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Fitting M3 clothing to the V4.2 Male in DAZ|Studio

Uestrickland89 P1-10-2009, 19:14 c 1 comments


Fitting M3 clothing to the V4.2 Male in DAZ|Studio



Info: 
  http://www.daz3d.com/i/tutorial/tutorial?id=2300&_m=d  



Description: One of the cardinal rules of 3D character art is that you can generally only use clothing with the figure it was designed for. Like all good rules, this one was definitely meant to be broken. The V4 Male figure does not yet have much in the way of clothing support, leaving artists with a limited range of options. We can leave our digital guys as nature intended, with only a pair of second-skin y-fronts to preserve their dignity. Or we can look at one of the various clothing conversion utilities that are on the market, and try to convert clothing from other figures to fit. Fortunately there's a much easier option. Whether by design or simply a stroke of luck, it's possible to adapt Michael 3 clothing to fit our V4 male. The results might not be as good as an outfit designed for the V4 Male would be, and we may have to make a few compromises along the way as not every outfit is going to be suitable for every combination of V4 morphs. But it can certainly produce good enough results for still renders. In this tutorial I'm going to be using the standard V4.2 Male morph for this example, and using DAZ|Studio exclusively. But there's no reason these same techniques can't be used for any of the male V4 characters currently available, such as Mefisto, CDI's Morphia or V4 Lawrence (available in the General Freepozitory), or with any version of Poser.



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Fitting M3 clothing to the V4.2 Male in DAZ|Studio

Author: DrVesuvius
Step 1: Getting Started
Step 2: Pants - Using existing clothing morphs
Step 3: Pants - Scaling & Translating
Step 4: Pants - Hiding underlying body parts
Step 5: Boots & Kneepads
Step 6: Abdominal Wrap
Step 7: Vest
Step 8: Overcoat
Step 9: Bits & Pieces
Step 10: Finished - Pose & Render

Tools Needed
* DAZ|Studio



Introduction
One of the cardinal rules of 3D character art is that you can generally only use clothing with the figure it was designed for. Like all good rules, this one was definitely meant to be broken. The V4 Male figure does not yet have much in the way of clothing support, leaving artists with a limited range of options. We can leave our digital guys as nature intended, with only a pair of second-skin y-fronts to preserve their dignity. Or we can look at one of the various clothing conversion utilities that are on the market, and try to convert clothing from other figures to fit. Fortunately there's a much easier option. Whether by design or simply a stroke of luck, it's possible to adapt Michael 3 clothing to fit our V4 male. The results might not be as good as an outfit designed for the V4 Male would be, and we may have to make a few compromises along the way as not every outfit is going to be suitable for every combination of V4 morphs. But it can certainly produce good enough results for still renders. In this tutorial I'm going to be using the standard V4.2 Male morph for this example, and using DAZ|Studio exclusively. But there's no reason these same techniques can't be used for any of the male V4 characters currently available, such as Mefisto, CDI's Morphia or V4 Lawrence (available in the General Freepozitory), or with any version of Poser.


Step 1 - Getting Started









First we start by loading up our V4 Male character. Bear in mind that while you can dial in other morphs such as muscularity or body-type FBMs to further customise your character, we're not going to have those exact morphs in the clothing we'll be using, and we may have to compromise by hiding some of V4's body parts to avoid poke-through. The more extreme V4's body morphs are, the more that's likely to be a problem.



Next we'll pick the M3 clothing we're going to fit to him. Not every type of outfit is going to fit easily or well to V4 Male. The easiest outfits to do are those which cover the body and limbs completely, so that all that's really visible are the head, neck and hands. Low cut shirts with large areas of the chest visible can be a problem, for reasons that will become clear.



I'm going to use the CIS Operative outfit, available here at DAZ3D. It's quite complex, consisting of several independant pieces and is a good indicator of many of the problems you're likely to run into.


Step 2 - Pants - Using existing clothing morphs

So starting with the pants, load them up and fit them to V4. The pants in this outfit are quite tight, which means you're likely to get a lot of poke-through. If you rotate the figure around, you'll see things are even worse around the back.







The first thing to do is to open the Parameters tab and look at the morphs in the clothing and see if there's anything that might make it fit the body shape a little better. This will involve a little bit of trial and error, tweaking the various dials available and see what gives the best results. You may find that in order to see all the available dials, you'll need to click the Options button in the top right and make sure Show Hidden Properties is selected.







The CIS pants are quite well stocked for morphs, and after a little experimenting, dialling in the Muscular3 FBM at 0.55 greatly reduces the poke-through.

Step 3 - Pants - Scaling & Translating

Next we can look at the scaling dials. These need to be used with a little care, otherwise you may find that if you scale one clothing part, the point where it joins another unscaled part can show up as a very sharp ridge. Use the individual xScale, yScale and zScale dials and try to keep the scales to somewhere between 85% and 115%. On some clothing parts you can also apply small amounts of translation, this tends to work better at extremities like the feet than parts that are in between two others.



