What are Dangle Bones, and how do they work?
Created by @eagul Published March 20 2023
This guide will teach you everything you need to know about dangle bones, focussing mostly on hair meshes. However, dangle bones can also be applied to any other mesh
Assumed skill level: - You are familiar with Wolvenkit and Blender. - You know what bones and weights are. - You are able to read and comprehend instructions.
Dangle bones are a 'chain' of linked bones which are used by the game engine to simulate physics (dangle). They're found mostly in hairs, but also in certain clothing items. For a mesh to have working dangle physics, corresponding .rig and .animgraph files are also needed The image below depicts how a dangle skeleton looks. The .animgraph will move the dangle bone chains, which are connected to the mesh using weights, which will then in turn animate the mesh.
The easiest way to add physics to a mesh that does not have them, is to transfer them from another mesh. If you are doing a hair port, prepare the (static) .mesh and textures first. 1) Locate a 'donor' mesh. It should have a similar mesh, and physics that you could also see working on your 'new' mesh. 2) Add both the donor mesh, together with it's .rig and .animgraph pair, and your new mesh to the project in wolvenkit. 3) Import both meshes to blender. 4) Using alt+P, clear the parent of the new mesh. Now select the new mesh, and then the armature of the donor mesh, and press ctrl+P, followed by Armature Deform with Empty Groups. 5) Select the donor mesh, and secondly the new mesh. Swap to weight paint mode. In the top-left cornet, press 'weights' and then 'transfer weights'. In the bottom-left corner, a small black window will appear. Click it. Set Vertex Mapping to nearest face interpolated, and source layers to 'by name' 6) Go into weight paint mode and manually clean up the weights, using the weight transfer as a reference. Optionally duplicate the mesh and move the copy to the side, so you keep an untouched reference. 7) Import it back into wolvenkit, and you're done!
1) Oftentimes, you can get away with editing a hair mesh, and not having to touch the physics at all, especially if the changes you are making are fairly small. 2) If you move the mesh away from the bones, it might move in unexpected ways. The further the mesh is from the bone, the more of a 'lever' effect will happen. This is particularly noticable when bones are rotating around an axis perpendicular to the one you moved the mesh away on. Usually small movements are fine and will not affect the dangles in a noticably bad way. If you do find yourself in a situation where you need to move the skeleton as well, check the 'Moving a Dangle Chain' section. 3) Check out UUH4V. It's an amazing resource that will allow you to load multiple hair meshes with each their own rig/anim pair simultanously. Keep in mind that you cannot have 2 of the same rig/anim pair loaded in the same hair slot simultanously, as this will cause unacceptable deforms. You need to merge any 2 meshes that use the same rig/anim pair in blender and import them as one .mesh. \
Included is an image of what i mean by the leverage effect. I used a handy little trick here to make bones visible in-game. Overlay a simple mesh over each of the bones in blender and weight paint it completely red. Load the boxes instead of a hair mesh. Edit the material used by the mesh to make it better visible. I used plastic_red here. Congratulations, you can now clearly see what bones are doing in-game. Hiding the body mesh helps with visibility. Green circle includes the true location of the dangle bone chain. Meshes in the yellow circle are rigged to the same bones as those in the green circle. Bone 3 is invisible. Upon moving bone 3 to the right (by editing the .rig), bone/mesh 1 rotated slightly, making mesh 2 do a huge leap. If you were to load a hair mesh in the same location as indicated by the yellow circle, you would end up with horrible stretching and deformations, even without exxagerating the effect by moving bone 3.
How everything is connected, or: why your edited mesh moves weirdly
This page will give you a short explanation on why 3d objects are moving.
To learn what a rig even is, check Armatures: .rig files
Maybe you want the Weight Painting for Gonks guide?
For a documentation of the import/export options in Wolvenkit, check here.
Guides on how to transfer weights between rigs: blender plugin, youtube video, wiki page
The connection between a mesh and a rig is made via vertex groups. Any number of vertices can be assigned to a group, which is then matched to a rig's bone via name.
How much every bone influences the vertices is determined by vertex weight, which can be altered in Blender's Weight Paint perspective:
Vertex weights are assigned for every vertex group, and each vertex will move on the basis of the sum of all its weights.
To preview the deform in Blender, you can select the mesh's parent armature and enter the "Pose Mode". There, you can either apply an exported animation, or select individual bones and rotate/move them. The Armature modifier will morph your mesh according to the pose, letting you spot errors much faster than trying to debug them in-game.
