Natural Bent Elbow Morph?

MelissaGT

So I have a specific pose that I want to use that has a really bent elbow and I'm having a hard time getting it to look in any way natural. I'd even settle for just not funky. The character body is Olympia 8 with some customized morphs, but nothing extreme. The first example is with no third-party corrective morphs. The second image is with Auto Shape Enhancer dialed in at 90%. The third image is Ultimate Natural Bend Morphs for G8F. Is there anything else out there that might help or could anybody give me a point in the right direction to helping her myself? So far I've only created some soft body indent morphs, etc. 

I know changing the lighting can help make things look better (or worse). This is just the base studio lighting I use for all my scenes. I arrange the pose first and then work on lighting...that's just my personal workflow. 

run4real

Did you try Mesh Grabber already?

MelissaGT

modeller said:

Did you try Mesh Grabber already?

I don't believe Mesh Grabber can be precise enough, because it's two pieces of the same mesh touching each other. If I grab one piece, the other will move too. I have ZBrush, but I was hoping to avoid it, lol. 

run4real

I see...by the way your project looks interesting!

MelissaGT

modeller said:

I see...by the way your project looks interesting!

It's actually going to be a full-body piece and when I zoom out, the Auto Shape Enhancer one doesn't look that bad.

And thanks! Raz is a character I've had for years, moved from G7 to G8 and now G8.1. She's one of my favorites.  

Saxa -- SD

Hexagon Bridge from DS works flawless and super-fast (ie. HexBeta - not regular).

So easy to inflate mesh to how you want, name change as morph, and make morphs until you get one you like.  Skeptical you can beat own morph if you have an artists eye to make mesh proper.  You get then how you want it.  Just a thought.

MelissaGT

Saxa -- SD said:

Hexagon Bridge from DS works flawless and super-fast (ie. HexBeta - not regular).

So easy to inflate mesh to how you want, reimport, make morphs until you get one you like.  Skeptical you can beat own morph if you have an artists eye to make mesh proper.  You get then how you want it.  Just a thought.

I have ZBrush...I just didn't want to go through that whole rigmarole of having to paint a freeze map on the part of the arm I don't want to move (the forearm) and then adjust the part of the arm I do (the bicep). There are also some muscle flex morphs I can try but based on looking at my own bent arm in the mirror, the bicep doesn't really flex all that much unless you're trying to "bump" it. If you're just touching your chin like that, it's really just two pieces of arm folded upon each other.  

Saxa -- SD

Totally get you on mirror reflection with arms bent.

To me, That's the beauty of Hex.  Or i think so.  Inflate one/deflate other.  Different maybe to Zbrush? and ultra-fast and how you want. Plus morphs you can dial in by strength, as you know, so you're not stuck with just off/on. 

Move the mesh you want by panning around.  Still think you can do alot with deflate/inflate.  But not making immaculate poses like you often do that mirror reality almost perfectly. 

On another note, TBH, never really run into a high-end elbow morph.  Muscle stuff is decent but I don't think anyone has made MJ-Portrait level realism yet.  :)

MelissaGT

Saxa -- SD said:

Totally get you on mirror reflection with arms bent.

To me, That's the beauty of Hex.  Or i think so.  Inflate one/deflate other.  Different maybe to Zbrush? and ultra-fast and how you want. Plus morphs you can dial in by strength, as you know, so you're not stuck with just off/on. 

Move the mesh you want by panning around.  Still think you can do alot with deflate/inflate.  But not making immaculate poses like you often do that mirror reality almost perfectly. 

On another note, TBH, never really run into a high-end elbow morph.  Muscle stuff is decent but I don't think anyone has made MJ-Portrait level realism yet.  :)

Yeah, you can do that with ZBrush too. I'm just superbly lazy when it comes to making custom morphs and importing them. Something invariably goes wrong the first try and I have to import all over again. It's all because you have to export from Daz at the base resolution, subdivide in the modeling program, make the morph, and then reimport back to daz at the base resolution using the morph loader tool (or GoZ if it decides to work...which only seems to happen when Gemini aligns with the Fifth House of Venus or something similar in cosmic rarity). 

So would you inflate the bicep and deflate the forearm?  

Saxa -- SD

melissastjames said:

It's all because you have to export from Daz at the base resolution, subdivide in the modeling program, make the morph, and then reimport back to daz at the base resolution using the morph loader tool (or GoZ if it decides to work...which only seems to happen when Gemini aligns with the Fifth House of Venus or something similar in cosmic rarity). 

So would you inflate the bicep and deflate the forearm?  

Have commands to quickly set from my.Higher-Res to base, and vicey-versa.  Part of my visual menus and subject to revision maybe.
Think Base should give you a pretty good start.  Unless you are using a major arm HD?  Then that's trickier, but you would be still hiding HD with bigger base changes from my exp for this pose with morph.

For me, artists' eyes is the critical thing here.  If you have them, then is sadly (at first anyway) probably quickest and best fix.
Not only are you deflating forearm for eg, but it kinda displaces a bit to side.  Scrunchied.  And it's not linear.  So scuplting.  But yeah that infl/defl would be my start point.  But maybe not yours?

Once you have, wil work for that arm type, lol.
Morphs are like Alice and Wonderland.  Never know when it stops.  Or for me anyway lol.