Looking at our CIS pants, the waistline fits pretty well, but the bottom cuffs cut into the leg. With this outfit it's not going to be a problem, because the boots will cover it up. But in case you wanted to do a barefoot render, you would at the very least want the cuff to go around the leg properly. If we select the lFoot body part of the pants and set the xScale to 115% and the zScale to 110% and an xTrans of -2.29, this brings the rim of the cuff out around the leg. We can even improve the poke-through on the shin a little by dialling up the xScale and ZScale here to 105%, but much further than this and the shape of the leg starts to deform rather noticeably. The good news is that once we're happy with the way one side is scaled, we can use Edit..Copy Settings and Edit..Paste Settings to put those same values into the equivalent body parts on the other side. The only thing we'll have to check is any translation along the X-axis. Because we're going from left to right, that -2.29 xTrans on the left foot, needs to be changed to a +2.29 on the right foot.







Incidentally, scaling the foot and shin part of a pair of pants can often be a good way to turn them into flares, or fit the cuffs over shoes or boots.

Step 4 - Pants - Hiding underlying body parts

Finally we have to bite the bullet and look at the remaining poke-through on the legs. We have a small patch on the shins, the whole of the knees and a tiny patch under each buttock. The simplest way to get rid of these patches is to hide the offending V4 body parts. Once we've done this, the pants themselves will effectively form the legs of our clothed figure. If hiding the body part is going to mean losing a feature of your character that you feel is distinctive, have a look in the clothing for morphs that are similar to those your losing. For example, while we could have simply skipped Steps 2 & 3 above and just hidden all of V4's leg parts, by applying the Muscular morph in Step 2, we made the pants a little more like V4 Male's leg shape than it was before. So if you now select and hide V4's lThigh, lShin, rThigh and rShin body parts, you'll notice that all the leg poke-through disappears.







But unfortunately there's also a small part of the shin missing betweek the cuff of the pants and the ankles on V4. This isn't going to be a problem, because we're going to be covering this area with the boots. But if it is going to be a problem for your clothes, you've got two main options. Unhide the shin parts and either use magnets to eliminate the poke-through, or tidy it up in postwork. Both these techniques deserve tutorials in themselves, so for now let's take the easy option and cover up the problem with the boots. In fact you may as well go ahead and hide the feet as well.



The good news is that many types of pants are going to be a lot easier than this to fit. Slacks or Jeans that are a little more baggy almost fit without any extra work.

Step 5 - Boots & Kneepads

And the news gets better and better when we load up the M3 CIS Boots. M3's shoes and boots fit V4 Male almost perfectly without any tweaking. The only thing you may have to do is adjust the angle of V4's foot from the default "high heel" position, to a flatter one, but that can be left until you come to pose the figure (in the illustration, I've applied about a -20 bend to the left foot, and -4.5 to the left toe).







The outfit has two knee-pad options. Both conform to V4 without much hassle, and both have the Muscular3 morph that we can dial in to match the setting in the pants.

Step 6 - Abdominal Wrap

We've finally made it above the belt. The CIS Operative outfit doesn't have a single shirt figure. Instead it has an abdominal wrap, a breastplate and an overcoat all layered over the top of each other. The good news is that the overcoat can potentially cover up a lot of problems with the lower layers.



So let's start with the Abdominal Wrap. When you first load this up it looks like it's a perfect fit, but as soon as you fit it to V4, something horrible happens. The wrap shifts up and forwards, and a whole load of poke-through appears at the small of the back. No amount of morphing or scaling will fix it completely. There are two approaches we can take to deal with this. We can either accept that the back will be covered by the overcoat, and get the front to fit as closely as possible. Or alternatively instead of conforming the wrap to V4 (the Fit-to option) we can simply parent it to the abdomen. This means that the wrap won't inherit the bending from the V4, instead remaining fixed to the abdomen like a solid block. This means that in some poses, we may need to manually adjust the wrap to match the figure, but since the wrap only really covers the abdomen area and will be largely covered by the breastplate and coat, this shouldn't prove a problem. You can use this technique for any clothing item that isn't going to have to bend much or at all with the figure, like a shoe or hat.

In the Parameters tab, make sure that Fit to is set to "None". Then in the Scene tab, select the M3 CIS Abd Wrap and drag it onto V4.2's Abdomen body part, as shown in the illustration.






