Rigify Part 7G Stage 1 Weight Transfer and Rigging Clothes

Save time by transferring weights from one mesh to another. Other topics include rigging clothing and how to create clothing from a body mesh.

[@800pieds]

Two words: THANK YOU. I've been struggling with the clothing and armatures for a while and thanks to you I'm closer now to a working pipeline. I'm using MBL, just like others here and your tutorial is adaptable easily enough.

[@DanProCG]

Thanks! I'm glad it helped.

[@800pieds]

I'm also a big fan of your MBLAB to Rigify addon! Still using MBLAB for loading bvh files cause I don't know how to do it with Rigify, but I couldn't use Manuel's IKs to save my life.

[@natlinux]

Thanks a lot for the video I spent days searching for a video showing how to use the transfering weights you saved my day

[@DanProCG]

Glad I could help. Good luck!

[@EGeorgev]

I was already modeling my clothes from the nude body mesh so all I had to follow is the steps in the beggining and I was done :D Talk about lucky. Without watching this tutorial and have vision for what I'm gonna do in advance and still I was doing it right :)

[@Lowe0000]

Thank you! I was going crazy trying to fix pants with weight paint, this solved it immediately :)

[@fevrocks1]

Very useful and interesting tutorial. I love how you have used the mask modifier, to get around the problem with skin showing through the clothes. I haven't used that modifier before, but I can see from your tutorial the benefit of using it. Many Thanks!

[@artemiasalina1860]

Thanks DanPro, I came here from your comment in blenderartists. I'll be checking out any other tutorials you make.

[@private9402]

You're a fucking hero i love you, hope life is treating u good

[@yiandev4368]

So for anyone that has clipping problems and needs to hide mesh underneath for UE4 or unity you can use an Opacity Mask to hide certain mesh parts using the material properties. You can use blender texture paint to paint paint different opacity masks for each clothing set or body part, i think you can even combine(ue4) opacity masks in ue4 material using nodes to your hearts desire. Still would be better if i could filter them out by vertex groups but its not possible to export vertex groups by fbx so opacity mask is the last resort, and its easy to program the material to switch to different opacity masks during runtime, at least in UE4 i have not noticed any performance issues since the vertices are still there and are still animated just not visible in the material and gameplay, not ideal but ok works. Now i can make cloth from skin or transfer weights, then use opacity mask to avoid spending eons doing weight painting and still not getting rid of clipping.

[@meijinsigma8913]

You made it look all too easy, and it kinda is great stuff man!

[@Uthu777]

I finally did it, my mistake was: I parented the dress to one bone. That's a mistake, I switch the dress parenting on the "object panel" to: "Armature to Armature", instead of "Armature to Bones". And....now my model ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha is weight transfered! You = The man!

[@HIN30N]

Very useful technique shown here.

[@modernator]

Great video! This totally works!!!!!!!! Thanks dude!

[@GGFallenWarrior]

that's fine if you want that type of clothing but for other clothes like male underwear, baggy pants, dresses, armour etc. how would you go about weight painting to get the same results as far as how good the deforms are for the rig so it can be animated without clipping or too much stretching of the clothes???

[@kreion]

you kinda sound like principle Skinner :D

[@staccatobueller5485]

That's the FIRST THING I thought when I started the video.

[@FrederickDesimpel]

Hi, nice tutorials on rigify... i watched the whole series up to now. I wonder what stage 2 will be about. While your weight painting workflow gives good results, will you show how to use corrective shapekeys, and how to drive them with a rigify rig too ? looking forward to see your posing / animation workflow too, if you will go into that.

[@DanProCG]

Hi, Frederick. Stage 2 is all about finishing the details. I hope to cover as many situations as possible. Shapekeys and drivers will be a part of that. It's often the only solution for getting good deformations for extreme poses. I don't think I'll cover animating the rig or posing. There are far better animators out there then me. I can recommend a great series for anyone interested in character animation and workflow. The Animation Toolkit from CGCookie has been my favorite animation tutorial. It is authored by Nathan Vegdhal (the creator of Rigify) and Beorn Leonard. Both are talented animators and have worked on some of the Blender Open Movie projects. (Big Buck Bunny and Sintel) Beorn Leonard has worked on some AAA movies like The Lego Movie. Great stuff. I believe the tutorials are free for CGCookie members. Good luck!

[@FrederickDesimpel]

looking forward to it. Working on a character myself, almost ready to rig.

[@blenderratt3692]

Hello Dan. Great tutorial. I use this method alot myself except when my base mesh has a lot of vertices. Anyway my experience with this method and the cloth sim haven't been good ( leather body suit). do you have any pointers or tips in that regard? Thanks.

[@DanProCG]

With a cloth sim, it's best to make a very low poly model to use as the collision object. Disable rendering for that object. If you use a high poly body mesh, the calculations will be very slow. Sims are difficult and time consuming, so I avoid them whenever and wherever I can.

