BishounenTaurus - 20 August 2012 09:35 AM
Rayman29 - 19 August 2012 11:45 PM
Geometry shell wont subdivide, it also doesn’t respond to smoothing modifier settings . Anyone else tried it?
I tried it, and so far the Geometry Shell seems to be essentially useless.
I don’t know where that stuff in the original release post about the geometry shell being to help with geo-grafting came from.
My prior understanding of it is this -
It creates a second surface around the figure/prop, set a certain distance ‘above’ the surface of the original figure/prop. The shell surface stays identical to the original surface beneath it in all respects (shape, morphs, scaling, posing, subdivision, UVs etc) except for two:
1 There is a slider with which you can adjust how far above the original surface it sits.
2 You can apply completely different materials to it from those you have on the base figure/prop within the shell.
Its main use is therefore that you can e.g. apply an M4 texture to Genesis, click to create the geometry shell round Genesis and then apply one of Jepe’s Hairy or Tears and Jewels texture sets to the shell, You will then get the hair, or jewels or water drops appearing a little above the main Genesis skin, giving a better 3D effect (and you cna adjust how far ‘above’ the skin the hair, drops or jewels appear). Or you can apply second skin clothing textures to the shell and winnd the shell out a bit so the second skin clothing looks like it is really round the bodu, not painted on the body.
It’s also worth noting that having a shell round Genesis for e.g. a Jepe Hairy texture is far lighter on program resources than loading a second Genesis, applying the textures to that, and morphing the second Genesis out a bit and fitting it round the main Genesis figure the way one has to using those texture stes with M4.
For this use at least, I find the geometry shell works very well indeed. There are quite a few possibilities for texture effects one wants to add on top of a skin texture but with a bit of obvious ‘height’ of the effect over the skin. Using the geometry shell is easy, and often considerably quicker to do and with better effect than trying to add a LIE layer along with displacement for the ‘height’ effect. You can also collide clothes with the shell, where just displacing a texture overlay pokes it straight through clothes being worn bby the figure.
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