Frustration 1. It’s hard to make tight clothes look good on dolls. That’s because the dolls are not 1:1 scale, but the clothing is, so the clothing does not look appropriately form-fitting. It looks too bulky. Plus it usually limits the dolls’ movement.
Frustration 2. Poke-through on 3-D models. This is when the position of your 3-D digital person is such that the person’s body part penetrates the clothes unrealistically. If someone’s arms are bent acutely, you may see, for example, elbow poke-through in the shirt. It’s not realistic, and it limits model poses.
Frustration 3. Memory hogging. 3-D modeling programs put a huge drain on computers. Every piece of clothing has its own construction, design, morph and texture information, which can get really complicated if you have a scene with 3 people, each with 1 hair, 3 items of clothing, 1 accessory, not to mention the set made up of 6 props. Memory hogging makes loading the files, saving them and rendering them really slow.
A partial solution is second skin clothing.
So every digital person is covered with a skin and a head mat, but then, if you want to give them clothing, you have to add pieces of clothing. Each piece of clothing is an object + mat as well, so you can see how the memory drain increases quickly.
Second skin clothing avoids the memory drain by painting the clothing directly onto a digital person’s body mat. Because the clothing is thus part of the skin mat and not separate, there’s no out-of-scale bulkiness. There’s also no poke-through. And, because the person is only wearing the [modified] body mat and not any extra clothing objects, the memory load is reduced.
Here’s a picture of Rori wearing second skin fishnets. They are painted on her body mat:
Anyway, I’d like to make second skin clothes for my characters, so I’ve discovered some software that can help me. Zew’s Clother and Clothim give you men’s and women’s clothing that you can easily apply on any body mat to create custom second skins. They’re the same program, differing only in the base wardrobe supplied. Second skins will be very helpful for certain characters [Anneka, Will, Velvette, Dom, Pippilotta, etc.] who wear tight clothes. It will also be good for putting underwear on everyone so I don’t have to see their [lack of] genitalia.
Hee hee, check out the Clothim add-ons. Do you or do you not see a distinctly FABULOUS sensibility at work here? I mean, seriously…tank tops for men that don’t cover the nipples? And over here in the downloads…underwear with a question mark on it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any guy wear clothes like this, except for at pride parades…WHICH MAKES IT PERFECT for my fashionless vampires! PERFECT I SAY!