WIP Update -
From Daz3D Foundation to Virtual Earth Resident
Daz3D has been foundational in my learning, practice and implementation of 3D models. I started with what to me is the toughest category - four legged creatures. It took a great deal of experimentation while consuming tutorials as I made - first wolves, then dogs and cats. I learned the ins and outs of mesh deformations and bone rigging with the animals. Doing human characters was easier by far, but I am grateful for the hard trials of quadruped creation and animation.
I had a vague idea of some of the features I wanted in a female character that would represent my creative ‘self’, but it hinged on what I could find in premade assets for my first go-round. I used a Genesis 8 female character from the Daz3D platform as my base mesh. I fooled around with the sliders to give her height and build the figure’s proportions to something modest - not too thick or skinny (just right, lol) and to form the facial features for my first draft. Once I had the body and face shaped, I then worked on the skin coloring until I achieved a cool nut brown tint. Next I had to do what us character creators all have to do - find hair and clothing!
[p]
I stumbled onto some dreads in the Daz store and wallah - the figure started to take on a bit of personality and I liked what I was seeing. The outfit though was challenging. I knew I wanted to dress this figure in something unconventional, but modest and earthy. I searched high and low in the Daz store to no avail. That’s when I stepped outside that boundary to peruse Renderosity. Nature being the theme, I basically trudged through their entire categories of offerings where I found a leaves and vines outfit that wasn’t as modest as I would like, but it gave me something to work with. I followed the instructions to import the 3D clothing asset into Daz, applied it and again, liked what I was seeing BUT it was way more sexy and skin revealing than I was aiming for, so I searched further and found some simple garments in the form of a pair of shorts and a cool top.
Last, but not least, once the figure seemed to project the kind of natural earthy persona I wanted to achieve, I had to deal with eye color and makeup to give the character some unique charm in her looks. I purchased a few assets from the Daz store and played endlessly with the variety of options before I decided simple colors just wouldn’t do the trick. In my mind I envisioned a rainbow of colors to compliment the dark green vines, leaves, top and shorts. I discovered a rainbow lipstick and it truly lit up my imagination. Heck, if I could have rainbow lips, why couldn’t I also have rainbow hair? I wish I could say it was simple, but that one little detail cost me a few brain cells as I had to then go out into the wild of the internet for some information about how to do that. Little by little, one experiment after another, I worked on that hair for days, maybe even a month, before I was satisfied with the hair coloring result. My ‘girl’ was looking damned good for a first draft and all the time spent felt well worth it.
[p]
My animation platform of choice was not Daz. My feverish intent was to actually be able to embody the avatar in a live motion capture. I had seen it done and by golly, I was determined to give it all I had to try and accomplish the task. My research on how to do that (embodiment) brought me to the Animaze platform where I struggled for weeks to get my 3D model, by now formally named Virtual Earth Resident - into Animaze. I followed every tip and tutorial, including bringing the character into Reallusion’s 3DXchange and then exporting in VDM format. Didn’t work. I gave it a good go, then hired a freelancer who did a great job preparing the character for Animaze. Once I got her inside the program, she looked like… well, cartoonish. Not what I was aiming for at all. Back to the drawing board I went and I fiddled around in Daz and Blender for ages, until… I discovered the rich features in Reallusion Character Creator.
That transformed the project into something much nearer to what I envisioned. Using CC3’s transfer protocol, I was able to bring in the figure and it retained its body and hair shapes, but without colors, I figured out how to bring the maps that Blender had made and successfully plugged them into their relevant diffuse texture slots. My model was looking much better, but there were limitations on how she looked - her face had the contours of a much simpler face than what I had shaped in Daz. In order to animate her, she had to be a CC3 character and that requirement completely changed the bone structure of her face, plus the hair and makeup (rainbow dreads and rainbow lipstick) didn’t carry over. Drats and darn plus a tinge of excitement because at least the body was rigged for movement automatically.
She (my figure) moved just fine using standard pose and animation content inside the Reallusion CC3 software. Visually though, she was a hot mess - textures on the outfit stretched all over the place and the hair on her head bent unnaturally as if she had two heads of hair on - one on top and the longer on the bottom - not at all connected and stiff as a board. I recognized that the solution was going to be a ton of weight painting on those textures to get them synched. The vine outfit was just snort of a nightmare as the twigs and bark and leaves intertwined and overlapped all over the thigh area. That left me three major challenges. I had come this far and wasn’t ready to give up, so I dove right in.
[p]
- Her face contours were not to my liking.
- The hair was contorted and disconnected and would need some weight painting and physics.
- The vines and leaf outfit with shorts and top looked great standing still, but the stretching of textures definitely called for some major weight painting activity, which I dreaded doing in Blender.
I had accomplished a great deal, drawing me ever closer to the dream of embodying the character with my own voice at least, before moving onto the next stage - driving her movements. But alas, before I could go any further I had to address the three issues that were front and center a problem for me.
. More progress coming shortly.
