How to Fit or Re-fit these items?

ebonartgallery

I have a problem. I'm working on a new character and I want him to have a belt and a gun belt. The model is G3M/Jared.

So on the normal belt there, it's the belt from the Soldier 2.0. But it's meant apparently to be used with some pants, because it floats around his hip and can't be re-sized. No actor/shaping/adjustment at all. Would there be a way to resize that?

On the second gun belt there, that's from a Genesis1 Female set - I'm guessing it's riding so high because it was originally fitted to a woman? It looks... more than a little odd, that way. Any way to move it down, or tell it where the actual hips are?

Richard Haseltine

For the male gun belt you could create a morph - you might be able to do it with DForms, or you might need to use an external modelling application and import with Moprh Loader Pro. For the female belt you could adjust the mesh so it was fitting as you wanted on the zeroed figure, hide everything but the gun belt,  export, import and use the Transfer Utility to rig it. Either would involve some mesh manipulation, at least.

ebonartgallery

Richard Haseltine said:

For the male gun belt you could create a morph - you might be able to do it with DForms, or you might need to use an external modelling application and import with Moprh Loader Pro. For the female belt you could adjust the mesh so it was fitting as you wanted on the zeroed figure, hide everything but the gun belt,  export, import and use the Transfer Utility to rig it. Either would involve some mesh manipulation, at least.

Can you point to some decent tutorials on that? Pretty much the only thing I understood in all of that was 'DForm' and I can only get that to work maybe 10% of the time.

ebonartgallery

Another major problem of course is fitting items designed for previous models - is it no wonder that one of the first questions everyone asks is 'when are you re-doing X for the new model type'?

Try as I might with smoothing mods, I cannot alleviate this clipping problem seen below. Makes the harness pretty useless unless someone can tell me how you not only move it to clear up the clipping issues, but make it fit to him so when I change it the next twenty or thirty times, it stays un-clipped. How can I do that?

 

ebonartgallery

So, a new thing: I went in and fiddled with the DFormer and this time it worked perfectly. Pulled that little chunk out of his chest, tested a few poses, everything works fine -- then I deleted the dformer and things went back to the way they were before! So... is that suppossed to happen? I thought it made permanent changes, or is that the... 'create a new morph' thing that Richard Haseltine was talkuing about above?

Richard Haseltine

I don't have Soldier 2.0, I will see if I can find something else that might serve as an example (and that I can get to work) though probably not today.

kaotkbliss

After you created your dformer morph, did you find it in the Harness' properties and dial it up? (I believe it becomes named something like dform morph or something like that)

ebonartgallery

kaotkbliss said:

After you created your dformer morph, did you find it in the Harness' properties and dial it up? (I believe it becomes named something like dform morph or something like that)

I just move the dformer part

Speaking of that, I ran into my old problem with the dformer - I created a new DFormer on the hip belt but no matter how I move the field around I never see the red/yellow bits that indicate what part I'd be moving and no matter what part of the dformer I move and no matter how far I move it, nothing ever happens to the object. What causes that?

sriesch

ebonartgallery said:

Speaking of that, I ran into my old problem with the dformer - I created a new DFormer on the hip belt but no matter how I move the field around I never see the red/yellow bits that indicate what part I'd be moving and no matter what part of the dformer I move and no matter how far I move it, nothing ever happens to the object. What causes that?

Not sure if any of these apply to your situation, but here are some notes I had saved concerning deformers, perhaps one of them might be related to your issue?

    Sometimes it seems like dform doesn't work.  The problem is that I've selected a node that isn't actually an object with geometry.  (for example, the troll's belt base node TR-Belt.  The belt is a figure, and you've attached the D-Former to the BODY node, which isn't actually an object with geometry. You need to create the D-Former attached to nodes of the figure that have geometry, like the hip.
    the dformer won't work (you won't see the field correctly) for some objects unless the object being dFormed was at the 0,0,0 position (TODO and possibly unposed?) before you applied the Dformer.  The field doesn't line up properly if the Dformer is applied to a posed/repositioned character. There are a couple of ways to make it line up, but the least aggravating is to apply the Dformer to an unposed character. Then you can move and pose the
character and the Dformer will follow correctly. This applies to all hair, clothes, and props that are fitted to the character as well. If you know you are going to use a Dformer, save yourself grief and apply it before you move the actor.
    the dformer always assumes the item is unposed so if you want to dform a shirt and your character is bending over, the dform circle will actually be above the character, not covering the shirt.

SFAM

Can't you just save the current, positioned object as a Pose (use self-created camera), then start with a new zeroed pose to do the Dforming, then apply the saved Pose to the now corrected object?  Seems like this would work, at least on paper!  Might save a little time.

ebonartgallery

sriesch said:

ebonartgallery said:

Speaking of that, I ran into my old problem with the dformer - I created a new DFormer on the hip belt but no matter how I move the field around I never see the red/yellow bits that indicate what part I'd be moving and no matter what part of the dformer I move and no matter how far I move it, nothing ever happens to the object. What causes that?

Not sure if any of these apply to your situation, but here are some notes I had saved concerning deformers, perhaps one of them might be related to your issue?

    Sometimes it seems like dform doesn't work.  The problem is that I've selected a node that isn't actually an object with geometry.  (for example, the troll's belt base node TR-Belt.  The belt is a figure, and you've attached the D-Former to the BODY node, which isn't actually an object with geometry. You need to create the D-Former attached to nodes of the figure that have geometry, like the hip.
    the dformer won't work (you won't see the field correctly) for some objects unless the object being dFormed was at the 0,0,0 position (TODO and possibly unposed?) before you applied the Dformer.  The field doesn't line up properly if the Dformer is applied to a posed/repositioned character. There are a couple of ways to make it line up, but the least aggravating is to apply the Dformer to an unposed character. Then you can move and pose the
character and the Dformer will follow correctly. This applies to all hair, clothes, and props that are fitted to the character as well. If you know you are going to use a Dformer, save yourself grief and apply it before you move the actor.
    the dformer always assumes the item is unposed so if you want to dform a shirt and your character is bending over, the dform circle will actually be above the character, not covering the shirt.

I'll try those; thank you!