Kitbashing a Character - Part 1 (Patreon)

or: I cannot morph but I can buy

- Motivation

Daz has been selling a lot of wild west assets recently. Looking around one specific artbook came back to mind: Pieces 8 Wild West by Masamune Shirow. Among a bathtub and copious supplies of baby oil, it also features a special type of anthro that I could not find: A horseman.

After some experimentation, I've managed to put together this (still Work in Progress):

Assets needed:

Since I cannot model or create textures I've used the following assets:

- Morphs

https://www.daz3d.com/ancient-anubis-for-genesis-8-male

https://www.daz3d.com/tor-for-genesis-8-male

https://www.daz3d.com/wolfbeast-with-dforce-hair-for-genesis-8-male

https://www.daz3d.com/ej-demon-races-creator-and-morphs-for-genesis-8-females-and-males

https://www.daz3d.com/ej-face-morphs-and-details-for-genesis-8-male

https://www.daz3d.com/young-boys-for-genesis-8-male

https://sharecg.com/v/91888/view/21/DAZ-Studio/SY-200-Morphs-for-Genesis-8-Head-and-Body

- Textures

Anubis and Tor from above

https://www.daz3d.com/fwsa-trystan-hd-for-darius-8

- Other body parts

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/prae-pony-tail-g3-g8-daz/129358

https://www.daz3d.com/sidd-hair-for-genesis-8-males

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/gladeling-male-for-g8m/136513

https://www.daz3d.com/harvey-rabbit-with-dforce-hair-for-genesis-8-male

- Helpful tools:

https://www.daz3d.com/altern8--skin-shader-system-for-genesis-8

https://www.daz3d.com/sy-skin-transform-for-genesis-8

https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-cross-gender-clothes-genesis-8

https://www.daz3d.com/mesh-grabber

 Alright, let's start morphing!  

I hope you brought the time and patience to wait for DazStudio to do whatever it's doing when you're dialing morphs.

I started out looking at the character in the artbook. It's a very muscular type with strong features. The head is completely horse-like, with a long muzzle. Anubis is a good starting point since it has that muscular body and a long snout. The ear does not work well for a horse, however. So load up Anubis the figure. One thing I liked was the human body texture with the fur starting on the shoulders.

I am actually keeping Anubis dialed at 100%. In order to lengthen the snout into a muzzle, I dial in Tor at around 68%. Keep in mind a lot of this is experimentation with dials that look like they would help, only to notice they don't actually do what you expect. The final morph for the muzzle turns out to be EJ DC Goat Face at around 70%. It really lengthened the snout. Wolfbeast at 31% brings a bit aggressiveness into the mix.

Once at this stage, the head is a bit small. Increase the size by using EJFM Head Size at 50% and SY 200 Head Size at 100%. Again, I set these values by perception, going for a coherent look.

The head now looks kind of bulky. The eyes are pointing forward, which is not how horse eyes work. I use Head Narrow at 100%. At this point, I could not find a morph that would move the eyes to a side view position. So I used Mesh Grabber to push the back of the eye socket into the head.  You'll have to do left and right since symmetry is not supported. Unfortunately, the eyes don't get morphed along with it, causing some issues when having the eyes look at stuff. I cheated by blacking out the eyes so I don't have to move them much.

A lot of the workflow is experimentation: Dial in a morph and see what it gets you. Meshgrabber can help, but I did not make any headway on the ears with it. But I have another trick for that.

Part 2 will look at the texturing: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41440388