I have made a custom character mesh...a humanoid bunny with floppy ears.

Since, at this point, I know very little about how to rig a custom character to a human bone structure, I am trying to use Mixamo's Auto Rigger.

Initially my mesh consisted of multiple parts (such as head and body). These parts were not necessarily following any bones since the character was the mesh only (i.e. no bone structure) and the idea was for Mixamo to auto rig it for me. When used Mixamo to auto rig the initial character, it worked fine in Mixamo (and Mixamo was able to animate it as expected) but when I tried to pull it into 3DXChange (I tried a number of file format exports) it gave me an error indicating that all parts have to be connected to the hip.

So I went back to my source file and did a join solids on the parts to create one master mesh. After rigging it in Mixamo and then importing into 3DXChange, I was able to convert it into a non-standard human and bring it into iClone.

In iClone I was able to animate the character using the regular iClone animation methods but I ran into two problems:

1) Since the solids were joined, in iClone the character shows up as one mesh with only one material part. This means creating a single texture which addresses all the "joined" sub-parts. This is made more difficult by the fact that iClone does not provide the option of getting the UV Reference for the item. I am sure there is software, like Blender, that could unroll the texture on the joined solid to allow me to create a compatible texture but its more difficult than having a nice and easy separate texture for each part.

2) I was intending to soft cloth the floppy ears so that they would move and bounce around when the character moves. Since the resulting character is a single mesh now, I cannot make the ears soft cloth without applying soft cloth to the whole character.

I had the idea of creating the character and ears independently and then attaching the ears to the character and soft clothing only the ears. However, since the main character does not have physics applied to it, the soft cloth ears just move right through the head and/or other body parts.

Any ideas how I can achieve this goal (i.e. a custom character with parts that are soft cloth) without having to manually rig the custom character?


"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

i got 99 problems but a bunni ain't one!

1 - you could try attaching the ears like a prop - then doing soft cloth that way ...

2 - download the free akeytsu beta and learn to rig,  http://www.nukeygara.com it's gotten better now that they've added weight painting -  sounds like you are putting more brain cells into finding work arounds than it would take to just understand rigging -  rigging isn't hard,  finding a decent software to rig with is.

worship the spring eared bunni!

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

Skip the Mixamo bit. You would only use it for skinned meshes. For just hooking up objects in an iC compatible skeleton, you can just do it in iClone and 3DXchange Pro. Each part will retain it's own material.

As I said in my post, I tried this method but then I ran into the problem that the floppy years moved through the bunny body because the bunny body was not Physics Active. When I turned Physics on for the Bunny the only option I got was Soft Cloth (selected automatically) and I still could not prevent the separate ears from not going through the body. Could it be that my ears are starting partially overlapped with the body and thus it is turning collision detection off?

planetstardragon (6/10/2016)

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2 - download the free akeytsu beta and learn to rig,  http://www.nukeygara.com it's gotten better now that they've added weight painting -  sounds like you are putting more brain cells into finding work arounds than it would take to just understand rigging -  rigging isn't hard,  finding a decent software to rig with is.

I knew someone was going to basically answer "learn to rig without automation tools". While this is good practice in general, I'd like to understand if someone else managed to use Mixamo to import a character with multiple meshes intact and/or I would like to understand how to prevent my ears for going through other body parts.


"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

That is awesome. I had no idea one could do that in 3DXChange and it is even easier than I thought. Thanks for the tutorial video, it looks like exactly what I am looking for.



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

i dunno if it's still the case / if they fixed it,  but the last time I used Mixamo,  it destroyed the model's UV.

Linking parts to the bone prop works, but it will ultimately look mechanical,  as the mesh won't bend since there is no weight mapping,  it's basically a character assembled with accessories. 

@swoop,   i'm about to dive into akeytsu and learn it next, now that they added the weight painting,  also going to see if they improved modo's rigging system in 10.  I do miss messiah,  but boy did they let that ball drop,  even their loyals are upset about it. I feel bad for that community actually, there are some really nice talented people there who were die hard supporters but the developer basically abandoned the community AFTER asking for a monthly fee to use the software on a "Big deal" that never happened.....   Heck,  I wish RL would buy the code off of them and give PM a respectable home.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

Yeah. I realized that after thinking about it for a while. Since you are mapping an independent mesh to each bone, it will tend to look mechanical and/or you will need overlapping meshes to fill in "holes" which is just going to end up causing issues if you want to turn physics on.

I saw some tutorials on how to do rigging in Blender but most of them show the rigging part (using Auto Weights) and then just mention that you may need to do manual weights to fix issues...with no good tutorial on how to do that. I guess I'll keep looking.



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

Thanks for you 2 cents but you showed how to bone the ears which was not the OP. I want to bone the character (regular humanoid bone structure) but maintain the different meshes of the character so that I can go in and change the ears to soft cloth. As I said, when I had multiple meshes and rigged with Miaxmo, 3DXchange did not like it and when I joined solids before rigging with Mixamo then 3DXchange accepts it but it comes in (as would be expected) one mesh and thus I can't soft cloth part of it (without soft clothing the whole thing and then making everything but the ears with black weight). The additional problem with the one mesh is that it is difficult to create textures for it because iClone won't generate a UV Reference map for it.


"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

, blender is not the best 1st choice for rigging -  at least not for a first time / learning experience - part of the issue is that they don't use a standard fbx format,  they use a python version of fbx ,  that add extra complications / troubleshooting issues that you don't need as part of a rigging learning experience.

You really should give akeytsu a try,  it's a specialized program,  and the beta is free -  if for nothing else,  for the learning experience.  It sounds like this is something you should have in your skill set anyways since you obviously enjoy developing stuff. 

My fav for straight forwardness / ez ness is messiah,  it's still on sale,  but unfortunately i can't recommend it because the company has been pretty much MIA, despite having it still for sale and I don't wish the registration drama on anyone,  they also made a big issue about not teaching everyone to use it - which ultimately worked against them,  they wanted to sell lessons, but ended up chasing a lot of people away - penny conscious / pound foolish. - it also wrecks uv's but makes up for it with it's supeerior animation tools...glad i have it,  sad the company is mia / shady. 

other programs that are good as a starter for rigging  - carrara and modo. -  i'd really suggest you checking out *modo indie if you can though,  it has some really cool tools that i think you'd appreciate. ( based on posts I've seen you make in the past ) -  people hail it for having the best modeling tools in any animation software - the bevel tools are pretty hot.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

Yeah I know what you mean about Blender. The software seems very powerful but not at all intuitive and a lot of the stuff is done a little bit different then most other software so the learning curve is bigger. I was trying to follow a tutorial that uses a Rigging addon and half way through the tutorial my version shows only some of the rig bones and keeps only some of the mesh. It is a nightmare. I'll check out Carrera and Modo but neither appear to be free and I don't have the budget to buy any software.

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast