Clothing for child characters (question).
lazarus102
Posts: 47
I am currently making outfits for Wilykat (Thundercats 2011), and Superboy(Jon kent - Supersons comics). The question that I've had on my mind; I am making the clothing to be G8M compatable, Am I better off to model the clothing to a child character so that it fits properly on their native character forms? I've been doing that with the superboy outfit, but questioning it the entire time.
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Comments
It is generally recommended to model all clothing to an unmorphed base character shape (i.e. G8M, not a child character).
I agree with barbult however, I just make the clothing for the character I want it for. Having said that, I don't make the clothing compatible for other figures also. You've got a large discrepancy in size between a child and adult. Which way are to dealing with that?
This is what I mean. I've noticed that in the case of G8M models, when using morphs to turn them smaller, the clothing often doesn't quite fit so natural. I mainly want to make it G8M compatible so that I could advertise it as such if I were to try to post it to the store. If I model it on a child character, then bring into daz, use that child character as a morph(the child character is from using a G8M model in Maya, so no diff in poly count), place the clothing on it, then slide the morph back to return it to the default G8M shape. would the clothing follow just fine?
This is where morphing fixes come into play. Either you have the fix for the ADULT or the CHILD. I know that it is hard to design it for the ADULT, morph to the CHILD, then attempt to "fix" that creation. Unfortunately, though the body is child-sized, the clothing doesn't function or look as it should, on many of the child-morph models. Especially around the breasts, where the reduction often leaves clothing with an odd under-cusp deformation and a breast-bone deformation or a "protruding crease". (That stems from the area of influence of the adult model, where you don't want the under-cusp and cleavage-crease to be as "loose", thus, it is more rigid in those points. Which, for the most part, also impacts the morphed attached clothing in odd ways.)
So, If you do it in reverse, built initially for the CHILD, so it looks good... Then you remove the morph, so it is an adult... That is where you might have better luck applying the "fix", morph. Essentially as a negative value morph fix. Making sure that all things work as expected, first, with the CHILD model, as that is your initial target. If needed, you could also just make an individual secondary version, just for adults. (One being Child -> Teen. The other being Adult -> Teen.) That is where you get the most dramatic "breaking", of the clothing and morphs. Because, at that point, you are essentially turning a female into a male. Which is why I still believe they should just use a neutral "human", as the base, and then isolate the female morphs and male morphs, like they did in the first Genesis model. However, that led to the reverse issue, where the "expanded" breasts all needed fixes, because they just didn't have enough adequate geometry there.
It's real hard to undo shapes, like the breasts, when the base-formulas all sort-of depend on that unique "large" structure to be negated. It would honestly be better to just use the male morph for all child male and female morphs, as the base. There is less to "fix", to get it to work right. It already functions perfectly in the chest area, since there is no negative deformations attached to the positive deformations "rigidness".
Also... You have to fight the "adult skins", which have adult details painted on them, which alter the model in undesired ways. (They essentially paint cleavage-creases, under-cusp indentations, and other details that you would never find on a child... Like laugh-lines, crows-feet, strong knuckle-creases, giant skin pores, dark body hair, elbow-wrinkles. But it is the painted details, by normals and bumps, on the chest area, all around the breasts, which adds deformations that you can't really fix with just modeling deformations alone. You have to essentially strip the details from the images, the bumps and normals, but selectively just remove the "adult details", which also deform the model shape, or apparent shape, too. These can also lead to poke-through, because the clothing doesn't "see" those details as part of the actual model itself.)
I think I would start with the main character in mind. If you're going promo the clothing for the kids then make it for the kids first then use the weft and warp 'shrink' settings to 'stretch' the clothing for the adult. That way the mesh is best suited for the model in mind and it won't matter too much if the mesh is a little thinner for the adult. I haven't tried fitting the clothing in Daz, exporting it as obj, then reimporting back to MD to work the draping. I know MD9 is much better than it was for reimporting. I've imported a couple of things that had clearly been made in MD and even had the sewing all in place. I'm thinking this way Daz has sorted out the 'stretching' for you. Let us know what you do.
To be fully honest with you, I don't currently have any plans to do female clothing at all. I might do one for Wilykit just so as to have the thunderkitten collection and all, but the amount of female content to male content on the Daz store is just disgusting (it's like 10/1, sometimes more depending on what you're looking for). The guys get nothin by comparison and a lot of the stuff that the male characters end up using was stuff made for females. So there's no sence in me throwing more cups of water into the ocean; I'd rather be original. But that aside, thank you for the answer, Jimmac as well. This has confirmed what I needed to know.