[@rssejalyt2441]

ty you

[@blenderratt3692]

Thanks for the advice, but for mostly all of my human characters I've started using MBL. For that same reason I try to use the sims because I'm a sucker for photorealism.

[@blenderratt3692]

1 more question. Before when I masked my character and tried to run the cloth sim, the mask hid my character from the clothes. That wasn't cool. Any advice?

[@26magicman26]

Fantastic, thanks for this ^^

[@Brandon_519]

4:13 I can't move any bones at this point and when I change to pose mode to try my clothes don't move. My clothes mesh shows the highlighted areas that the bones effect in weight paint mode, but when I move the bones it stays in place. Please reply.

[@DanProCG]

Did you click on Rest Position in Armature properties >Skeleton? (It should be set to Pose Position.) That will lock you from moving bones in Pose mode. If that is not it, you cannot move the deformation bones directly. You'll need to use the rig control bones. (Any bone with a custom shape like a box or circle.)

[@Brandon_519]

Thank you for the reply. I am in Pose position, and I am using a human shaped mesh created with manuel bastioni lab. I don't have any control bones that you have here in this video. I have been manually positioning each bone for animations so far. I don't really understand why when you disable freeze operator your bones start moving the clothes you created, where in my project the clothes on my mesh are not effected. When I look at my clothes in weight paint mode the bones are clearly highlighting areas of the clothing.

[@DanProCG]

The only thing I can think of is the clothing is not parented to the armature. Does the clothing have and armature modifier pointing to the same armature as the body mesh?

[@Brandon_519]

Pfft...Sorry...No I did not have that. I didn't consider it and just followed this video step by step. I am very new to Blender and this video was linked to me by a member of the Blender Artist Community. Thanks so much, man.

[@DanProCG]

Glad you got it working.

[@grobovayatish]

thanks

[@namnamproduction9096]

is it for second life , could be exported as a dae with UV map ?

[@skilarbabcock]

For me its only transferring one bone/vertex group instead of copying them

[@lerdherlix6657]

thank you for the guide!!

[@nitaigauranga3849]

excelent

[@3dtutorialsandquestions]

What is analog in 3dsmax mask modifier?

[@lightningx7239]

it work man thanks

[@mugenanimations2343]

When I hit transfer weights, the options containing freeze operator are inaccessible. I can't click anything in that menu.

[@DanProCG]

I'm not sure why that is happening for you. If you can, open a thread at blenderartists.org in the Animation and Rigging Support forums. Maybe I (or someone else) can help find the issue. As always, be prepared to upload a file that can be reviewed for your issue.

[@alexbull4722]

This issue is solved by enabling 'Global Undo' in user preferences, don't ask me why.

[@SuperCinema4d]

GOOD!!! Thank you

[@DanProCG]

Thanks! I hope it helps your project.

[@shamanik1320]

"Good enough for a poke, right?" "Yes, Mr. Henderson. Thank you, Mr. Henderson." Wow, I'm so weirded out that autocorrect knew to put Henderson after I typed "Yes, Mr.

[@PalchikVykin]

has anyone tried doing this for Unreal Engine ?? I'm trying to Weight Paint a Custom Saddle on to a Dino and after asking the only way is to Export FBX, Weight Paint Mesh's ; Reimport and Utilize the Same Skeleton as the Dino Charachter

[@Uthu777]

I rig my model not with rigify...can this work also on outside rigify?

[@DanProCG]

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking.Transferring weights form one mesh to another, creating clothing from a body mesh, and using a mask modifier to hide the skin under clothing should work for any rig.

[@Uthu777]

@@DanProCG i tried and cannot seems to work. When my model moves the cloth stays put on Blender 2.79b.How did you choose the bone and pose on weight painting mode? I cannot do that.hel]pp

[@DanProCG]

If the clothing is not parented to the armature, and there is not an armature modifier on the clothing mesh, it will not move with the armature. That is the only thing I can think of that would not allow you to select a bone within the armature or transfer weights.

[@Uthu777]

Thx.

[@DanProCG]

You are welcome. One more thing, the armature should be in Pose Mode prior to selecting the mesh and entering weight paint mode. If the armature is not in pose mode, the bones will not be selectable.

[@yiandev4368]

transfer doesnt work for me well, if the mesh has lots of different parts like a jacket which is not similar to skin and has lots of extra geometry it deforms very badly, i already knew about the 3rd method making cloth out of the already weighted skin but that only works for tight pants, undewear, skin close cloth anything that has volume and complex model shapes that end up looking different after modelling and multilayer cloth it wont work also there is the option of lattice deform + the above methods but lattice is modifier only works in blender i need bone deform only to export to FBX for my game pretty much im fucking stuck for years on cloth issue, i just dont fucking understand how profesionals get cloth done for characters, its ridiculous so many games look flawless on cloth yet i cant find a single way in blender to achieve non intersecting cloth, its worst of the worst im stuck and cant make my game because of this issue

[@xroman_]

thanks