Jaderail - 21 August 2012 08:29 PM
Hold it. You can collide clothing with a Shell?
Yes - the shell is selectable in the Collision Item setting.
So if I’m getting poke through on my Genesis I could create a shell and have the item collide with the shell. Possibly fixing the poke through? Or should I try the new PokeAway first? If I knew how to find it or use it That is.
Yes, I would suppose it could be used for that.
I imagine different people will come up with all sorts of different and inventive uses for the shell. For myself, all my initial thoughts were to do with having a second surface above the main one that can have completely different mterials applied to it, and uses that can be put to.
Note that in the parameters pane for the Geometry shell you can turn the visibility of different parts of the shell off by body part, surface, or a combination of the two, and you can also use transparency maps of course.
My first thought was as in my previous post: with human figures you can put transmapped body hair, close croped beards or stubble, water droplets, dirt etc on the shell, and adjust how far above the figure’s skin they are. In many cases it can be simpler and produce better results than just using the LIE or Ubersurface2 to layer the hair, water droplet, dirt etc onto the skin texture surface.
My second thought was that for assorted fantasy, horror or scifi images one could apply the UberArea light to a geometry shell round a figure or prop to have a figure or a prop like a sword producing an even colored glow even though the surface of the figure or prop is textured with varying maps and colors over its own surface.
My third thought was a Star Trek one. In Star Trek, starships have been shown with two different types of shields. Most commonly, In TNG, DS9 and VOY, they have had simple elliptical shields surrounding the ship, and that can easily be simulated with a primitive round the ship which one can then texture with a transparency map to show a phaser/disruptor/plasma weapon strike on the shield at some point, with the glow of the energy of the strike over part of the primitive’s surface. But sometimes - especially in some of the movies, and in effect in ENT with the polarised hull plating - the shields haven’t been an even ellipse, but rather what some call ‘comformal shields’ where the shield surface is only a meter or two outside the hull, and follows the exact shape of the hull. For conformal shields in a Star Trek space combat render (or any other SciFi that has that kind of shielding) one only has to create a geometry shell on the ship, dial out an appropriate mesh offset, and there you have the conformal shield surface which you can texture so that the energy round the phaser/disruptor beam point of impact flows round the hull shape below.
Whatever the primary intended use for the geometry shell the DAZ designers may have had, I’m quite sure users will come up with many, many inventive uses for it. Even if it doesn’t quite have the abilities some may want it to have for whatever first use for it occurs to them, it’s certainly quite useable as it is for many other uses.
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