4-Armed Alien!
tdc
Posts: 129
For a few weeks, I've been trying to develop some kind of four-armed alien. I finally came up with a workable solution. Although not exactly perfect, the extra arms are posable and you can still pose the main character and the second set of arms follow.
I used Photoshop for the textures and Blender for some morphs. Like adding the second chest. So, I basically added two Gen8's but one, I took apart. Deleting ALL the bones that did not affect the arms and chest. This took a while... Then hid all the extra parts and dragged the arms into the upper chest of the main figure. This allows me to still use poses on the main figure. I can't use poses on the secondary figure but the arms are completely posable!
I thought at one time there was a four-armed genesis character but, after searching and searching... found nothing.
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There did used to be a product availble, Four Arms For Genesis, but it doesn't appear to be availble anymore.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/14259/start
I've thought, now and then, of making a four armed figure for Genesis 8 but the problem is trying to make it work with even a decent range of morphs. :/
I've then thought about making some sort of set up so you could overlay two figures, with hiding and geoshells or... something. Like old school centaurs.
Maybe someday I'll fold it into a usable product.
I'm glad somebody has figured out how to do this. There is one figure called "Sledge" over at Renderosity, but he doesn't look particularly human-shaped.
I bought it when It came out. It was fun to play with, but there was almost no support, except for a few of RawArt's figures. They don't seem to be in the store anymore either.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/14695/start
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/14261/start
I realize it's impossible to support every morph that was made for Genesis, but it would have been nice to have supported the morphs from Creature Creator that affected the arms and hands. I'm sure this was a niche product.
I attempted to make an extra set of arms for G8. I took a G8 base figure into hexagon and removed everything but the arms, positioned them where I wanted on the G8 base figure, created a geograph. All worked good and they grafted perfectly. But then I couldn't trnasfer rigging back onto the arms without either messing up the arm placement or the joint bends so I gave up.
The big problem with RawArt's 4 armed character were the UV's; you could only use the skin that came with it and there was no easy way to manually edit a texture for it since vendors of textures don't add extra arms.
I managed to do a fourarmed version of my character JaguarElla with it so I think you could reuse the arm textures, is on my other PC so I cannot look immeadiately what I did but moot as no longer available
she uses RAWart's Catpeople Jaguar texture though she is based on different morphs
they are M4 UV AFAIK
there is some oddness at the join to the torso
Yep, there was some experimentation along those lines but people were looking for presets for their favorite characters so interest petered out...
I loved the extra arms set that was made by Etujedi back then. But all the characters I made for it were horribly low selling, so if the sales for the arms themselves were that bad, then there is a reason that no one went through all the work to make a new pair.
I get that the people who would want such a product are passionate about it, butthere doesnt seem to be enough to suit the workload for it.
I have also toyed with a couple different ideas to try again using two bases, even coming up with clever ways to hide the seam area....but nothing worked to the degree I would have liked.
Saw the thread and decided to make my own low-poly 4-armed man. Less than 10,000 polygons.
Probably coming to an Its Raining Men challenge near you.
Attached is my version of G8F 4-arms, static props ready to be geographed again. I deleted the ones I had already geographed because the rigging didn't work and thought that I needed to rig before making it a geograph, but that didn't work either.
My rigging consisted of attempting to transfer the rigging from G8F to the arms in various ways, but all ended in failure due to the arms being in a new location I think.
I can't share the actual arm geometry since they are actual G8F arms with a couple added polys to connect the arms to the new location on the G8 figure for geographing.
The reason against modeling a grafted set of arms is the problem Etujedi and I ran into as well....people want all the morphs and functionality of the built on genesis arms.
All I want is to have something to stand in for a Thark / Green Martian from ER Burrough's Barsoom / Mars books. Someday I'll have to try to make one myself, no matter how crude it might be I guess. Of course could be quite a while until I'm ready to tackle that since I'd need to learn stuff like Blender, etc.
Your fastest option then would probably be to load 2 figures and hide everything but the shoulders and arms of one, then give that figure a -y value until the arms are where you want them and parent the figure to the other.
