Best Practice for rigging several different mesh bodies

[Killa1000 Howley]

Hi everyone, I've been building mesh objects and accessories in SL for sometime, but have recently decided to make the jump into rigging clothing for SL, I've got used to the practice of rigging using avasat, weight painting, yada yada, what I wanted to know was, what is the best way to streamline your mesh garments across other bodies, It took me a while to rig a garment up to my geralt body, and obviously I want to find out what the easiest way would be to rig the garment up to other mesh bodies such as Jake, gianni, etc.  

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Warning, this will be an opinionated answer:

If you model cleanly and efficiently, you typically won't because a model made on one body is typically designed to fit that body and follow the edge loops, density and flow of that specific body and no other.

Now sometimes if you're lucky (or if you use 10 times the polygon count and thus deserve to be burned at the stake), you can actually massage the mesh into the shape of another body  (if modeled efficiently you will be limited to bodies that are fairly "close" to your original target of choice).

I can think of a few tricks, but one that I do know works is that you can use deformation cages (Blender & 3DsMax i know have them)  and "massage" the mesh into the new proportions. One advantage of this approach is that you MIGHT be able to re-use the same deformation cages across multiple projects for the same body. (but sometimes not)

 

As for the weightpainting aspect, i can't think of any good trick, body creators each have their own idea of what is "good weighting". Some will try to make it really simple, some will have some really complex shoulder/neck influence in an attempt to be "realistic", some bodies will try to preserve areas that are commonly used in conjunction with unrigged attachments (nipples, ears, neck, wrists, ...), and there is obviously the last group who doesn't know what they are doing but as long as it bends, even if it looks like a wet cardboard tube, they call it success.

Weight copy obviously gets you about halfway there, but you're still gonna have to do a lot of manual painting.

Mirror painting is your friend.

(I'm not an autority on rigging so feel free to chip in anyone)

 

My advice? stick to 1 or maybe 2 bodies that you like, actually use and want to promote and grow in market share. By trying to please everyone you will over-burden yourself (just imagine if you discover a problem that need fixing, 1 month after releease), end up pleasing no one, and you will be lost in the sea of other creators.

 

A few important things when comparing yourself to other creators:

• Many creators are teams of people, even if they sell all under the same brand/avatar.
• Some contract other creators to do work for them or participate in joint projects.
• There are a few brands that even contract out all the creation process to other people and are effectively just "managers".
• Some are hobbyists and others do it full-time.

Edited April 25, 2020 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Killa1000 Howley]

Thanks for the reply, everything you've said makes sense, and I'm aware it would be a big task to undertake, the main concern with my creations is that they tend to be group focused (e.g Uniforms) in which several people will be using different bodies. 

but this is useful thank you!

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Makes sense, I've done uniforms in the past but not for multiple bodies, so I totally understand the problem.