Halforums Academy 2 Story Commentary Thread

There's a tug of war, when it comes to skirts, between clipping and physics freakouts. If I make the collision bodies small, more clipping occurs as they squeeze between each other, but there's less skirts/hair going batcrap crazy.... but if I make the collision bodies larger to fight clipping, It causes them to bump into each other more, and if the movement is violent enough (which often it is in jerky dances like the beginning) it can impart a whole lot of kinetic energy to the skirt bodies, resulting in... that.

It's a balancing act, and I have to tweak it for every single video. I think it might be a limitation of the engine, because I've never seen an MMD video where a skirt actually behaved realistically. That's why most of the "official" models wear pants or shorts, I think, or if there must be a skirt, it's a poofy, cotton-candy nebulous tutu with no physics that they just let whatever clip through.
In Second Life we use "glitch pants" to combat clipping. Basically wearing a clothing layer (pants/underwear) under the skirt that is textured the same as the skirt so when there's clipping, it's not as noticeable. Could you do something like that, apply a band of blue to the UV map at the top of the waist?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
In Second Life we use "glitch pants" to combat clipping. Basically wearing a clothing layer (pants/underwear) under the skirt that is textured the same as the skirt so when there's clipping, it's not as noticeable. Could you do something like that, apply a band of blue to the UV map at the top of the waist?
Hmm. That's a good idea. I'll have to look into it. I could... duplicate the upper leg and panty meshes, make them ever so slightly larger, then texture them with the skirt's texture... that might work. Thanks for the tip. I'll have to fool around with it and see how it works. Rigging could be tricky.[DOUBLEPOST=1463334136,1463333800][/DOUBLEPOST]Incidentally, how I got around this on the teacher models (which have much tighter pencil skirts that hug the body) is that I just ended up having to delete all their groins :p There's nothing under there between the belt and the mid-thigh. Even without physics applied to the skirt, it just had a tendency to have skin poke through the fabric. Obviously, with flowing, twirling, physics-enabled skirts, that was not exactly an option :p
 
GasBandit said:
Incidentally, on the teacher models (which have much tighter pencil skirts that hug the body), I just ended up having to delete all their groins :p There's nothing under there between the belt and the mid-thigh.
Just like real teachers!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Another change I made in this latest video is I quadrupled the "outline" thickness around the edges of the meshes... which makes it look a little more "borderlands"-ish. I think it helps, especially around the chin/mouth area where things tend to blend together, but maybe I overdid it... I might try splitting the difference next time. It causes some wierdness around joints, sometimes - especially elbows.
 
Hmm. That's a good idea. I'll have to look into it. I could... duplicate the upper leg and panty meshes, make them ever so slightly larger, then texture them with the skirt's texture... that might work. Thanks for the tip. I'll have to fool around with it and see how it works. Rigging could be tricky.[DOUBLEPOST=1463334136,1463333800][/DOUBLEPOST]Incidentally, how I got around this on the teacher models (which have much tighter pencil skirts that hug the body) is that I just ended up having to delete all their groins :p There's nothing under there between the belt and the mid-thigh. Even without physics applied to the skirt, it just had a tendency to have skin poke through the fabric. Obviously, with flowing, twirling, physics-enabled skirts, that was not exactly an option :p
That's what we do with mesh (non-physics) clothing, you wear an alpha layer that turns you transparent underneath. If the clothing is rigged-mesh and moves with your body, it's not so much an issue, but you can still have poke-through if your avatar's shape doesn't quite fit the clothing shape.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Some other notes about the Hare Hare video -

I had to green screen/chroma key the first part, and animate the crest into the background in Adobe Premiere. That's why Wasabi is slightly blurrier at the start - I was trying to get as much of the green edge off her as possible.

Speaking of, I had to shoot/record the entire song 3 times, once with Wasabi alone on a green background, once with the three girls on the Yellow/black background, and once with all 5 on the classroom set. Obviously, I switched back and forth between the 3 shots in Premiere.

Kyon!Fade and Koizumi!Film re-use the Yuki!Ash and Mikuru!CeltZ animation data, except for the last couple seconds, where I deleted the existing data and actually keyed the transition to final pose myself. In the process, referencing the source material, I noticed for the first time that Kyon and Koizumi don't finish the same way - Koizumi enthusiastically hops into his final pose, whereas Kyon just kind of steps into it begrudgingly. I didn't perfectly match the movements, but I think I got the gist across. I also decided to make Kyon!Fade's final pose even more phoned in, because Fade doesn't like anything, and his give a shit obviously just ran out.

Film Fanatic's eyes are shut the entire time, but Celt Z uses her eyes like a normal person. Kind of an ironic switch given HFA canon, but I decided to lean more toward the characters they were portraying in this case.

I considered making Fade and Film taller than the girls, to better match the source material as well, but that was a bridge too far, I finally decided. In game, all 5 of these characters are the same height ("Medium"). The only tall characters with the right build would have been Eriol and Gusto, but I didn't feel they fit the video as well as these two guys. Besides, I have other plans for Eriol.

I took major shortcuts on both the boys' models as well, to get this video out the door >_< neither guy has speaking phoneme morphs. I'll take care of that later. I've figured out how to do "mouth transplants" pretty well. I found that to copy a morph from one character to another, you have to copy all the meshes those morphs are on, and delete the duplicate vertices on the target model. I got the idea from how I'm handling the skirt now. Ash got Wasabi's mouth copied onto her head (with the textures changed to Ash's skin tones), which is why she took so much less time to complete than usual. Moving forward, I plan to make two separate "mouth" files (one male, one female) with all the phonemes on them, so that I can import it into other models. I wish I'd thought of this sooner, but it wasn't until working on this video that I realized it was even possible.

The boys' shirt tails are almost as big a pain in the ass as the girls' skirts have been.

And finally, much like the game episode series, I'm fearful I may have peaked with Wasabi's video :p
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Well, I just wasted about 5 hours' work, but it was a learning experience, sooooo... I guess not a total waste? Still kind of aggravating that it wasn't more productive.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Fun facts about "Get Lucky"

This was the first video in which all the camera work was 100% original - all me.

Terrik has considerably less clipping on his shirt tails because his model was made much earlier, and as a result, his hips are actually in the wrong place, anatomically speaking - they are too low. Almost down to his crotch. It's hard to make out in this video, though, because of black pants on a black background.

Film Fanatic doesn't blink, because I had forgotten that I had coded his blink to be more ^_^ than -_- for the sake of imitating Koizumi in the Hare Hare Halforums video, and that gets a different japanese name - 笑い as opposed to まばたき, so the "blink" data never got sent to the right channel, and I didn't notice until post production.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
We used to call these spankies in Swing Choir and the women wore them pretty much for the reasons above.
Vertex clipping a big issue in your church? :D (th-bump-tish)

Looks great! The no-clip spankies seem to help a lot.

Li'l Z peeked over my shoulder when the music started, and said "It's you, Mommy!", so you must be on to something. ;)
Aww, don't worry Li'l Z, I'm not trying to create a lifelike facsimile of your mommy to take her place so you won't even know she's missing or anything!

:devil:
 
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