Late to the party: Four Arms issues

JOdel

Okay, a project came up and it looked like the Four Arms for Genesis might be a good solution to a kit-bash which was getting out of control.

It does indeed solve the main problem, but now I have a different one that's just as bad. How do you get clothing onto the extra arms?

They need sleeves and gloves. Autofit doesn't do it. The sleeves and gloves get fitted to the Genesis figure that the arms are attached to. Or, in the case of the kitbash, they get fitted to an invisible Genesis figure that isn't even there, and won't go near the arms I'm trying to get them onto.

The "fit to" dialog claims that they are fitted to Four Arms, but they aren't, they are fitted to an invisible Genesis that the arms are supposedly geografted to. And once autofitted, they refuse to be moved into position to fit the arms without distorting all over the place.

So. How do you fit the clothing *to the arms* (and hands)? By which I mean, how do you get the clothing fitted to the arms so it follows the arms when posed. Just parenting the clothing and moving it into position won't do.

etujedi

Hi JOdel,

If the clothing is for Genesis, make sure Genesis is loaded then load the clothing. Then you can add the FourArms after that. The lower arms will not have clothing on it, but your original Genesis will.

If you are trying to get the clothing on the second set of arms, you could try fitting a second set of clothing to the FourArms after you follow the steps above. You would have to use a modeler to adjust the clothing to fit the Arms, and the transfer utility to get the rig working. After that, hide the parts of the clothing you do not need.

Do not let autofit try to tackle this. If you are using clothing not made for Genesis, use the transfer utility to get the clothing on to Genesis first. Save your clothing. Then make it fit the arms and save that as a seperate clothing item. Make sure to load Genesis first, your clothing, the FourArms, then select the FourArms and load a second set of clothing.

Hope that helps.

JOdel

So there is no way to dress a pair of random arms to be able to pose them? The project requires a couple of pairs of arms on a sphere. I was hoping to be able to avoid the additional polys of the whole Genesis figure (two of them). But the arms need to have sleeves and gloves.

Bummer. Sounds like the problem is not solved and isn't going to be.

A pity someone can't write a script to manage it. I'd certainly pay for one.

Richard Haseltine

If the bones are hidden then they won't affect the render, though they may affect the viewport. But for this it does sound better to use the full Genesis rather than the extra arms.

JOdel

Yeah, well, I have a kitbash which I've been using. I'd hoped to simplify it.

But now I'm wondering, what good are the arms if they can only be used for semi-naked barbarians? Civlized four-armed aliens would probably at least be wearing uniforms.

Scott Livingston

Not sure how well this would work (I don't have Four Arms, but I've used this trick in other situations), but you could add another invisible Genesis to the scene, pose that figure's arms to match the position of the Four Arms geografts as closely as possible, fit the clothing to that figure's arms, and then use smoothing/collision to make it look like they're fit to Four Arms (set the items to collide with Four Arms).

Etujedi's method would almost certainly work better, but this is easier and might just be good enough.

JOdel

And we're back to an invisible Genesis, which is where I started.

Oh well. Maybe I'll hsve a use for a semi-naked 4-armed barbarian one day. But I'm tempted to ask for my money back.