Step 7 - Vest







The next layer is the M3 CIS Vest. When you load this up again it looks like a perfect fit straight away, but when you fit to V4, again you get a small shift upward, most noticeable around the shoulder straps. This is a result of the differences between M3 and V4's rigging, and is something you'll come across with any M3 top that you fit to V4. While we could parent this like we did for the abdominal wrap, because this vest is much more prominent, we're more likely to run into problems when posing. The good news is this is very easy to fix. Select the hip bodypart of the CIS Vest. Note that it's important to select the hip rather than the vest itself. Now in the Parameters tab, select the yTrans dial and start applying a little negative translation. Doing this by eye, -4.5 seems to be a good fit, much more and the shouder straps start to dig into the figure.






Step 8 - Overcoat







Now on to the Overcoat. When we load and fit it to V4, we get the same shift upwards. As it happens, this gives the coat a bit of a high-collar look that doesn't look too bad, but since it also causes poke-through in the lower back area, let's fix it anyway. Select the hip body part on the coat, and in the Parameters tab, start dialling down the yTrans.







Judging it by eye, this doesn't need as much as the vest, -3.3 yTrans gets the collar nicely settled around the neckline and eliminates most of the poke-through in the upper back. We can still see some of the abdominal wrap poking through the lower back. Looking in the main body of the coat, in the Parameters tab it has a good selection of fit loosening morphs, including a LoosenBack dial. Setting this to 1 cures all but a tiny point of poke-through, adding in 0.1 of the overall Loosen morph eliminates this completely, and will give us a little more leeway in tight spots when posing the figure.







There's one small problem area on the coat, and any long-sleeved top will have this problem. Look at the cuffs of the sleeves and you'll find them digging slightly into the V4's thumb. This may not be a problem in some poses, but this can easily be fixed by applying a small amount of scaling to the forearm of the coat. 92% xScale sets the cuff nicely at the wrist.







For tighter long sleeved tops, you may find that you have to resort to hiding some body parts of the figure, the same as we did in Step 4. This is where you can run into problems with outfits that leave lots of skin visible. For example, you may have to hide the Collar or Chest body parts to solve poke-through on the shoulder or armpits, but if your shirt has a low cut neckline, you may be able to see a patch of skin missing. In this instance, you'll need to look at other ways of solving the poke-through, like magnets or transmaps, or accept it and tidy it up in postwork.

Step 9 - Bits & Pieces

We're now down to the last few clothing details in the outfit. The M3 CIS Cape is just a micro-cape that covers the coat's shoulders. This fits fine if you set the Loosen and Loosen Back morphs to match those we set in the coat in Step 8.



Loading up the headscarf and fitting it to V4, we get a pretty poor fit. The scarf's sadly lacking in head morphs to adjust, so the only option we have is to Scale. Exact settings will vary widely depending on which head morphs you have set, but for my mix of John/Paul/George, I find that it needs 120% in both the X and Z Scales to the head part of the scarf to completely eliminate poke-through from the head. This makes for a very loose fit, and for items like this, you'll have to make a judgement call as to whether this result is good enough for you.







Next we have the gloves. When we fit them to V4, the results are pretty awful. The hands are the most complex parts of any 3d figure (just stop to think how many different bones go to make up the hand and finger parts!) and V4 and M3 are rigged quite differently. While you could spend a lot of time scaling and translating all those individual parts to try to get them to line up, personally I believe that gloves are far more trouble than they're worth to try to fit. Not every clothing item is going to be adaptable and in this case the best thing to do is leave the gloves out or try to locate a similar item for V4.







Finally the crowning glory, the hat. Although this is setup as a conforming figure, with Chest, Neck and Head bodyparts that match up to the figure it's fit to, the hat is only ever in contact with the head, so there's no reason we can't Parent it to the head in the same way we did the Abdominal Wrap in Step 6. Select the hat figure, make sure in the Parameters tab that Fit to is set to None, then in the Scene tab, drag the hat onto V4's Head body part. Then a little scaling and translating will settle the hat nicely onto V4's head. Again the precise values will vary depending on the head morphs you're using. If you decided to use the headscarf, you may even need to scale the hat up to fit around it properly.






Step 10 - Finished - Pose & Render

And we're done. All that remains is to pose our newly dressed V4 Male and see how the fit holds up. Just as with figures wearing clothing that's designed for them, sometimes applying a pose will create additional poke-through problems that need tidying up. V4 Male takes standard Michael 3 poses quite well, and applying M3 ContraPosto 01 gives a pretty good result, with only a little poke-through on the underarm and rear that's easily fixed.



But if you're only going to be rendering your character from the front, does it really matter if there's poke-through at the back that no-one is ever going to see? What really matters is what's visible to the rendering camera, so if the outfit looks all right in the preview frame, then your work is done.



So now that Victor can borrow Mike's clothes, there's no longer any reason for him to go everywhere shirtless. Unless of course, you want him that way!



/END

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  1. JD2
    Currently OfflineOffline
    JD2 says:
    View and save tutorial at
    http://www.daz3d.com/i/tutorial/tutorial?id=2300&printable=1&_m=d

    P 4 August 2010 19:43     • #1
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