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ok I'm gonna babble about process shit in Daz Studio so pls feel free to mute this thread if you're not interested!
I've got this scene partially set up, it's mostly to test some different scripts but my idea is the elf guy's like a summoner & the big dude is his air elemental
I've got this scene partially set up, it's mostly to test some different scripts but my idea is the elf guy's like a summoner & the big dude is his air elemental
My big dude is Josh Crockett's Grave Ghoul but I used a script called Shape Splitter to zero the head out and apply a different G8M shape. The creator does an overview of that here:
This is useful because most extreme monster shapes are full-body morphs rather than split head/body morphs, making them hard to customize. They also tend to be dependent on HD detail to look good, and u normally can't transfer HD morphs with scripts.
The elf is just a normal G8M mix of several different characters. he's wearing a G8F dress using a cross-gender script
Usually if I wanna make a pretty dude I start with someone on the Mega Twink end like Sasori then dial in others til he looks a little older/more detailed
Usually if I wanna make a pretty dude I start with someone on the Mega Twink end like Sasori then dial in others til he looks a little older/more detailed
So one of the challenges with interacting figures is that there are no real soft body physics in DS. You're essentially posing barbies except they can clip through each other. The more rigid/bony a character looks the harder it is to look right (cough Joker cough)
A thing that helps with this is to add collision to one of your characters. This will make them conform to the other one and the mesh will warp where the two interact. Edit>Geometry>Add Smoothing Modifier and then under Parameters>General set your collision item to the other char
It actually works better a lot of the time if you add it to the more rigid character (if there is one) bc softer characters already have the illusion of give and often have corrective morphs to simulate soft flesh movement. Even very wiry characters still have fat and soft tissue
I want the summoner to be leaning on him but without collision there's clipping between the cheek and the pectoral. W/it on you get a slight indentation. BUT you can see in the 2nd pic one of the downsides is it's causing too much indentation around the wrist/ribs.
That's probably the biggest challenge w/any kind of model interaction in DS: bodies don't have realistic tension, they don't hit an obstacle and conform. they either behave as though the obstacle isn't there, or the obstacle behaves like a beanbag chair
There are a few ways to fix this! I composite a lot, which means rendering out versions with different effects and then just combining them in Photoshop. If u hate postwork this will be a bigger pain than correcting the mesh.
In this case I just twisted the upper arm slightly so the indent is less extreme and lands where there's more tissue over the ribs. But sometimes you'll need to keep your pose exactly as is and moving won't work. In that case, instead of smoothing you may want to use a dFormer.
I am very bad at them so I'm just going to link an official tutorial
If you can spring for it/get it on sale probably THE most convenient tool you can use is Mesh Grabber, which lets u do some mesh sculpting in DS. https://www.daz3d.com/mesh-grabber
If you can spring for it/get it on sale probably THE most convenient tool you can use is Mesh Grabber, which lets u do some mesh sculpting in DS. https://www.daz3d.com/mesh-grabber
(more like dick grabber lol)
Since he's colliding with the elf he can't also collide with the dress. The dress is already using the elf as a collision item. So I'll use MG to select a polygon where the character meets the dress and move it inward just enough to create a shadow
Since he's colliding with the elf he can't also collide with the dress. The dress is already using the elf as a collision item. So I'll use MG to select a polygon where the character meets the dress and move it inward just enough to create a shadow
Just moving the mesh far enough back that you don't get a hard intersection line makes a huge difference a lot of the time
There's another interaction that can look kind of stiff here and it's the hand on the back of the dress
There's another interaction that can look kind of stiff here and it's the hand on the back of the dress
when I ran a dforce cloth simulation on the dress it created a straight line where the cloth falls from lower back to hip. That's right where the elemental's hand is so it seems weird that it's not moving the cloth at all.
