Soft Tissue animation

[FlipTopBin]

I have just finished the latest update of Milfy City and frankly I am in awe of ICSTOR's animations.

I am particularly interested in how he does soft tissue animations as Daz support for this seems to be non-existant. There is a butt slap in one scene where the shockwave ripples back and forth over the buttock and few groping scenes where individual fingers make dents into breasts/buttocks.

Anybody have an idea how they do this?

 

[Rich]

I haven't gotten to Milfy City yet, so I haven't seen the animations, however there are a number of potential options.

First, there morph packs for Daz that allow you to alter the shape of glutes and breasts (example:

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) Judicious use of those can create some of these effects, since there are things like "shift up/down," "squeeze," "impact," etc. in many of the morph packs. By changing the morph setting from frame to frame you can simulate some softbody effects during the course of an animation.

As for "fingers pressing into things," one way you can probably do it is to use Daz's "Smoothing Modifier." It's primarily intended for getting clothes to fit better, however it essentially does some collision detection and mesh warping. In normal use, you add a Smoothing Modifier to clothing and set the collision target to the figure wearing it. The Smoothing Modifier will then detect "collisions" (i.e. places where the figure pokes through the clothing) and try to warp the clothing mesh to un-collide (i.e. get the clothing outside the figure's mesh.) If you were to add a Smoothing modifier to the figure being spanked/fondled and set the collision target to the figure that owned the hand, you could probably get a "breast/butt indents away from the fingers" effect. Since the collision detection moves the mesh only just enough to avoid the collision, you'd get different amounts of "indent warping" based on how much the two meshes intersected, which, of course, could vary frame-to-frame.

Another way to alter a mesh is to use a D-Former. You can specify an "influence area" (either by resizing the D-Former's "spheriod" or by painting a weight map) and then use it to warp the position of the vertices in the mesh. I've used this for things like "make the sheet and mattress indent where a figure has his/her knee," for example, or to create "he's erect inside his pants" bulges in clothing. Again, the amount of deformation can be changed frame-to-frame.

Last, but not least, you can create your own morphs using Blender or another modeling tool. You export the mesh, typically as an OBJ, shift vertices around, and then re-import the mesh using Morph Loader Pro. This then gives you a "morph dial" just like any of the other morphs in Daz. (This is, in general, how they're created.) And, like any other morph, you can alter it's amount frame-to-frame.

I obviously don't know how ICSTOR actually did the animations, but those are the common techniques.

 

[FlipTopBin]

Wow, thanks @Rich You really are a deep pool of knowlege on this stuff!

The smoothing modifier is a great idea, thanks. I had thought about the D-former stuff but have shied away from it so far but maybe its time to start deforming things. Ill think about Blender but that may be a little too advanced for where I am on my 3D journey at the moment.

I would heartily recommend Milfy City. The story is pretty generic but the artwork is great and the animations are the best I have seen in any game.

 

[Rich]

Thanks, @FlipTopBin. Milfy City's on my list - ICSTOR has produced some great stuff. I'm just underwater right now, so no time.

D-formers are good when you need to shift clothing a bit - maybe the "undressing morph" on an asset doesn't _quite_ give you what you want, or maybe there isn't one at all.

Here's a quick tutorial:

Select an item, then Create > New D-former. The D-former gets parented to the item. When you create one, it has three parts:

1. A "field", which identifies which parts of the asset will be affected and by how much.
2. A "base", which identifies the origin that will be used for rotations.
3. The "deformer" itself, which is the thing you move/rotate/scale in order to affect the mesh.

By default, when you create the D-former, the field is a sphere that encompasses the entire piece. (So its initial "scale" may be in the thousands.) You can scale/translate/rotate it in order to get the area of influence to be what you want, or you can abandon the sphere, convert to a weight map, and "weight paint" onto the mesh to set your influences. It's definitely an iterative process to get a good-looking effect. But the idea is that some parts of the mesh will be strongly affected, and then vertices farther away will have progressively smaller effects so that you create a smooth transition. (If that's what you want, of course.)

Note that a D-former only warps a mesh - it can't, for example, open a shirt if the shirt is actually a continuous mesh (without a seam) across the front. But I've used them for things like:

• Lengthening a skirt that's too short. (or vice versa)
• Moving a bra strap off a shoulder (when the artist didn't create a morph for this)
• The aforementioned "pants bulge."
• Create gravity effects on long hair. (Before the advent of dForce-enabled hair.)

The effect usually works best when you're only making a small correction to a portion of the mesh. The mesh also has to be dense enough to bend well - when I did the "knee into the bed," the effect was only so-so, because the top of the bed was very flat, with very sparse vertices, so it was hard to get a good localized deformation.

Anyway, have fun playing...

 

[FlipTopBin]

Thanks for that. I found some videos on Youtube as well so will definitly have a play with this.

 

[osanaiko]

sh. The mesh also has to be dense enough to bend well - when I did the "knee into the bed," the effect was only so-so, because the top of the bed was very flat, with very sparse vertices, so it was hard to get a good localized deformation.

Would this effect be improved if you converted the bed prop to SubD first?

 

[Rich]

Would this effect be improved if you converted the bed prop to SubD first?

Interesting question, which I didn't try at the time. I don't know whether D-formers only operate on the "base mesh" (and then the SubD is done afterwards) or vice versa. Be an interesting experiment.