BishounenTaurus - 22 August 2012 08:56 AM
It would be much more useful however if we could do something as simple as change the UV map settings of the shell. That way, we really COULD use it to blend the textures of geografted shapes, or we could use Jepe’s M4 bodyhair over an M5/V4Male base texture.
As it’s just a projection of the underlying geometry (which is why it is so lightweight in the scene), it’s not going to have a different property of that type.
We can’t use the old method of creating two Genesis figures and conforming one to other, for as soon as you use one of the main shapes (such as M5, Hitomi, Jason, etc), the proportions go completely out of whack.
What I do in this case is, after loading the first Genesis and creating the M5 textured character, is to simply load another Genesis, switch it to the M4 maps, apply the Jepe body hair, and apply the push modifier to it which gives it the same Mesh offset parameter for the second Genesis (the bodyhair one) as you get with a geommetry shell. Then just copy the shape from the M5 Genesis to the M4-bodyhair Genesis and dial out the Mesh offset the same as I woould with the Geometry shell. Then I DON’T fit/conform the bodyhair Genesis to the M5 character Genesis. After posing or re-posing the M5 Genesis character, just copy the pose to the M4-Bodyhair Genesis. It only takes a moment to copy the pose, and the M4-Bodyhair Genesis just sits round the M5 just like the geometry shell would. Because it’s not conformed, there’s no problem with scaling proportions getting doubled and all that.
Yes it’s a few clicks to load the second Genesis and apply the push modifier and copy the shape from the first; and it’s a click or two to copy the pose from character to bodyhair after a re-pose of the character. and you are not getting the resource saving of the shell over the secon Genesis. But it’s really easy to do, takes less time to do than it’s taken me to describe it, and works perfectly for having the effect of the shell but with different UVs. Specifically putting a Jepe M4 Hairy over an M5 textured and morphed Genesis was the first thing I did with the push modifier function after discovering it and what it did wwhen it first appeared in a beta.
As it stands right now, the geometry shell doesn’t have much in the way of use that couldn’t already be done using the Layered Image Editor.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with that at all. With the LIE you have to create displacement maps to lift e.g. body hair over the surface, and even then the hair is in effect ‘stuck’ to the surface; with the geometry shell (or a second Genesis used as a ‘suit’ via the push modifier) you don’t need to make a displacement map and e.g. hairs can be above the surface shadowing beneath according to the light angle. With the LIE you may have overlayed the diffuse map over the top of a base, but the whole surface has the same surface shader type, specularity settings etc; with the shell, you can apply a completely different shader, never mind just material settings, to the surfaces on the shell. With the LIE you can’t use the UberArea Light on the surface and still have a normally colored and shadered surface while having an even colored glow emanating from a figure or prop. With the LIE you can’t produce a forcefield surface around a figure or prop. And with the LIE you can’t have something like clothes colliding with an overlaying displaced outward component rather than the ‘zero’ displacement of the surface.
It’s possible the geometry shell doesn’t have any particular use for anything you want to render at the moment; but it certainly has many possible uses for other things others may want to do.