You might have to do some photo editing after the render, but that might be easier than learning to make and rig your own
Experimenting, I found that in a lot of cases, unless you were doing really careful closeups... superimposing figures will work tolerably well.
Examples:
The skins for BarSoomian and Triclops worked fine on Genesis, even without using the character morphs, or even without the four arms graft. The UV for Four Arms was close to the V4 UV; I had good luck using a lot of skins with that UV on four-armed characters. Some didn't work as well as others, but often a little postwork, or careful positioning of the character, can hide texture weirdness.
I think that was the barrier: a lot of customers just want to apply a texture or a pose and render.... Nothing was unsurmountable but it was just fiddly enough to be a dead end....
Yes, the characters made specifically using the arms were fine.....but people want to use the arms for things other than prepackaged characters, and thats when the lack of morphs becomes a problem. If you have a heavy character and one set of arms bulks up nice, but you cannot get the second set to look the same, then it is not so cool.
That's what got me started on a four-armed figure. But because there were so many issues trying to link the bones to the main figure, I just gave up and tried to cheat a bit. Taking the whole body and duplicating it and extracting all the bones that did not support the arms, then trowing that figure into the upper abdomen seems to be working good enough for me. At least I can pose the arms, and use all the morphs I want as I did with the main figure.
As you can see, it's a bit messing on the inside, but with all that hidden, and a bit of work on the texture... I think I did well for the time being.
The major problem was that, if you wanted them for Genesis female characters, there wasn't any upper body clothing which could be improvised for them.
how can i fix that unrealistic ? joints of extra arms where they connect to torso of main figure ? that's overlapping each other and has no realism
That, and we wanted to be able to put *clothes* on it.
I had an actual need for a 4-armed character around that time. And I tried. But it just wasn't going to work. Fortunately it was an insect character, so I was able to eventually cobble clothing onto one of Noggin's man-bugs.
Q: has anyone tried arranging the armes in the z axis rather than the y axis?
Thought I'd throw in a couple of comments since I had to fake this a year or two ago, and will likely fake it again soon because I have a need for a Barsoomian sort of character coming up.
What you see in this image is two straight G8Fs, but one of them has every single bone that isn't arms and hands hidden. That is, Left Collar through the ends of the left fingers are on, and Right Collar through the ends of the right fingers are on; everything else is off. These are hidden in the figure structure, not via surface opacity; though you could do it that way if you had a custom opacity map for the Torso surface that allowed only the shoulders to be visible. You do need the shoulders.
The arms-only G8F has her Shoulders Width slider to as low a value it will go. Also, her Z Scale property--I mean the scale for the entire figure--has been unhidden and unlocked and set to 80%.
The main G8F has her Shoulders Width set to about 75%; that is, wider than usual.
The arms-only figure has been dropped down on Y a bit and moved forward on Z a bit, relative to the main figure, and then the entire arms-only figure has been parented to the main figure's Chest Upper bone.
The posability is good. I've chosen this pose not just to move all four arms independently, but to show that waist bend and twist on the main figure does the right thing with the extra arms, keeping those shoulders where they should be relative to the torso. You have to watch out for hierarchal poses, which will not like the extra arms at all, but if you're careful with the posing you can even do tricky things like having her wield four swords.
Applying surfaces to the extra arms to match the main figure will involve copying and pasting surfaces.
Clothing, as already noted, is an issue. You want a blouse/top with open sides, like the backless halter shown here. I have also had some success with very loose robes/caftans with big wide sleeves, and just had two hands poking out the end of each sleeve :P
You have to be very careful with posing and camera. They don't look good from all angles, but they can be made to look good from ENOUGH angles that it's a workable hack. As for the seamlessness, a lot of it is your choice of skin surface. Some don't do as well as others. You want a very, very even-textured one--no blotches or color changes.
You've got the extra arms a little further down the torso of the outer figure than I do. Also, the outer figure in mine has Shoulder Width set to about 75% and the inner figure has Shoulder Width set to -100%. That may make a difference. Mine doesn't look as good from the back either, but doesn't have the inner figure's shoulder blades poking through.
(Excuse my dropping her into an existing set--I'm working on a different story right now and didn't want to clear out that set and have to reload it later.)