Wow, you posted this yesterday and it's already 2 pages long. I hate being late to the party. Anyhow, congrats on the new figure. Great to see a figure with a non-traditional body and face shape. Hope it does well for you.
Hi Darryl.
His development thread was pretty long, so I think he was a high-interest package to begin with. That might explain the quick arrival of hitting the second page.
I just wanted to leave a note and clarify here, that Nataani is not a new figure. He's just a dial-spun morph and skin texture set for the Dusk figure. I know you probably understand that difference, but I have run across many folks who don't quite understand the distinction, so I wanted to clarify that, just in case someone like that happens on the thread here.
I agree that he hardly looks like Dusk anymore, though. That's not exactly a bad thing, I think. I really view all base figures as just that - a base. They're a base template upon which to build. They need some life breathed into them, and then they come alive for us.
There are definitely no worries here. I normally do my own morphs with HW dials, and a lot of my own poses. I can totally relate going the other direction. It is sometimes a challenge to convert what you do in one program to the other. I just think your map work is gorgeous!!
Yes, when I buy a character package, I'm usually NOT buying it for the morphs. I buy it for the skin. I normally prefer to morph my own figures for obvious reasons, as a storyteller.
The conversion is just really a matter of my needing to really learn the Poser material room. This is doubly difficult for me, because I can't really use the program for my own artwork. It is incapable of handling the kind of scenes I build, whereas DS has no problems with them at all (and this is how I ended up a DS user in the first place).
It's mostly just materials that need to be done at this point. Poses are up in the air yet, but they should be easy enough to either convert, or rework them a little bit to suit. He definitely won't have the horse poses. But I think I can get most of the Dusk-only ones converted over with little trouble. And I already do have his INJ/REM done, thanks to Satira's help in the Poser software thread.
For me the biggest/hardest part of a conversion from DS to Poser really is the materials. I'm struggling with it on the beach baby clothing textures, too. I just can't stand the material room, and it makes my brain explode. I don't understand it, and I can't work with it very easily. I just kind of stumble around until I have something that looks acceptable (even WITH tutorials!)... and that can take me a very long time. I'll get his Poser version done eventually. It's just going to take me some time is all.
Hi friend...glad to do it. I was having trouble figuring which clothing would work on him and still look good...a couple things I tried were going to need tweaking...had it been Poser, no problem, but with DS, I don't yet know the tricks and shortcuts, so I just went with the shirtless model, like relaxing at home...it worked for this particular project
Mmm.... Nataani's morphs are a little tricky with clothing in some situations, depending on his pose and the clothing involved, yes. Studio usually does a pretty good job of having the clothing auto-follow whatever morphs are dialed into the figure. If you're getting excessive poke-through there's a couple of things you can do in DS to help with that.
1 - Apply a smoothing modifier.
-- Load the clothing, and get it conformed (Fit-To) your morphed Dusk.
-- Now, in the Scene tab, select the clothing item that is experiencing poke-thru.
-- With the clothing item selected, go up to the top of your DS window. Click on Edit --> Figure --> Geometry --> Apply Smoothing Modifier.
Usually, that is sufficient to get clothing to fit a morphed figure. Sometimes, you need to adjust the Smoothing properties, and increase the number of Smoothing Iterations and/or the number of Collision Iterations (this is found in the Parameters tab under "Mesh Smoothing").
If the item is a prop item, applying a smoothing modifier should instead be done via Edit --> Object --> Geometry --> Apply Smoothing Modifier
If you get an error when applying the modifier, it means the item already contains a smoothing modifier, and you can further adjust the properties of the smoothing via the Mesh Smoothing category in the Parameters tab.
2 - Apply a Push Modifier.
-- Just like with the smoothing; you want to click on Edit --> Figure --> Geometry --> Add Push Modifier.
-- It will ask you to give a name to the push modifier if you want to. I usually just leave it with the default name myself.
-- Push modifers should be used gently when doing so on clothing. By default, it will apply the push modifier with a value of 1.0; I find that usually values between 0.10, and 0.30 are plenty sufficient to take care of some stubborn poke-thru. All this does is push the clothing mesh a little further away from the skin. So be gentle ont he values, or it will look like Dusk is wearing a clown suit instead.
Push modifiers, once applied, will be found in the Paremters tab under "Mesh Offset."
Just as with the Smoothing Modifier, the menu location depends on what type of item you're applying the modifier to. Base figures are applied via the Edit --> Figure menu, while prop type objects are applied via the Edit --> Object menu.
3 - Adjust the morphs in the clothing.
-- DS usually auto-applies the figure morphs to a conforming clothing item once it's conformed. Sometimes, with some shapes, I find that locating a particular morph (it will be shown in grey colored text) and increasing the value of it on the clothing item can help deal with poke-thru. So if your figure is making use of a "bulky" body morph, then select the clothing item and look for "bulky" or "PBM_Bulky" or something like that, and increase the value of it a little bit.
Likewise, you can get rid of the imprinted abs structure on the males by reducing the muscle-related morph values on the clothing as well.
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Those are a couple of little tricks I use for fitting clothes to a stubborn morphed figure.
There is also the d-forms, but that's an item I'd want to cover in the Software forum, as it could rapidly derail the thread here if I got into the how/when/why to use them here. LOL
Hope this helps. ^_^