Created: March 20 2023 by @eagul Last documented update: Dec 19 2024 by
This guide will go deep into detail about moving dangle bones. Still unknown: changing bone parenting, rotating bones, editing the animgraph physics, adding new mirrored dangle chains for better coverage. If anyone has done tests on any of these topics, please contact @eagul via Discord!
- You understand what you are doing, and know why you need to move dangle bones - You are able to read and comprehend instructions.
Visual learners, rejoice! Here is a more up do date guide in a video form with some helpful tools as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kojfyn_6jv4
Okay.... Let's get started. If you are doing physics stuff, and need to move the dangle bones to fix the leverage effect, or for any other reason, you are in the right place. I will be using my long hair dangles project for examples here. Read 'Leverage effect' section in 'Dangle Bones' page for the reasoning behind why this process is necessary. (Using a normal hair dangle skeleton is not an option because it is parented to the 'head' bone, which causes horrible clipping and unnatural movements when the head turns. It might be possible to change the parenting to spine3 bone, but i have yet to test. Even if it is possible, the process described below would still be usefull to move the chains into the right positions) You will need to do a couple things: 1) Get everything into blender. 2) Isolate the bones you need to move. Hide other bones in armature edit mode. 3) Duplicate the bones and move them to the desired position. 4) Edit the bone positions in both the .mesh and .rig, sometimes editing the collision hitboxes in the .animgraph will also be required. I would also recommend having a rigged and weight painted mesh ready, for testing purposes. I will explain each step of the process more in-detail below.\
Usually, you can get the skeleton in it's real form into blender by using WithRig export on the mesh. However, if the .mesh contains bones that are not present in the .rig, you will need to use MultiMesh Export. You need to find a second (or even more) .rig file, so all the bones that are present in the mesh have a counterpart in the .rig. You then need to also add the meshes that correspond to the new .rigs and then export. Attached images show settings i used to export base\characters\garment\citizen_formal\torso\t1_072_shirt__netwatch\t1_072_ma_shirt__netwatch_dangle.mesh with rig, which i used for long hair dangles.
Open the .rig file in Wolvenkit. Under boneNames you can find which index corresponds to which bone. Expand boneTransforms. Locate the bones you want to move. Moving a bone in a chain will also move every bone that's parented to it (located lower than it in the chain). In the case of the image above, moving the bone selected in yellow, also moved the entire chain. In this case i moved bone 8 (selected in yellow) by 0.283076668 on the Y axis.
As you can see, the skeleton exploded. This is (to my understanding) caused by collision hitboxes on the spine bones. It will only happen if you have moved the dangle chain inside of those hitboxes. If this happens to your skeleton/mesh, follow these steps to fix it: 1) Open the .animgraph file in Wolvenkit. Expand the 'rootNode' array, and keep expanding untill you see collisionRoundedShape and then lower the roundedCornerRadius for each of the bones untill your skeleton no longer explodes. Here i set the value to 0, the animations work fine, but a correctly set value might reduce clipping in some poses.
Notice how editing the bone positions in the .rig also deformed/moved the mesh in-game. At least it's dangling nicely now, and it no longer explodes :copium:
The .mesh also contains bone matrices. To my understanding, these are used to map the bones from the .rig to the vertices. You will need to move the bones in the .mesh to match the changes You did to the .rig skeleton, and this will fix the mesh deform. In this case, I'm editing bones 79-83. The goal is to move each of them by -0.283076668 on the Y axis. Open the .mesh in Wolvenkit and navigate to boneRigMatrices.
Next, open https://matrixcalc.org/ and copy paste each of the entries of the bone matrix into the calculator. Then press inverse.
Notice how the bottom row of the inverse matrix corresponds to the coordinates of the bone, which you can see in Blender.
Next, copy the new Y coordinate from the bone you duplicated and moved.
After that, return to the calculator, and press 'Insert in B', and then replace the matrix entry corresponding to the Y position of the bone with the new coordinate.
Then, press 'inverse'
Next, press the 3 small lines below the output, click on Show LaTeX, and copy the top row entries back into wolvenkit.
And now repeat all of those steps for each of your bones... enjoy... After that, you should be finished! \
How to check weights directly in Blender
Created: ??? by PinkyDude 🦝 Last documented edit: Sep 22 2024 by
This guide will show you Pinky's weight painting workflow, sharing tips and tricks on how to fix weights on garments for both refits and custom ports. You can find the original tutorial on Google Docs.
