Messing with Clothing Styles in Daz 3D

In the previous post I talked about feeling out the characters from my visual novel and discovering some of their clothing preferences. This was a perfect opportunity to test some ideas visually in Daz 3D, since that software is all about character design, posing and accessories.

Daz 3D uses a system of "morphs" which layer onto a standardized 3d base body and allow for quick reshaping. If you've used Blender, it's a lot like shape keys where you define a group of vertexes, move them around a little, and save their new positions so you can animate back and forth between the original shape and the shapekeyed shape.



Morphs and shape keys capture the movement of vertices from whatever their starting positions. Since you're really only saving the *offset positions* in a morph, ie the distance and direction moved but not the final positions, you can apply as many morphs as you want and they *each* contribute to the final location of the set of verts.

You might create a "fitness morph" and move every vertex in the stomach and hips inward to make the waist look trimmer, for example. You can use that morph to slim the waist, and create another to sculpt muscle tone. You can then apply the muscle tone morph independently to a default belly or a thin belly for a whole bunch of different combinations.



You can even use half a morph, or double the effects of one if you'd prefer subtlety or exaggeration.

I don't have an April or Cailey 3D model rigged and textured for Daz 3D, but I do have some morphs that take the default human and turn them into an anthro foxperson! These are close enough that I can start to see what works or doesn't for anthro hair and apparel.



I found that hats, many hairstyles, high heels, and various earrings work poorly on Reyna. This is partially due to which vertices the author of this particular character morph decided to move (to remain compatible they have to start with the Daz 3D base human), and also a natural effect of trying to stretch things like shoes to fit a more feral-like leg design. If I ever do my own custom anthro character morphs, I'll probably separate the ears as a wearable vs moving all the verts on the actual ears. Not sure a better way to handle the feet, since things like high heels might just not look good on digitigrade legs...back to the drawing board (literally! sketches are the fastest way to find solutions at this point)

Here we have textureless stand-ins for Cailey and April trying on some of the fashions and hairstyles I think they'd appreciate in their world. This rendering uses the NVIDIA Iray engine for stylized/photorealistic materials and took about 30 minutes to finish with all the lights and mirrors in the scene. It's got some heavy post processing in photoshop because the room lighting was kind of a mess. >w>