While conceptualizing my Monster Mash picture, I struggled with the problem of how to render satyrs using a G2F base and freebies. I found bat wings, horns and a devil tail without difficulty, but the hooved legs — and their particular digitigrade shape — stymied me. Some free hooves for plantigrade human figures exist, but they tend not to create a true digitigrade shape by elongating the feet. But I want anatomically convincing satyrs!
Well, it turns out that Pinin over on Poser Outer Zone offers a Satyress figure for free. She is more cartoony than super realistic [bulky shoulders, four-fingered hands, alarmingly round and symmetrical breasts, thighs out of a James Bond novel, long legs], but she has plausibly shaped digitigrade legs with hooves. Come to think of it, she reminds me of Kim Goossen’s toony Girl, one of my favorite digital models. I decided that the adorable Satyress should be my base for all my Monster Mash satyrs.
I immediately confronted two problems: 1) no morphs and 2) no clothes. Since I’m an advanced beginner at D-Forms, problem 1 proved no match for a half-day’s work, during which I cranked out a variety of partial head and body morphs. I lavished the most energy on bulking the figure up, not with muscle, but with fat, especially since the central figure, the dancer, is a fat woman. I never expected that a mesh originally sculpted to be wiry and muscular would deform so well into pear-shaped fatness, but it did. Pictures later…
Satyress’ empty wardrobe required some more labor. I started off by, first off, converting Satyress from a Poser native [.cr2] figure to a Daz-compatible figure with Daz’ proprietary Triax weight mapping so that Daz tools would work on her. I then began loading up freebie clothes and scaling, translating and D-Forming them until they fit her in zero position, exporting the items as OBJs, then reimporting and using Transfer Utility, with her as the source, to rerig them. Since I was resculpting the clothing meshes pretty crudely, the modified items didn’t fit well.
I then got the genius idea of using the Autofit function and G2F to do most of the sculpting for me. I overlaid Satyress and G2F, making G2F partly transparent. I then translated, scaled and morphed G2F so that her core [torso, arms, hips, upper legs] shape matched Satyress’. Then, when I Autofit clothes to G2F, they ended up resculpting to fit Satyress’ shape with 95% accuracy. After minor tweaks of the clothing wtih D-Forms, I exported the OBJs, reimported and used Transfer Utility to rerig.
Voila! Satyress gained instant access to closets’ worth of clothing. In fact, with the help of Autofit, she could now wear V4, M4 or K4 clothes [Autofit to Genesis, then Autofit a second time to G2F], as well as Genesis clothing, G2F clothing and/or G2M clothing. I have hand-converted some V3 and M3 items for her — short-sleeved V3 dresses seem to reconfigure particularly well, probably because V3’s shape, like Satyress’, features blocky shoulders and hips — but mostly just breezed through a bunch of V4, Genesis and G2F stuff. I don’t bother with pants because I don’t want to deal with Satyress’ hooves, but short-sleeved shirts, long-sleeved shirts, above-the-knee shorts, above-the-knee skirts and above-the-knee dresses convert with [relative] ease. At this rate, I will have outfits for all five of my satyrs, each with unique pieces.
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