This guide will use a masc garment, but the process works the same regardless of rig or body type.
For porting objects altogether, see Porting 3d objects to Cyberpunk
For help with refitting, see R&R: Refitting (step by step)
For converting between bodies, see RIG Swapping Garments - other body conversion
For this guide, you need:
>= 8.14
The
>= 1.5.5.2, recommended:
Blender
>= 4.1, recommended: 4.2
You also need a Wolvenkit project with an item where you want to fix the weights.
For this example, I’ll be starting the weight from scratch for my Tracksuit Jacket:
It's best practice to stealcopy the weights from an existing in-game item.
A good candidate is the tight version of T-Bug's netrunner suit, as it has the required bones for almost everything:
base\characters\garment\player_equipment\torso\t0_005_pma_body__t_bug\t0_005_pma_body__t_bug_tight.mesh
base\characters\garment\player_equipment\torso\t0_005_pma_body__t_bug\t0_005_pwa_body__t_bug_tight.meshAdd the correct version for your body gender to your Wolvenkit project.
It is really tight. This has a few nice side effects:
If it clips, it will clip into the body — that is perfect for weights!
It will avoid "bat wings" around the armpits, where parts of the sleeves or sides will stretch next to the chest
Unfortunately, a perfect fit does (usually) not exist. But don't worry, we can fix this!
Export the Netrunner suit to glb
Import it into your Blend file
You'll notice it has 3 submeshes. Merge them into a single submesh:
Click into the viewport to deselect everything
Hold the shift key and click on each of the three meshes
Press Ctrl+J
If your refitted garment is already broken down into multiple submeshes, you’ll have to do the same thing here. The result will be called "weight container" or "target mesh" in the rest of the guide:
Create a joined duplicate “weight container”:
Even if we merged the submeshes, the actual models themselves are still separated. Editing and smoothing the weights will cause them to detach from each other, creating holes and gaps along the seams.
For that reason, you should now clean up your mesh and merge the vertices by distance:
❓ Edit Mode > Mesh > Clean Up > Merge by Distance
When porting assets from other games, a good habit is to always clean the Vertex Groups before transferring weights :\
Click the weight source (the Netrunner suit)
Ctrl+Click on your merged weight container (the target mesh)
Switch Blender to Weight Paint mode:
Before proceeding, you must have the armature in the rest position! This can be done by selecting the armature, going into data (the green stick man icon on the right sidebar), then clicking 'Rest Position'.
Select Weights -> Transfer Weights
A pop up will appear in the bottom left corner of your viewport window. Make the following changes:
Vertex Mapping - Nearest Face Interpolated
Ray Radius - 5m
Source Layers Selection - By Name
You have now successfully transferred the weights from the Netrunner suit to your ported garment. Let's clean this up.
Select Weights -> Limit Total.
In the pop-up at the bottom left, change the limit from 4 to 8.
Finally, select Weights -> Normalize All
In the pop-up at the bottom left, un-check Lock Active:
We could now transfer the garment's weight to our submeshes, import the result into the game, notice that something is off with the weights, fix it in Blender, rinse, repeat, and waste a lot of time.
Instead of doing that, we'll simply hook our garment to an animated body.
I took the time to merge and weight-fix two full bodies who are also already hooked to the inventory “Jacket Check” animation
You can download them from my Resources folder, here:
🔻 MA Body - Man Average RIG
🔻 WA Body - Woman Average RIG
To add it to your .blend file, select File -> Append, and select the collection [MA/WA]_weightCheck:\
You can now skip to Weight Painting for Gonks
From the Blender AddOn's Animation Tools Panel, select the correct rig for your mesh. You'll most likely want man_base or woman_base:
Change your weight container's armature modifier to point at the rig you just imported:
You can use the same body that you've already used for refitting. This tutorial won't cover this — look it up in R&R: Refitting (step by step).
Import your body mesh into Blender
Join all the submeshes together
Change the body's armature modifier to point at the rig you added in 3.1
You can see that our added armature already has A-Pose and T-Pose hooked up:
We need a bit more than that, so let's grab ourselves an .anim from the game files.
For fitting clothes, you might want to use the inventory idle animations:
base\animations\ui\male\ui_male.anims
base\animations\ui\female\ui_female.animsOtherwise, you can get creative with the (something like .anims > !fpp)
This will populate the Animsets list.
We can use the play button to make everything move. Now, time to hook everything up.
