WIP Update - 9/10 - New Models? Sorta. (Patreon)

Hey all!

As I had mentioned in the monthly update post, I've been spending a lot of time this month messing around with a few technical concepts that I've been putting off for a while. The first one that I've been working on has been converting textures and facial rig from one model to another so I can make use of the other model's shape keys. For the most part, this has been working well, but it does require both models to have proper UVs that unwrap in a similar fashion. The tech I've been using has been pretty much a headswap, and it merges the existing head/facial rig to the new body rig to reduce the amount of weight painting. As a test, I tried converting the Arhoangel/Dreamrider DVa model to Rigid3d's Liara model that I've used in the past. The Liara model has a few quirks, but the shape keys give a lot more dynamic and control to the shape of the model. Here's a comparison shot of the two:

The model on the right is the classic Arhoangel/Dreamrider DVa, and the model on the left is the Liara one with the swapped head and textures. The Liara model has a bit more detail too, especially at the knees and abs, but there's also a lot more control for breast/glute size and shape. It's not 100% perfect, but it works well enough for most of the work that I can do. 

The other idea that I've been messing with goes hand in hand with the model swap, and that's rigging outfits to a new rig. This has been a bit more of a challenge because the proportions for the outfits don't always match the model's, and the weight painting can take a while to get the deformations working right. Recently though, I've come across a few different ways to transfer the most of the weight paints from the the model to the outfit, taking out a lot of the painting legwork. Despite this, there's still a lot of clipping issues to fix (especially if the outfit's not proportioned like the model), and it can be difficult to get the clothes to deform in motion while not clipping though the model. It's not perfect yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Here's a test that I did using the new DVa model with the old Arhoangel Tracer set: 

The outfit needed a bit of tweaking after posing, so it's not fully animation-ready, but as a test I think it worked out fairly well. I'm working on rigging up a button-down/office outfit for the DVa model for a potential animation, and hopefully I'll have more to show later this week/month! 

To add on to these two tests, I was able to do a similar model transfer with the Widowmaker and Sombra models, and they both seem to be working well so far! With the subject of this month's poll being a Widow render w/ futa alt, I altered the new Widow model to have a futa version: 

There's a little seam on her leg that I need to clean up, but it worked out just as well as the DVa and Sombra ones. Her head may need to be scaled a bit to fit the thicker proportions too, but that'll be fixed in the end render. To add on to this, I went through and imported a full Widowmaker suit from Mavixtious's Ultimate Widowmaker Rig. This required a lot of tweaking since the Ultimate model is based off the in-game Widow, but with masks and some shape keys it should work out well enough:

It's not 100% perfect, but I figure once I get her posed and figure out the expandy bits, I'll have a lot more new clipping to deal with. 

Anyways, that's what I've been working on lately! Sorry for the tech-y word dump, but I'll have more proper WIPs soon. The Apex sequence is pretty much done, and I've got another Pin-Up that's queued up after (not including the monthly poll one). Once I've gotten a few more of the clothing kinks worked out, I'll be working on getting jiggle+cloth physics figured, and I'll be sure to post some .gifs as I make progress. Thanks for your patience so far, I'll be sure to keep you all updated as I make more progress!