot you can do with materials and textures in Blender. This was only some basic stuff, but I hope it'll help you.
As for the armatures, would you like me to cover the basics like I did this time? I believe you already have a good understanding about how to build a skeleton. :)
As for the armatures, would you like me to cover the basics like I did this time? I believe you already have a good understanding about how to build a skeleton. :)
All right, let's start with the basic armature guide. Sorry if I took too long to write... I've been having a few issues with time recently.
I've split this section into two parts. Part I will show you how to setup the armature and vertex groups/weights. Part II will focus on how to create actions with the skeleton you just got up.
Also, I saved some "checkpoints" along the way, if you want to see how's the current status of the model at one given point. :)
If you or anyone else who reads this have questions or suggestions, feel free to comment.
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Part I: Setting up an armature
For this "lesson", I've invited an old friend who will be "lending" us his body for demonstration purposes (yeah, I'm lazy and not good enough to model something else... xD). He is Saki, from an awesome N64 game called Sin & Punishment. Gotta respect Treasure for creating a game character with only 335 vertices. We'll be creating a skeleton to animate his coarse, simple geometry. For convenience, his body parts are all segmented (there are no connections between vertices from different parts), so there'll be no problems to attach bones to them.
Then, let's start. First thing we'll do is create the armature. On the 3D window, press Space > Add > Armature (1) to create the first bone of the armature, which will appear on the 3D cursor's position as an octahedron. You can name the armature object on the Link and Materials tab (2) and enable the X-Ray option on the Armature tab (3) to have better visibility (although I prefer to use the wireframe vision for that...).
First bone created, let's now make it a full fledged skeleton to cover the whole character's body. Press Tab to enter the Edit Mode and you'll see it is possible make three different kinds of selections. You can either select the base and tip spheres individually by right-clicking them, or the whole bone by right-clicking the octahedron itself. You can apply all the basic transformations (translation, rotation and scale) and even subdivide (press W and select Subdivide or Subdivide Multi) the selected bone. Let's make this first bone control the lower part of his body by placing it inside his "belly".
From here on, let's use extrude and duplicate commands to create the lower skeleton. First, let's create two bones for the hips. That can be easily done by enabling the X-Axis Mirror (1) option on the Armature tab. Now, select the tip of the bone and press Shift+E to create two new, symmetric bones at the same time (2). Quite useful, huh? ;)
At this point, you should note an important aspect of armatures: the bone hierarchy. The newly created bones are automatically assigned as children of the parent bone they came from. Being a child means every transformation applied on the parent will also be applied on the child. It's common to have multiple bones detached from the main structure to control different parts of the body. If you want a bone to transform a 'necklace', you can make it a child of a 'neck' or 'head' bone, so any transformations on the neck or head will transform the necklace as well, but it can still be transformed independently from the neck with its own bone.
You can check the parent-child relationship on the Armature Bones (1) tab. Note that the two selected bones (named l.hip (2) and r.hip (3)) are already assigned as children of the bone they were extruded from (called lower.backbone)
OK, now let's just keep extruding the bones until we reach his feet! Select the tips of the newly created bones and press E to extrude new children from them (you can use both tips at the same time for symmetry purposes).
Now let's move to the upper skeleton. We'll start by selecting lower.backbone and duplicating it by pressing Shift+D, then placing it into the upper part of the torso. Alternatively, you can extrude this bone from the base sphere of lower.backbone, giving you both base spheres in the same position.
We want the lower.backbone to be the parent of the new bone (which I'm calling backbone), so when we apply any transformation on the lower bone, the whole body will also be transformed, while the upper bone will only control the upper part of the body. To do this, select the upper bone and then the lower bone (the parent should always be selected last) and press Ctrl+P to open the Make Parent menu. Select Keep Offset to mantain each bone in their respective positions (Connected will connect the base of the child to the tip of the parent).
Now select the upper bone and press G to move it around... Noticed that there's a dashed line connecting its tip to the base of the lower bone? That means we have a parent-child relationship between them. With this, as I said before, when we transform the lower bone, the upper one will receive the same transformations, thus keeping the whole skeleton connected. Now do the same stuff as before to complete the upper part.
When we extrude and rotate bones multiple times, their local Z axis may get messed up. This may result in irregular bone intepolations between keyframes (we'll se more about this later) and thus weird (sometimes completely crazy) transformations. Then, press A to select all the bones and Ctrl+N to open the Recalculate Bone Roll Angles menu, then select the Clear Roll (Z-Axis Up) option.
Now you're good to go!
Press Tab to go back to the Object Mode and, with the armature object selected, press Ctrl+Tab to enable the Pose Mode. This is where you'll be animating your characters. Noticed that the selected bones are now colored in blue? Try selecting and rotating one of them. Seems nothing is happening... That's because we still haven't attached the armature to our character.
Press Ctrl+Tab to go back to Object Mode. We will now tell Blender that we want changes to the armature's bones to deform our object's mesh. To do this, we should create a parent-child relationship between the armature and the character's geometry. Select the character and then the armature (remember the parent always comes last!) and press Ctrl+P to open the Make Parent To menu and select Armature.
Another menu will pop up containing four options. That's where vertex groups get important. To deform a mesh, a bone needs a vertex group named after the bone in order to know which vertices it should transform. This means that we'll always have a bone-vertex group pair with the same name. Vertices may also belong to multiple groups, and that's where the bone deformation weight may get some importance.