Select your merged weight container and change its Armature modifier:
aMa / aWa if you used the prepared resources, the armature from 3.1.2 otherwise
Rotating your body, you might already notice holes or clipping:
Let’s check the animation by pressing the Play ▶ button on the timeline or in the Animation Tools:
Arms and collar will need some fixing. Let's go and do that.
Use the Play button at the bottom of Blender's viewport or in the Animation Tools
Let the animation play to a point where your issues are clearly visible, then hit the button again to pause it
Hide any armatures and collections, so that only the jacket mesh is visible.
From experience, we know which bones are responsible for the bat wings, but we'll go through the list one by one. If you want the more target-oriented approach, skip ahead through 4.1 Fixing the bat wings
Enter Weight Paint mode (at the top left of the Blender viewport)
Open and expand the Vertex Group list on the right:
On the right, select the first vertex group (Hips)
Use the Blur tool to fix anything that looks janky
Select the next vertex group on the list (Spine)
Smoothing out the Spine groups helps a bit, but the mesh is still being pulled:
We’ll start tackling the actual Arm bones now:
We’ll need to clean the armpit on the [l/r]_SHL_0_JNT group. You can do this by using the Brush tool (with the Weight slider down to 0), or with the Radial Gradient tool:
Drag the gradient tool near the armpit to remove all the excessive weight, and then use the blur brush to smooth the area:
We’ll do the same with the [l/j]_triceps_mscl_JNT group:
...and the [l/j]_biceps_A_mscl_JNT group:\
\
That’s much better! \
Scroll down to the [l/r]_latissimusDorsi_mscl_JNT group and smooth out the area a bit.
This isn’t too bad, we removed most of the stretching and the sleeves behave in a natural-ish way, considering this is a large jacket :> \
The garment's collar is also a troublesome area; we can see how mine stretches and clips in all kind of weird way.
We'll go over the list in order again, starting from the Spine bones and adding weights here to harmonize the whole collar:
Select the Sample Weight tool
Click on any light blue area\
I’ll once again use the Radial Gradient tool to apply weights in an equal way
Be careful when using the Gradient tool
When weight painting with the gradient tool, the weight will apply on BOTH side of the mesh; front and back! To avoid this, rotate the camera and angle your model so your gradient only affect the desired area\
Check the following vertex groups. Smooth out jagged edges, and remove incorrect weights.
Main vertex groups (avoid editing them too much, if you can avoid it):
[Left/Right]Shoulder
Neck, Neck1
Head
[l/r]_sternocleidomastoid_[top/bot]_mscl_JNT
[l/r]_butterfly_top_CRV_bot_out_JNT
Remove weights from the following arm and torso related groups (depending on the length of your collar):
[l/r]_chest_front_[A/B/C]_[bot/top]_out_JNT
[l/r]_deltoid_[top/front/back]_[top/bot]_out_JNT
It’s important to aim for Correct over Perfect, otherwise you’ll get stuck and frustrated really fast, trust me 🧡
Don't worry about the clipping, we'll fix that in 5.1 Fixing clipping.
Change your weight container’s rig in the Armature modifier back to its original armature :\
Hide the MA_weightCheck collection and un-hide your garment’s submeshes
Transfer the weight from your weight container to each of your garment’s submeshes. You can use the Mesh Tools, or do it by hand (one by one).
For each of your (now weighted) submeshes, change the rig in the armature modifier to animate them.
Entering Edit Mode will reset our model back to the default pose. To fix that, we have to check the On Cage and Edit Mode buttons on the armature modifier:
Repeat the step for each of your submeshes
Select them all, then enter edit mode by hitting tab
With proportional editing on, simply select the vertex in the area and slightly pull away from the body:\
Use the bar at the bottom of the viewport and move the cursor to change the animation. You'll find and fix more clipping here.
Once you're done, change the armature modifier back to the original one.
Delete the weight container mesh (you don't need it anymore)
You can now export your mesh from Blender, then import it back into Wolvenkit.
And that’s about it for this tutorial/workflow on how I handle weight painting!
Don’t let weight painting occupy your entire brain while working on a project; it will never be perfect, a lot of vanilla garments have weight paint problems with stretching crotch and armpits area, it’s not something we can 100% control or avoid\
As long as it’s not too visible or mesh breaking, clipping and stretching are easily dealt with in Photoshop or other post-render editing softwares 🤏\
Again, I’m no expert, but I hope this tutorial will help you tackle some annoying aspects of Weight painting!\
Have fun and happy modding y’all! 💛\
Thank you for reading -Pkd \
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