What are my options for making tattoos that encircle body parts?

Inkubo

I want to make a Frankenstein-like character with parts sewn together, like https://www.daz3d.com/frankie-von-stein (but on a modern Genesis generation).

I tried making the incisions as a kind of tattoos for G8 by loading texture maps like the Torso into Affinity Photo, then using the pen tool to draw the incisions; then I saved just the incision images out and stuck them on geoshells to see the result. It was terrible!!! Because of the way the texture maps are stretched around the body, my consistently sized incision lines got stretched out to sometimes ridiculous proportions. Places where they met at UV seams, like where the face map meets the head, were pretty obvious: On one side of the seam they'd be thin and tight, on the other side they'd be fat and very pixilated like something out of Minecraft.

I have the Affinity Suite, DAZ, and Blender. I know I could texture paint in Blender, but I'm not confident I could end up with neat lines like I want.

My next idea is to make one long incision graphic, like 4000 x 100 pixels, and fight with LIEs to place and size it where I want on each body part. Not looking forward to that!

Are there any other options for wrapping a tattoo gracefully around a character's body parts? This seems like a job that could be perfectly automated, but maybe other people do it an easy way using software I don't yet possess?

Any ideas on how to get professional results easily?

Richard Haseltine

You might experiment with decals, but really either a lot of trial and error - ideally using a tempalte showing the underlying mesh, so you have an idea of how it stretches - or some kind of projection painting tool (e.g. Substance painter, ZBrush, 3D Coat, maybe even Blender for something relatively simple like this) is the answer.

Faeryl Womyn

Catherine made some colored templates to help with matching up seams. You could try that.

https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/93405/colourful-templates-for-genesis-8-male

Catherine3678ab

In addition to the programs Richard mentions, there is 3DCoatTextura [not necessary if one has 3DCoat].

In these programs one can paint with paint -- and/or with images and/or stencils. And there are a number of tutorials on YouTube for them too.

crosswind

If the tattoos you make cross the seams on a certain surface (e.g. tattoo on waist - Torso) or cross the surfaces (e.g. tattoo on shoulder - Arm / Torso), you better use the above applications to paint and bake the texture maps...

Then, UV stretching issue is rarely seen on Genesis figure but "geometry stretching" are pretty common. For instance, a tattoo on chest but the figure has big breasts and deep cleavage... or a tattoo on upper shoulder shrinks when figure's shoulder bends up or stretches when her shoulder is back... Anyway they deform regardless of what kind of tattoo (embedded, LIE, Geoshell or decal...). There're chances you may tweak settings on decal tattoo to improve the look, but decal has other issues of its own... it depends, as well as LIE.

If you want a tattoo to have more natural look under these circumstances, perhaps you can make a couple of "versions" for it, a "stretched" version, a "shrunk" version, etc.. for different cases..

Inkubo

Thank you all. I guess there really is no "easy button" for this task!

Catherine3678ab

Not really however with practice you'll discover which work flows work best for you. Also if you place tattoos or any other skin marks away from seams, that makes for an easy job.