This would be in the game discussion thread but since my problem deals with modeling I thought to put it here. Here I’m trying to implement character creation in blender’s game engine, since I can’t really incorporate sliders correctly in the 2.49b BGE I thought to do it the other way like how they did this in The Urbz, Brink, other games which allows you to choose your character’s body build and facial appearance. Pretty much I’m wanting to know how I can make two objects blend smoothly when they’re not together. Such as this image here shows. Is there any possible way I can do this?
You can use two or more if:
- the contact vertices/edges are at the same place.
- the contact vertices perform the same animation (the same vertex group, the same bone pose)
If you do not do it that way, you get overlaps and more worse gaps between the maps.
Usually you use one object, make a full rig (parent to armature). Then split the object in multiple parts.
Then you can make copies of the parts and create different versions. Ensure you do not change the contact edges.
I hope this is somehow understandable.
Monster
I kind of get it and I do have one completed full rig to use. But in what way do you mean by splitting the object in multiple parts and you do mean all on one object right or two?
I assume you have an armature and and “skin” mesh object?
I’m talking about the skin mesh object. You can go into edit mode - e.g. select the upper vertices - and separate them into a new skin mesh object.
Now you have two. When both are applied to the same armature they behave as the one mesh before.
Yes
But that sounds like what I’ve already done in that picture I showed. Pretty much I had the head and body still connected as one object, then I duplicated two whole persons, cut off the head off one and the body on the other. Unless your talking about a different method here. In what way are you talking about separating one object to make another?
Ok now I see. I thought you are asking how to split the lower and upper part of the body ;). I haven’t seen the hard ramp on the head. So forget what I wrote, I see you know that already.
So you want to smooth the faces that at the border of the mesh. I can remebere I had this discussion a while ago. It is possible, but needs some work.
Let me check if I can find the thread…
Ok it is a german thread
but here is what it means:
Extrude the Edges in away that it matches the face on the other mesh (= the removed face).
The new face
- should match the exact form of the face on the other mesh
- should be invisible as the other face is shown there.
Do that on both meshes
Background:
In solid mode the vertex normals are ignored vor shading.
In smooth mode they are included in shading.
If you switch on “Draw Vnormals” in edit mode, you can see the normals of the vertex. A normal is the direction the vertex/face “looks to”. The normal is used for shading.
- A face normal is always 90° to the flat surface in positive direction (the other direction is the backside of the face)
- A vertex normal is an interpolation of the face normals of the neighbor faces. If there is just one face the vertex normal matches the face normal. That is what happend to your meshes.
I hope this helps
In that picture I tried doing it and it did indeed blend in smoothly though if were one object it’d do like the cube on the right is have bigger specularity. Now I did it to a character model I have by Rorkimaru and it still looks a bit off comparison to the original.
Is there maybe a way I can rotate the Vertex Normals or is this just about as good as I can get it?
Attachments
I got it now! I tried doing the method you was showing in the first picture in your last response. I didn’t know I had to go into the UV Calculation and choose what faces I wanted to be invisible!
But now it won’t work on anything with shapekeys like UniHuman. I did the duplication trick, select the faces I wanted to be invisible and the opposite faces to be invisible and it didn’t go invisible! I went back to the new file I made from the method I did, added a shapekey to one of the two meshes that’re posing out as one object and it still has the invisible face that I added on it but now it doesn’t have the smooth gradient effect to it. Is there a way I can still get around this even with shapekeys added?
Are the vertex normals pointing into the right direction?
If so is the invisible face in smooth mode?
yes and yes.
I don’t see how with the shape keys involved it made it go not so gradient on it when it hasn’t even shaped. All I did was add in the basis.