Assistance Request: Stretching Super Villain Render

funkiestface

I'm currently working on a sort of Render Comic that involves a small group of super powered thugs attempting to break out another super villain. I've come to a bit of a roadblock: I'm uncertain on how to proceed regarding demonstrating a character's ability to stretch. The kind of super power being demonstrated is similar to that of: Plastic-man of the DC Universe, Reed Richards of Fantastic Four, and/or Elastigirl of the Incredibles. I've started using Daz for over a year now and still have a lot to learn. To supplement some of my Renders I'll use Blender to design simple assets that are easy to make or I can't find here or on any other 3d asset distributor. 

 

My Goal: The villain with the stretchy super power extends their arms and coils them around a cop. I hope to make multiple renders demonstrating his arms coiling his victim, the arms having restrained the cop's upper body with their arms pinned to the side and at least another where the villain is forced to release ther victim due to the cop biting them. I'm currently using Genesis characters. 

 

So my initial idea was to import both characters into Blender and sculpt the villain's arms to wrap around the victim or maybe use some sort of super simple skeleton rig and then break the arm bone into several smaller bones pose said bones around the victims body and export the result as an obj. I'm thinking that there's a better way and was hoping that maybe somebody more experience would either give me a suggestion as to what to do, or could point me in the right direction.

 

Thanks in advance!

Richard Haseltine

Well, you could do the rerig into multiple bones in DS and pose like that, but I don't think there's a simpler approach other than individually sculpting each step of the process. In principle you could make a set of GeoGraft limbs to replace the defaults, which would at least leave the rest of the figure unchanged (for morph and clothing compatibility) - but I think you are going to end up cursing your character-design decision whatever you do.

RobotHeadArt

Instead of sculpting Genesis's existing arms, it might be better to hide the arms and make a geograft.  I would try making a curve in Blender, shaping it around the victim, converting it into a tube, attaching the Genesis villan's hand to the end of the tube and then bring that back in DAZ Studio.

You will want the villan's costume to have a solid color for the arms with no maps (bump, normal, etc.) so you can easily match streched vs nonstreched appearances.  If you have maps on the arms you will likely run into difficulty stretching them so they don't look distorted or have weird tiling seams/artifacts.

kenshaw011267

I've tried this myself and it was a mess. I got the closest by creating lots of bones. But it was an absolute nightmare but I'm not a 3D modeler. Maybe someone much more familiar with it could get it done and have it look decent.

SixDs

For the record, are we talking about creating something realistic here, or toon. There is going to be a world of difference between the two in terms of time, effort and potential frustration, IMO. For a toon, you might get by with using a shortcut - such as easypose primitives.

TourqeGlare

I've had a lot of good luck doing it in Blender with no modifications to the base G8F figure. here's a bunch of examples:

https://twitter.com/LevithorArts/status/1264840098148835328

https://twitter.com/LevithorArts/status/1253293395285438464

https://twitter.com/LevithorArts/status/1252796032426971136

 

The way I did it was with the Daz Importer by diffeomorphic: http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-14.html

There is an option, once rigged properly, to allow for stretching and it can get, not Christmas bow crazy, but pretty deep otherwise.
I have no experence sending everything BACK to Studio though, but all of these pictures were rendered in Blender, so Studio could be thought of as prepwork, I guess?

funkiestface

I appreciate everyone's suggestions. Thank you all again! In regards to the characters style I'd consider them to be more realistic than cartoony. The attached image depicts the bare arms in the character. I tried making a simple skele rig in blender and stretching some of the bones to a length that should be sufficient in coiling the cop. That didn't work out. But I think blender may still prove useful. Especially with Tourqe's suggestion.