- Don't Create Groups, as the name implies, will let you create everything manually.
- Name Groups will create vertex groups named after each bone, but will not assign vertices to them.
- Create From Envelopes and Create From Bone Heat will each run an algorithm that will try to assign vertices to the bones' vertex groups automatically based on some settings you can adjust (though I won't go into details of envelopes and bone heat), the latter option being a bit more accurate.
For experimental purposes, select Create From Bone Heat (you may get an error if Blender gets lost with some vertices). Now select the armature and press Ctrl+Tab to go into Pose Mode again. Select a bone and rotate it. It works now, right? But it's probably deforming the mesh in an odd manner, or maybe not all vertices are being deformed... Thankfully, you can fix that! In fact, I prefer to select the Name Groups option and assign vertices by myself, so that I don't need to fix the mistakes Blender might have committed with its assignments.
Well then, now select the character and press Tab to enable the Edit Mode. Go to the Editing menu (F9) and take a look at the leftmost tab, Link and Materials. Click on the button with the up/down arrows to the left of the vertex group's name. See that now we have a new group for each bone in our skeleton (1)? Your job now is to assign the correct vertices to their respective groups by selecting the object's vertices (2) and clicking the Assign button (3). You can use the Delete button (4) to remove the vertices that don't matter for a given group.
After you assign the correct vertex groups, it's time to paint your model based on how much you want the skeleton to deform it. This process is called Weight Paint. To start painting the weights, make sure the armature is in Pose Mode, select the character's model and then press Ctrl+Tab to enable the Weight Paint mode. Your model is now almost fully painted in blue, right? The weight follows a scale in the range [0.0, 1.0], in which dark blue means no weight and red means full weight.
As you select different bones, you'll notice that different parts of the model are being colored according to this scale. You can select and rotate any bone to see if it's already deforming your mesh correctly. If it's not, then you'll want to repaint some parts of the model. You can configure the way you'll be painting using the Paint tab (1) on the Editing menu (F9). The most important options here are the desired weight (2), the opacity of the brush (3) (which would be the same as the pressure when you click), its size (4) and how you want the colors to be applied (5). You can also click the Wire button (6) to view the edges of the model, which gives you a better idea of the vertices' positions. Then you can use the left mouse button to paint the model based on these settings. If you paint a vertex that does not belong to the selected bone's group, Blender will automatilly assign it for you, so be careful not to include the wrong vertices into your desired group.
This example is not quite suitable to demonstrate how weight paint works because, as I said, its geometry is fully segmented, but if you have a model whose geometry is connected, e.g. having arm and forearm sharing vertices in the joint, you'll want to reduce the weight of each bone in these joint vertices to avoid excessive and undesired deformations. Once you set all the vertices for a group and its weights, your character will be fully rigged and (almost) ready for animations.
The next step is to set the IK Solver Constraints. IK stands for Inverse Kinematics and, basically, it's a technique used for animation in which you define a control point and computer algorithms calculate the angles between joints to return the desired pose (in contrast with the Forward Kinematics, in which you directly calculate the angles between joints to achieve the desired pose). Therefore, constraints must be imposed to these joints so that the computer won't rotate the moving parts in some unfeasible ways (which takes us to a nonlinear programming problem... >_<"). Blender can calculate these rotations based on constraints you define for bones, and we will now see how to make a basic setup for Inverse Kinematics animation.
Let's start with his hands. Select the armature and press Tab to enable the Edit Mode. Select the hand bone and duplicate it (Shift+D). This will be our control point and it can't be directly attached to the skeleton. If you move it around, you'll notice the dashed line (1), meaning it's a child of the forearm bone. Then, clear the parent-child relationship by selecting the control point and pressing Alt+P to open the Clear Parent menu (2). Alternatively, you can use the child of field (3) on the Armature Bones tab. Also, you don't want your control point to deform the mesh, but only tell Blender how the other skeleton bones will do it. Then, disable the Deform option (4) for each control point you create.
You may now want to put the IK control point closer to the hand . Then, go back to Pose Mode. We'll now create the IK Solver Constraint. Select the IK control point and the forearm bone, then press Shift+I to open the Add IK Constraint menu and select To Active Bone.
The forearm is now colored in yellow and a dashed line has been traced to the root of the upper part of the skeleton, meaning you have a full IK chain. Since we want this control point to transform only the arm, we'll change the chain length to 2 (two levels above the current bone). You can do that on the Constraints tab (1), by editing the ChainLen value (2). The dashed line now goes only up to the tip of the shoulder (3).
Now select the control point and press G to move it around. Pretty neat, huh? :)
Let's sync the control point rotation with the hand, so you won't need to transform it manually later. Select the hand and, on the Constraints tab, click Add Constraint > Copy Rotation (1) and the selected bone will be colored in green. On the new panel that just appeared (2), fill the Target OB (object) field (3) with the name of the armature object and the Target BO (bone) (4) with the name of the IK control point bone. Now select the control point and press R to rotate it. The hand now follows its orientation, right?
As an exercise, repeat this procedure with the right arm and legs. You'll notice that copying the rotation of the control point to the feet will make them land on the ground correctly, without undesired penetrations. You can check that by selecting the lower.backbone bone and moving it along the Z axis (you'll also need to select the hands' control points to keep the consistency).
Well, that's all I remember for armature setup... Hope it will help you anyway!
I believe Part II will be a bit smaller, since there's not too much to cover about setting actions and keyframes... At least not that I remember. lol
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