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SickleYield — Mother Beast Test Render
Published: 2014-05-24 05:02:37 +0000 UTC; Views: 493; Favourites: 1; Downloads: 2
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Description
Here's a preliminary. The set is a long way from release, since I'm going to make some more poses for her and a texture add-on for sure and that takes a while (posing the other three pieces in the set will be easy by comparison).Those are 24 arms. Each has 93 bones. This thing poses incredibly fluidly. It's work to get all of them posed starting from scratch, but starting from my pose pack it will be a lot easier. For those wishing to do less work, the set also contains a larva with only ten arms, a single tentacle, and a no-tentacle polyp with a big round mouth that opens. (The Mother Beast's mouth opens, too. It's the hole in the middle there.)
The Mother and Polyp also have barrel window materials so that their interiors can be shown.
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Comments: 6
Totally superb work, and thank you once again for posting all those little bits of your workflow
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NP, I can talk all day about what I do!
I don't believe in trying to limit competition by restricting the flow of information. If I do a product that makes real money, it's usually because it was too big of a pain in the bum for anyone else to attempt it, and that won't change with others entering the market.
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That's a commendable stance!
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OK, I am impressed. I can't imagine how you even conceived of this! I know you'd mentioned the arms and bones before, but it was sort of abstract until I saw her. Posing her would be incredibly difficult without pose presets at least to start with. And I can't imagine how much work you're doing to actually make the set in the first place!
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Why yes, I WILL brag/complain about my work process, thank you for giving me the slightest excuse. XD
Actually creating the groups in the obj wasn't that hard, because I only had to manually set them up in a single tentacle. See, if you export a grouped obj from Blender, you can open it in a text editor like Notepad++ and use find/replace to change all of the "bone 01" to "bone 02" very quickly, then re-import it and change its position slightly. I welded them all together at the end. I've been doing this since the Articles of Punishment and it's a very useful workflow for "big boned" rigs.
Now, once things were imported to Figure Setup Tab, THAT'S when it became tedious. It took around eight hours of work time just to set up her bones, praying ardently for DAZ not to crash as I worked in the Figure Setup tab. See, previous versions of the program had a tendency to let me work in the tab for a half hour and then crash, so for that whole eight hours I got tenser and tenser thinking "it's going to crash and I'll have to redo it all!" And this was 2200 bones. 24 different chains of 93 all requiring to be manually dragged one onto the other in order, and while they tended to be grouped together by the root bone, they were scattered all over within the chain, so I had to go waaaay up and down to find 93 and get it onto 92, etc.
It did not crash. Then I got to wait two hours for it to do the "create figure" step of actually generating the geometry and rig into DS on a hot day with the computer's fans complaining about their previous 8 hours of work. This was a religious experience. If I previously had any doubts that my god loves me (and has a sense of humor about tentacle monsters), I wouldn't have after that, I tell you what. Saving to library took a mere two minutes or so on the clock.
The weight mapping I mostly did with automatic plus smoothing (the next day). Smoothing each axis on all bones at once - all x, then all y, then all z - took around a half-hour each one. By that time that was chump change compared to the earlier steps so I was much calmer about it.
After working with the DAZ Python on the image I did yesterday (thank you for looking!) I was shocked to find it does not appear to have an extrudable tongue and has less than 60 bones. I think it's been coasting all this time on being the only decent snake and the great textures Ignis Serpentis did for it. Oh yes, if I ever get these monstrosities into testing I am doing some weight-mapped snakes.
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Strangely enough, I just mentioned on someone else's page that I love hearing about the technical aspects of how projects like this come together! Thank you for going into such detail!
Yay! Weight mapped snakes! I agree, the lack of an extrudable tongue in the Python was very surprising to me. I think even the Poser Cobra has that, and I believe it's older than the Python; it's just an almost unposable mess everywhere else. (Also, before I knew how to save things out properly, I may or may not have completely borked the poor critter's material zones, so now half of it is normal and the other half is very shiny with no textures that match the zone. And I'm not sure where my Poser Debut content installer is.)
Thanks again for the explanation!
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