Looking for tutorials, resources, tips and tricks for sculpting custom morphs (G8F)

CrescentByte

Hi all,

First order of business, apologies if the images stretch your screen out, I did look for spoiler tags but could not find any in the editor form. If anyone knows how to implement spoiler tags on here or how to make the images more display friendly please let me know.

I've recently got into sculpting in blender again (been on and off for a few months now) and have got a drawing tablet display to help improve my sculpting as it is much better suited for it than using a mouse. I was wondering if there are any tutorials and/or other resources, tips and tricks laying around focusing on sculpting genesis bodies for daz3d, particularly for sculpting custom morphs for the genesis 8 female body as that is the body I want to learn how to work with and sculpt custom morphs for. I do have a bit of experience in body sculpting from making some tweaks to some of the ped models in gta v, but wanted to know what the best approach would be for tackling daz3d bodies or even genesis 8 female specifically. My overall aim is to make really big 'thicc' shaped girls. I did see a thread that mentioned different ways of going about making thicc shapes here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4928681/ but the shapes made there and the real life examples are still much smaller than what I'm going for and focus more on achieving the shape via existing morphs rather than sculpting new ones. One of the shapes I would like to try and make eventually is some sort of combo of the below examples, or even just one of them to start off with maybe:

Colors of autumn

Excelent shape/curves but has a lower bodyfat percentage and on the smaller side of what I'm aiming for.

Love Randalin

Excellent waist/hip ratio and probably the closest of the real life examples to what I'm aiming for, only differeces are I will be aiming for a fatter torso/upper body and slightly refined overall shape.

A couple stylized examples of shapes I would like to make/imitate

Thicc samsung sam by bamboo_ale

Similar situation to colors of autumn. Nice shape that I wouldn't mind making at some point, but my overall aim is to make a shape much bigger than this.

Cassie by jaykuma and various other artists

jaykuma's oc cassie is easily the closest of all the examples in shape and size to what I would like to be able to sculpt for myself onto g8f at some point. 

It was a bit tricky to find some decent photos for the real life examples that complied with the forum rules for images so I admit those ones are not the best, however googling both of their names (especially if you add reddit before the name) should yield some better and also more recent examples, particularly with randalin who is bigger in her more recent content.

I have tried in the past to make a bigger shape through the use of existing morphs and also scaling (main scale that covers all 3 axis) the pelvis, thighs and shins but the overall result of my efforts on this front is not the best structurally, there is alot of clipping particularly in the glute/butt area. One thing I've found is that you will never really be able to add as much detail and proportion as you would like by relying on existing morphs alone and you won't always be able to add it in the exact area you want it to go either. That's why I would like to try and learn how to sculpt custom morphs instead, so I can make exactly what I want and I can add the exact detail I want exactly where I want it to go.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to reply. :)

Catherine3678ab

Generally speaking, invest in some morphs along the lines of what you are after and see how they are done. Making the morph is one thing, getting it to work well as part of the figure is another.

pds

Catherine3678ab said:

Generally speaking, invest in some morphs along the lines of what you are after and see how they are done. Making the morph is one thing, getting it to work well as part of the figure is another.

As Catherine said, sculpting the shape is one thing; getting it to work well with a figure in a variety of poses is going to be the challenge and from what little I have gleaned from similar discussions, it comes down to creating effective "corrective" morphs. The PA Zeddicuss has been creating a lot of shape + pose sets lately, but I've not used them so I don't know what, if any, corrective morphs are incorporated.

This product by Kindred Arts and Sickleyield specifically states that appropriate corrective morphs were a primary focus, so maybe you can use that as a starting point:

https://www.daz3d.com/big-girl-morphs-for-genesis-8-female

MelissaGT

...and then getting it to work with clothing is going to be another challenge entirely. You're going to have to create custom morphs for every single piece of clothing you want to put on a figure. For that reason alone, I typically work with the base body, or something very close to it, because I don't want to deal with odd stretching of textures and other wonk caused by using a shape that is either left or right from the base center. 

Catherine3678ab

Another detail to be aware of, if you're working completely from scratch well you know you have 'all' the extra work to do as well.

IF just using morphs from packages intended for your own use, those normally [should I would hope] have that extra work done. However if/when using morphs from "merchant resource" packages, that extra work is not necessarily done as the PA is expecting one to incorporate the MR morph in with their own morph and so once again, one is back to doing all the extra work entailed for the morphs.

Kainjy

I also tell you that to obtain a high level model you should create a Hd morph because usually the genesis base mesh is low poly. The tecnology to create a Hd morph is reserved only for PA.

mding

I cannot recommend any, this is just a basic search:

 

http://www.daz3d.com/how-to-create-a-new-custom-daz-studio-character

http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-content-creation-with-blender

Older:

http://www.daz3d.com/easy-modeling-and-morphing-with-blender

YT:

mding

One thing I almost forgot: Sickleyield has 2 morph packs for Genesis 2 which might inspire:

https://www.daz3d.com/big-boys-for-genesis-2-male-s

https://www.daz3d.com/big-beautiful-genesis-2-female-s

CrescentByte

Cheers all for the replies so far, you guys and gals are awesome.

So yes as most of you have mentioned, sculpting the morph itself in another 3d program (in my case I will be using blender for sculpting) is obviously 1 piece of the puzzle for making something usable in daz. At this point I'll be happy just being able to sculpt that base shape and being comfortable doing that, then once I have mastered that process, progressing onto making it play nice in daz studio by learning how to properly set up things like corrective morphs and other adjustments, developing a workflow for making morphs for clothing and other appendable items when the smoothing modifier is insufficient to produce an elegant result, etc. At this point I have established a workflow for exporting g8f (at base res) into blender and then back again via morphloader pro. I've sculpted a couple draft morphs messing around with the proportions of the body, but hadn't thought about hd detail yet. Perhaps there might be something in blender I can do combined with the subD modifier in daz studio to mimic or get close to hd detail once I get the base shape setup. Thanks again for all the input so far. I will checkout all the videos and other linked resources during the week. I think I might also see if i can find anything related to sculpting human anatomy in general. Perhaps over the weekend I can practice what I've learned over the week and draft something decent.