Hand Transplant Experiment (Patreon)

So I had the thought a few days ago while I was trying to bastardize one of Sombra's many gloves onto the DAZ hands. 

Why don't I just try to find a hand mesh from one of the Overwatch girls' game models and stitch it onto a girl in the future to ease this whole process along?

Part of that line of thought is also because I've always hated how the DAZ hands look on these models. If you thought I liked them, well now you know. I never felt confident before in doing something like this though, but now with my increased knowledge of how to do things like weight-transferring using scripts, it makes things like this possible.

So I decided to give it a shot with Sombra. I used Symmetra's right arm as a base because her skin color is very similar so it will be easier to blend the two textures together later. The idea behind this is to scale the original mesh and bones down to align as closely as possible with the nude body, so that I don't have to scale everything else up to fit the new hands. I also noted how far I scaled it for future reference, so I can use that number to scale her gloves down to fit.

Granted, the gloves won't be an exact fit because these are Symmetra's hands, not Sombra's. But it will be close enough, and that's part of the point, but not the whole point. The point of this is: rigging gloves is a bitch when they don't fucking match up to the base mesh. The DAZ hands have such weird proportions in comparison to the OW gloves, that it almost never looks right.

That's where this comes in. By maintaining the bone positions here (simply linking the OW hand bone to the DAZ forearm bone, presto), I maintain the rigging, and when it comes time to plop the gloves on, I simply transfer the weights of the finger bones and such on to the existing finger bones and such, and the result is much better than if I tried to move the glove mesh around to match the DAZ bone positions. If you don't know what I'm saying here, let me try to explain it simpler: The bones position directly influences how it rotates the mesh. Change the bone position from where it was originally, and it tends to rotate funky and fuck up the mesh. By having the original OW bone positions, I hope to avoid these weird rotations.

That's the theory anyway. Another hurdle to overcome was maintaining the nude body's flexes/morphs. The body needs to maintain the exact same vertex count in order for morphs to work, so I can't just weld the hands on and call it a day. They need to be separated.

So did it work? Fuck yeah it did, that's why I'm writing this.

Another thing to consider is that the vertices where the hand mesh ends need to be in the exact same position where the arm mesh ends, in order for there to A. not be a gap, and B. allow normal stitching to work. Normal stitching is what allows the lighting to seamlessly flow over that seam between the hand and the arm, like it's not even there. (that's also a script, not built into 3ds max, but I'm only using the script because when I started this by stitching the head and body, I didn't know about setting the seam normals to be explicit before separating, which negates the need for this)

Anyway. Now I need to do it on the left arm... And then if it all works as it should, then Sombra will have better hands. PogChamp