r/blender • u/masoudrezaei28 • 1d ago
Free Tutorials & Guides Not new to making characters. But new to rigging them. what do you think?
So, I'm not new to making characters but I was always bothered by buttons and buckles or basically any solid object like a knife or walkie talkie stretching or deforming when the character starts moving. I also don't have much experience with rigging and skinning.
This was my solution! What do you think?
should i just leave them? since they are barely visible?
By the way this is a game asset, so I think extra bones are overkill.
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u/stupidintheface0 1d ago
The lead artist at my work is pretty anal about this kind of deformation, but realistically when the asset is in game, this kind of thing is never noticeable. However the same thing on a larger piece, like a belt buckle, I think you have the right idea.
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u/GentlyAbnormal 1d ago
As a lead artist in games, this level of polish on shoes is just taking away polish/time from something players will actually see XD
Totally fine for personal work or portfolio though!
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u/masoudrezaei28 18h ago
Agreed, i just didn't have any other good example ready to show. And i also wanted to see what professionals are doing.
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u/thehugejackedman 1d ago
This is why games cost 300m, because major studios allow their artists to spend time on this shit
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u/Intelligent_Aerie814 22h ago
The top comment nailed the perf budget aspect, but you're missing the most sacred rule of game dev: Fake it till you make it.
Look at HoYoverse (Genshin Impact, ZZZ, etc.). They are a billion-dollar company, and they don't even model real belly buttons on their characters—it's literally just a texture/normal map painted on a flat stomach.
If they can fake a belly button on a main character, you can absolutely fake these buckles. Just weight them 100% to the main mesh, or even better, bake them into the texture. If the player can't zoom in, it doesn't exist. 😂
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u/masoudrezaei28 18h ago
Haha, true. Though with my models im doing my best to keep a good level of optimization and quality, after all detail like this can matter in certain games.
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u/SolidFelidae 1d ago
Was that pages and pages of chatgpt conversation
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u/Puzzleheaded_Cap5597 20h ago
Well using it to learn how to do it is not bad assuming it just to learn and doing it themselves and not to have it generate something is not a bad usage of ai imo
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u/superkickstart 17h ago
Using it to learn vs blindly vibe coding a addon that does the same as blender does built in. You can ask ai how to do things which i agree is a good use of it.
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u/Alicendre 1d ago
Entirely solid objects should generally have uniform weights. For things that are going to deform heavily, you can often get away with blending your weights so that they won't stretch strongly but still mostly follow the flow of what they are attached to.
I'm not sure why you needed to vibe code an entire plugin apparently since copying weights from the selected vertex is a Blender feature by default, in the Item tab in edit mode.
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u/iku_19 18h ago
almost every vibe coded plugin i've seen on this subreddit over the last two weeks has been an addon that does something blender does built in.
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u/masoudrezaei28 13h ago
Blender does copy from active but doesn't do smooth transition! or does it? I'm genuinely asking not being smart or anything, i don't know why my other comment got down voted but the post says it too, I'm new to weight painting and i couldn't find any tutorials showing these tools.
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u/masoudrezaei28 18h ago
Wait it is built in? thank you, i didn't know that. Though to be fare i originally made this to avrage the weights on selection, which turns out it's also a built in feature. The problem was, at the time no matter how much i searched i couldn't find any reliable way to avrage, so i ended up with this addon and then kept adding other features to it like smooth transition and display weight values. If you do know of other handy built in features i would appreciate it if you could share. After all thats why i posted this anyways.
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u/Both-Variation2122 1d ago
Do shoes in games have 3d lace loops now? :O In what genre do you get camera close enough to notice them, not to even talking about deformations?
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u/masoudrezaei28 18h ago
Fixing the deformation on something so small is an overkill, I agree, this was just a showcase. but triple A games like alan wake 2 or the last of us part 2 do have laces, laces loops and buttons.
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u/Realistic-Welcome158 1d ago
If you're working on an asset where you don't have the perf budget to do extra bones, you're probably working on an asset where nobody is gonna care about this deformation.
If you're working on an asset where people will see and care about this deformation, you should allocate extra perf to do extra bones.
Weighting all verts 50/50 between 2 bones still usualy results in some stretching when the bones are rotating relative to eachother. Clearly it's better than just leaving them auto-weighted, but that's more down to spending time manually weighting them rather than just trusting auto weights.
All in all, it's context dependent. Do you have time to worry about it? Do you have perf budget to do the high-fi solve? Will your audience/player see it? That will tell you your answer.