What is the optimal workflow for rigging outfit to a skinned base model?

wolfofremus

I am a newbie. Please forgive me if I use any  terminology incorrectly.

I want to create armor and clothing items that can be fitted on Daz3D base characters, posing them and use the rendered image as characters for my card game.

Do I just manually rigged the out fit to the base character? What is the best better 3D solfware for the job? And is there a certain workflow that help speed thing up a little bit?

Seth389

I'm no pro myself but I've learned through trial and error that it's totally best if you merged all assets on your character FIRST before skinning anything. It's kinda ridiculous to have different skinning happening all over the place.

The only time I feel it's okay to have an un-merged element is when you think the skinning would interfere with another part of your mesh. Like chains and laces on clothing, and then you would have to link those to an element of the clothing or bone.

And for jesus christ make sure your scale values are set correctly to 100% (at least in 3ds max) for all your elements before skinning them---otherwise everything goes haywire when you rotate things later on. A quick fix is "Reset Xform" in 3ds max found in the last tab in command pannel. Scale values of a selected object are displayed at the bottom of the screen where the "coordinates" usually are.

I'm literally rigging something right this moment:



I initially had all the clothing and body as separate models and that worked like a nightmare. It's much more effective to have it all merged, as you can see by the area I have selected. It's actually 3 different clothing meshes but I attached them together so that they are controlled as one. It allows for much better skinning.

Basically go as simple as you can ... which applies mostly to us noobers : (

throttlekitty

If you're using Daz for both posing and rendering, use their Autofit function, it's quick, transfers all the daz-specifics, and mostly painless. You'll want to check that all the joints are deforming correctly, nearly every weight copy out there will have problems with under the shoulder and between the legs. So you'd just go through and correct those with the weight paint brushes.

If your target program is something else, just say so. There's no one best tool out there for this, the process is similar for most; usually starting with copying skin weights from the body and making manual fixes. Answers for exactly how to add additional rigging for additional clothing parts will change depending on what program you want to use.