OSO's Blendy - How to Blend a Centaur's Skin?

ShortlegDoggo

I asked on the main PA thread a couple of days ago but didn't get any bites, so I hope it's okay to post here.

I'm having trouble with Genesis 8 Centaur specifically, making it so the human skin has a smooth transition into the horse skin (like the Maxx Centaur, for example). Is there a guide anywhere on how to do that? I found a brief section on it in the product's Readme, but didn't have any luck.

Geograft blends are fairly easy with Oso Blendy. For example, with a centaur, you could put the equine
torso skin as the second layer of a torso material and an appropriate transition blend mask. With a
preset that only applies second layer, you can then apply this to most existing skins without a problem.
The one obstacle you may run into is a skin that’s based on a different SSS Mode (chromatic vs. mono).

Seems simple enough, but it's just not working for me for some reason. 

FSMCDesigns

There was a long thread about this issue with some tips from the creator of Maxx, but alas, unless you are a PA and have access to the tools they use, there really isn't a way to do it.

ShortlegDoggo

FSMCDesigns said:

There was a long thread about this issue with some tips from the creator of Maxx, but alas, unless you are a PA and have access to the tools they use, there really isn't a way to do it.

That's a bummer. I had high hopes after seeing the Readme. Thank you for letting me know! I found that thread, that's too bad. Love the centaurs, but not a fan of the skin-to-fur transition.

parkourchallenger

So there is a way to do it. I did it, but it isn't easy. The long short of it is that the centaur skin (not the shell) needs to be your characters skin. You can do this one of two ways: 1) (hard way) manually paint your characters skin onto a centaur map. Every. Map. This is what was done for centaur Maxx. I'm not too good at matching textures while painting and I didn't want to do it for every character, so I went this route: 2) (easy way). Make a UV map that takes the human skin and stretches it out over the horse skin. Copy the human torso skin to your horse body and apply the new UV map. Apply horse skin to the shell and then mess with the opacity maps (requires some painting) to get the desired transition. I have the UV map, but I'm not happy with how I did it. But, I basically used blender, imported base centaur and base G8F found out where the two maps connected on the g8F then went over to the centaur map and manually moved each vertex individually to the transition point. I then went to the next loop down and moved those UV verts to where the next loop down on the g8F would be and did that for a couple more loops. The important part was just trying to get things to line up without stretch Now I have some human skin on the horse skin. Cool. But I still had a whole horse that needed to be skin as well and not a whole lot of human skin left. Here's where I started doing 'no-no's. I started folding the horse UV's back up on the ones I just made. The thinking was that I would have to fold an entire horse and fit it in a waist. This isn't entirely wrong, but it's bad practice because it'll flip the normal map. After a couple folds, I gave up with the rest of the horse uvs. The important part I needed looked good (the transition). But everything else is stretched. That doesn't matter though. The horse skin will cover it up. The end result was exactly what I wanted though. With the added bonus of working on any character I got the g8f UVs in obj format if you or anyone wants them. Just don't look under the hood or go too far into the horse body with the opacity maps or it starts to look ugly. The whole chest and back area have a good chunk of space to play around with though. I was thinking about maybe turning it into a product, but I lack experience at the moment to do it the "proper" way. If anyone has any feedback on how to do it better though, I'm all ears.