procedurally generated charters

[DrPepper808]

I have done a fair amount of coding in my life, but art is all new to me. I have been going thru the DAZ tutorless. What I want to do is procedurally generate charters for a Trainer game I have in mind. the charters will be doing mostly the same poses, but I want to change Body thickness, clothes, hair, face, that type of thing. if your familiar with' Lab Rats 2' From VERN. that's what I would like to do, but maybe without the need for 10,000 images. LOL. Sorry for the Prolog So here are my questions:

1: What would be the best' current' way to accomplish this task?
2: What is the method called that was used in 'Lab Rats 2'? (he took a base white frame and overlaid skin, clothes, ect)
3: What would be the best tool to accomplish this task? I am using DAZ to learn but I don't really see how it would slice the figure apart to frame/skin/hair.. and so on.

At some point in the future, I would like to add movements in the form of eye blinks and breathing. and maybe cut sense as my skills progress. so, I don't want to paint.net myself in a corner.

 

[MidnightArrow]

I think they added Metamixer specifically for this (well, for creating fucking NFTs, but same difference). I haven't touched it with a ten-foot pole so I don't know how it works, but you might want to look into it.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Best way? Probably a 3D model, much more technically challenging but can be quite flexable and powerful, and compared to images is most more memory friendly.

However, it sounds like you are talking about a 2D 'paper doll' style, which Trap Quest uses something similar. The method you choose is mainly about deciding how you want the different layers to be organize. but deciding what layers you need will determine how to slice up the layers and how you'll organize. For example, maybe you're character has two main settings, breast size, and ass size (affect the thighs). you would just need to make an image of a character with the minimum amount of everything, make an image for each size, then you can throw the images in Gimp or photoshop, use one of the filters which detects pixel differences, and it will cut down each image to just the part that changes.

The issue is that if you want to crop the images to just the part that changes, to save on memory, you need to position the image. You may want to make a standard crop, ie a box where all images for the breasts can fit in, so that all the images use the same position offset to align with the image. Or if you can't do that (engine limination) or want to keep it simple at first, you can keep the image full scale, just erase all the parts of the body that aren't being affected (using the automatic tool in gimp is located in filters/animation/optimize (diffence). you'll have to do this for each image, using the 'minimum' character as the first refrence image (layer 0)

Depending on the character styles, this may not be good enough, diffence calculations don't do a good job with alpha, so if bigger butt also means wider hips, ie a growing thigh gap, just overlaying an image ontop of a base image won't hide the sorce leg. In that case do something like trap quest. where the body was cut up into top (chest and up), legs (and hips), belly (belly grew with pregnancy), and then breasts, having the art for the belly over lap both the chest and hips, as well as covering the void that the top and legs don't fill.

this gets more convoluted depending on what you want to do, such as adding layers for the arms if those are going to be posed (tho these can be merged with the chest layer if teh breast are separated). and if you include different character sizes then you may have to redo everything if you can't just resize the images. the process can get quite technical and convoluted.

what may help, a way of testing and practicing is, besides making mock ups manually, I find that I often have to practice these skills while making character drawings in Inkscape, a vector art porgram. For example, even if a characters hand is on their hip, I want teh line that represents the hip to be smooth and logical, following a line, so when I draw the outline for the legs and torso, I go over the hand, and I'll draw the hand on another layer so that its ontop of the layer for the hip, this also make shading easier to do. I practice slicing up characters in case I want to change the outfit or repose or animate the characters.