I am trying to rig a Daz 3D model in Blender. Generated a simple Rigify armature, but when I parented, got a message that one or more bones was unable to find a solution. In fact, no weighting has been applied at all.
I’ve been through several tutorials, but can’t find a solution. The purpose I need the figure for, a simple once-off pose, is not worth the trouble of weight-painting by hand.
There’s a problem with the geometry of the figure [ overlapping faces, non-manifold geometry etc] - and the only ‘quick’ solution will cause problems with fine details . . .so . . . in Edit mode for the figure select all vertices, press CTRL-v and select this:
type in 0.001 and hit enter. This will remove over 12000 vertices, [and degrade the eyeballs]. Back in Object mode, clear the vertex groups for the entire figure, delete the armature modifier, regenerate your Rig with the Generate Rig button on the armature roll-out and then rebind the mesh to the new rig with automatic weights. I got this to work, but I don’t know how clean the resulting geometry really is for what you need, and the pose of the MetaRig armature should ideally be tweaked as the knee joints are perfectly in a straight line from Hip to Ankle - this will lead to rotation mis-behaviour at the knees. If you need more details on using Rigify for a simple rig, this is good :
Thank you so much, DaminenJ - really helpful and working like a charm.
Strange that the figure had so many issues - Daz figures are pretty much the most perfect there are - possibly the conversion to obj messed it up?
A couple more questions arise - firstly, the finger bones are not visible and I can’t find a method of making them accessible. Making the green bones visible doesn’t help because nothing seem s to make them move. The purpose of using the figure is to have it seated on a motorcycle,gripping the handles, so manipulating the fingers is vital.
Secondly, I will have to apply bone constraints. Actually quite surprised that the Rigify rig doesn’t come with constraints, it being such a great piece of work. Anyway, I imagine this will be a huge undertaking, judging by the amount of work involved in doing this in my previous software, Carrara. So, do I set up the constraints before parenting to the figure and is there a way of saving a constrained rig for future use?
You don’t touch the green bones - Rigify is a Metarig system that automatically creates a proper rig with full FK/IK and much more. Follow the tutorial in the linked Youtube video - it is explicit and exactly the work flow you should follow. Just be sure to use the mesh of the figure that has the vertices removed - as per the last post.
My apologies for taking so long to respond - had some bad weather and worse internet connection:)
I followed the whole series very closely, but he always used very simple characters, so never addressed the issue of finger bones. Nor are bone constraints dealt with.
Anyway, after watching a lot more tuts, I eventually picked up sufficient info to identify the problem. There is a script which has to run to make the finger bones behave correctly. My version does not have the option to run the script, but when I open the file after saving, I get a warning about a python script which could cause problems, so naturally I disabled it. Turns out that was the script which should be run. After enabling that, the finger bones came back!
Unless i’m totally missing the point, that is how I understand it.
Seems like the tut authors aren’t very fussed about bone constraints - probably just very careful about how they handle poses so as not to twist the figures into pretzels.
The end result is that I got the rig to work well, but as soon as I attach clothes, the lag is so bad any attempt at posing is pointless. Guess my old laptop is just not up to it. So I’ll just have to stick to posing in Daz Studio and importing to blender for renders.
Fortunately I = like most other Blender users, I imagine - I don’t have much need of realistic human figures, so it’s not too much of a hassle.
