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Ok so this is what I’ve been doing this past week, I’ve been trying to reduce the clipping of the shirt, that armpit area is very hard to get right, I managed to squeeze a bit more of good deformation with weight painting alone, compared to the last version that I uploaded, but I still felt unsatisfied with the results, the improvement was marginal at best, so I had to focus in the most evident problem, people just don’t like to use twist bones when they are making animations and that was the main source of the clipping in the motions I’ve been using, people twist the arms and not so often the shoulder bones too, in Izumi’s case for both bones that would mean people twist them in the X local axis and that is what causes the most hideous clipping I’ve seen, it is no problem to just untwist the bones in the local X axis to get rid of the clipping, or animate Izumi in that way, the problem is that it takes time to do that and people would consider it a chore, it would be easy to solve this problem in blender, just transfer the weight from the arm to a different bone and set a constrain to counter the twisting in that bone, but in MMD that is not possible, it is true that you can set bones to copy the rotation from other bones, either positively or negatively, but it does with all axis at the same time and I think it only does that in global axis not so sure about this last part, but still I only needed to cope the rotation negatively in one axis, only MMM2 can handle the rotation of individual axis for animation, so the challenge was to find a way to automatically counter the twisting of the shirt when Izumi’s arms get twisted, and I found a way, I had to use a trick I saw once on youtube but never had the chance to use, and in the original source it wasn’t even used this way, this method does not counter the rotation in the local X axis in Izumi’s body, it just ignores it, plain and simple, now the sleeve of the shirt follows the arm perfectly and the twisting is ignored, reducing clipping even more, there is still a bit of clipping on some cases but hey everything will clip if you twist it enough there is no exception to this,  the difference is very perceptible, and if you get annoyed with the clipping that is still left, it will require small adjustments, compared to the last version, this method will be very useful for future outfits since it can also be used for the legs in shorts for example, and high collars, getting rid of the twist on the leg and or neck bones, you’ll see what I mean once you download the new version, also added more riggid bodies to the lower body in the school uniform,  this allowed me to have the skirt closer to the body without clipping, and that was until this last Friday, I also had to make a small change to the Izumi’s bikini, I changed the name of some bones and  relocate 2 of them, more smoothing to Izumi’s fingers and some texture work on the new uniform, the uniform also required 6 new bones for that new fancy method for deformation I used, all of them are hidden bones so there should be no hassle for the user, the change of the bones in the bikini was necessary because I cleaned the blend file a bit and, sorting stuff in different layers and stuff, the bikini shared some bones with the idol outfit so for the sake of good organization I had to give the bikini it’s unique set of bones, named properly, this created the need to give duplicate bones a new name, there is still a shared set of bones between the idol and classic outfits, and those would be the panties bones but those are easy enough to understand and use as they are now so I saw no need to make any changes there, after that I’ve been working on a small animation for the release of the new outfit, the dance of choice is Pink Cat, but I want to add a little something to it, a parody of Quick Silver’s scene from the X-men first class movie, involving panties theft, it should be at least interesting and a bit different from the bunch of time stop videos there are already, should be fun, also eager to test a new version of PMXe that is out, and english version of course, a much better translation and a more up to date editor than I am using now, now if you are wondering why I am cleaning and organizing the original blend file, well, you’ll see soon enough, give the new version a try and let me know what you think, sorry for the wall of text and thanks for the support.

***Updated link

http://www.mediafire.com/file/dzcxugrdoxyne6h/Izumi_Shimizu_2.0.15.rar

Welp, been working on this for a while and it's 2am now so I think I'm gonna rest for a bit, I'll be in touch guys.

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Comments

Takuya Sawatari

Seeing you mention her blend file makes me super excited when I remember our recent talk! Also for some incredibly clever auto-twisting rigs, you might be interested in Tsukuan's work: <a href="https://twitter.com/antuku3" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/antuku3</a> Not all of his models have it yet, but Matsuri (the girl in the goth loli dress) has it for her thighs, so they deform extremely well. The new version of his Medo model that he has been posting recently is not public yet, so the version of her on bowlroll can't deform like on his screenshots yet.

Ademar440

I've seen his last tweets, as far as I understand he is using a combo of IK bones and SDEF deformation for the vertex, I don't use SDEF for 2 reasons, it only supports 2 weights per vertex and to me at least it looks like crap from some angles, I’ve seen it used a lot in some touhou models in the butt area.

Takuya Sawatari

The ones he released so far don't use SDEF. I just quickly checked Matsuri's thigh twist in Blender and it uses BDEF4. There are additional bones that automatically twist the thighs, but the most amazing part is how her hips are rigged to not collapse when you stretch her legs to the side. She has bones located in her belly to adjust the hips. I haven't dug very deep into this rig myself yet, but it's pretty clever: <a href="https://imgur.com/rnBFmVf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/rnBFmVf</a> <a href="https://imgur.com/e2qVGah" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/e2qVGah</a> Don't worry, I'm not expecting this to magically be implemented for Izumi any time soon. This seems like something that took him ages to figure out and get right.

Ademar440

yeah I think that can be done with the method I used, and as far as I know SDEF is an MMD thing only, so I don't think you will be able to see that in blender, you can see that with PMXe's weight paint tool though, blender has a setting for the armature modifier that does something similar, but it's not the same.

Takuya Sawatari

After I brought the topic of SDEF up on github, nagadomi implemented it in python and it's now included with mmd-tools: <a href="https://github.com/powroupi/blender_mmd_tools/issues/162" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://github.com/powroupi/blender_mmd_tools/issues/162</a>#issuecomment-411289783 Though it's slow, since it processes vertex positions on the python interpeter, and editing SDEF coordinates is a hassle. The setting in Blender you mean enables quaternion interpolation, which as far as I know is the same as PMXe's QDEF weights, which require pmx version 2.1, which crashes MMD, since it was never updated to handle QDEF. So yeah, in the end, the way you implemented Izumi's armature is the best way for compatibility with other software.

Ademar440

It's at least the best I could come up with for the time being, without having to hide that part of Izumi's body, wich I tried but that also creates problems, this time with shaders, hopefuly I will be able to find another way eventually.