Kyoto Kid - 24 August 2012 08:09 PM
...the child character below was created with V4 and an injected Thorne character body shape as the base. Scaling of individual body regions and limbs was employed and there was no breaking of any joints or limbs or other mesh distortions. This was also done in Studio 2.3 which did not have the benefit of the Morph follower for clothing fits (clothing was all manually fitted). Yes it may have required more effort than working with Genesis, but it still worked.
Scaling V4’s body parts works well with some scalings, others not so much, and also depending on which program she’s used in.
Leg lengthening or shortening, for instance, is generally fine. However, in the example I mentioned above, where I was wanting to broaden a V4, V5 or S5 shaped Genesis’s shoulders, using the provided dials for chest width, shoulder width and shoulder size I got just what I wanted, with those dials actually increasing the xscale of the chest and collars, increasing the scale of the collars, and decreasing the y and z scale of the collars; and the whole collar/armpit area was still great when I put the arms down at the figure’s sides. In DS, copying the same scaling factors to a V4 and putting her arms down, the whole collar/armpit area was awful - worse even than default V4. And e.g. the Perfect V4 morphs in this case don’t help as a lot of the mesh has shifted around where it is in relation to the joint, so the ‘correction’ of the Perfect V4 JCM is now moving vertices in what are now the wrong directions. And in Poser it’s even worse: on putting the arms down, the shldr body parts are no longer lined up with the collars.
As I say, it depends what a user’s particular needs are. But in the general case, Genesis works well through a wider range of body part proportion changes than V4, with the clothing just going with it, and the better bending of the Triax weight-mapped joints always present; wheras the add-on V4 bending improvement JCMs are too dependent on the V4 geomtery’s relation to the default rig to work with some proportion changes, and doesn’t apply to the clothes and their bending anyway.
If you can get what you want with V4, that’s great. But it remains true that with Genesis you get a wider range of useable adjustments to the shape and proportions.
