Behind the Scenes #7: Revising a Character Model (Patreon)

In the very first Behind the Scenes post I spoke about how I create new, custom character models using Daz 3D assets. I'm currently in the process of revising many of the earliest models I made, so this month's Behind the Scenes post will discuss how I take a critical eye to each model after having worked with them for awhile.

If this is a topic that interests you and you haven't yet read Behind the Scenes #1, I recommend you check it out first since this post is written with the assumption you have some general knowledge about Daz 3D.

Let's look at what I review when taking a critical eye to each character, the fixes I make to improve them, and the efforts I make to keep changes unobtrusive while overall enhancing the character. Larger versions of all the images can be seen in the attached gallery.

Overall Body Shape

It can be hard to recognize problematic aspects of a model's body shape before making CGs with them. They may look fine in the default pose and in a few test poses, but in contorting them into all sorts of positions over the course of creating the game, some problems become really hard to work around.

Let's look at Will, a character I had a specific issue with, and how I corrected that issue.

Will is a fan fav for players who are into daddy/teacher scenarios, so I definitely did not want to take anything away from an appearance that so many of you already like. But he had one glaring issue in particular, and that was the proportions of his torso.

From the front he looks fine, but once you see him at a different angle you can see the depth of his torso is smaller than it should be. Realistically, both his build and his age would make him bulkier around the middle. This also has the side effect of making his lower half look too big for his body.

For many models, it was combining too many different body morphs that brought about issues like this. The first version of the model combined the bodies from two different figures with some details cranked up like "fitness size" (as it's labeled in Daz), plus other morph adjustments.

To create his new body, I removed one figure morph but kept the other. I also removed many of the built-in Daz morphs I had originally used, opting instead to only dial in a few targeted body adjustments. I also used a separate morph pack to fine tune the abdomen. Here's the adjusted model side by side with the first version.

A lot of fine tuning was done to make sure his general shape/silhouette was kept intact. Here are comparisons of a front view and back view, which do have some differences but not enough to be noticeable in practice.

Neck Length

This is a subset of body shape but is trickier to eyeball. Essentially, if you adjust the height of a Genesis 8/8.1 figure, the neck length can become too long. 

Long necks are certainly a thing people have in real life, but for many characters in the game, customization led to distractingly long necks. Let's use Evan as an example of a neck getting too long due to changing the height of the base model.

To fix this was pretty easy—I adjusted the neck length by the same percentage the height was changed. I had his height set to 65% (counterintuitively, a positive height value means shorter), so I set his neck length to -65%.

And here are the models side by side.

I couldn't find much info about the average length of a real-life neck, but it seems a general rule of thumb is it's around the same length as the width of the person's palm, 3.5" to 4". There's still a fair amount of eyeballing going on to get this looking right, but I think the adjustment in this case looks more natural.

Dick Position

When I first made many of the models, I didn't know how to make adjustments to the dick asset so that it sat correctly on the body. This means many of the characters had the bones of the asset all out of whack, which led to a lot of the awkwardness you may have seen in earlier images I made.

The asset I use—XY 1.5 from Renderotica—has built-in adjustment sliders to fix this, but I had no idea what that was for when I first started. This led to some dicks becoming deformed when posing them for a scene. Now that I know what to look for, I can make the appearance of each guy's anatomy a bit more realistic.

This is what the bones of the basic, unaltered asset looks like on the figure it was made for, Michael 8.1:

The two downward facing bones just inside the front of his thighs are for the balls, and the smaller ones a little further back are for hole positioning.

Now let's look at Julian, who due to his differences from the Michael model and changes I made to the dick shape and size, had his dick's bones completely out of position.

And here it is post-adjustment, where I got the bones close to the placement of the default version while accommodating the shape and pose changes I made to Julian's dick.

Dick Size & Shape

I want there to be a decent variety of dick shapes and sizes so each guy is unique. I took a fresh look at the shapes and posing I did for each guy's erect state and made a few alterations, like with Asher.

Not much was changed except the way it curves up and also the way his balls hang. Some guys had a little more extensive adjustments, but not so noticeable as to be distracting. My primary focus was making sure things looked natural and a little less "perfect".

There are unfortunately a few issues with this asset that make it so I can only push the changes so far. For instance, I would like some guys to have a dick that curves straight up closer to their body, but the asset deforms the more it bends, like this:

It's more prominent in some characters than others, but the middle grows smaller in circumference while the head grows larger. 

In order to work around this when I want a dick bent up for a scene, I actually put two versions of the character in the scene, one with the dick turned off and one with everything invisible but the dick. Then I rotate the invisible figure to get the dick in position without it deforming. 

Skin Materials

During the lifespan of Genesis 8 and 8.1, new material presets were introduced called PBR (Physically Based Rendering). In brief, PBR materials are designed to react to light in a much more realistic way than older textures. You can read more details about this from this Adobe article.

Many of the figures I use came with PBR materials, but some were created before PBR was the norm. When evaluating each character, I check if they still have older material presets. If they do, I follow these steps from the Daz 3D forums to swap them over to PBR, and it generally makes the figure look more realistic in a scene.

A great example of this is the difference from the original Noir model to the new one. The original model had non-PBR materials, and she looked incredibly flat even under the same lighting conditions as the new model.

I also look at the glossiness of a character's skin. Too much can give them a sort of greasy or plastic-y appearance. There are certain surface settings that can be adjusted to alleviate this, like specular weight. If you scroll back up to Will's images, you can see the subtle difference between the older, glossier version and the new version.

The Finer Details

Lastly, I take a fine-tooth comb to each figure to look for any minute details that I initially overlooked. One big example of this is Riley, who for a long time had a faint blue line where his head met his neck. You can clearly see it here in one of his unedited CGs:

For many of his earlier images, this line read as a shadow, which is what took me so long to notice it. But once you know it's there, it stands out in the early images and his original sprites.

I initially fixed this by using the clone stamp tool in GIMP to brush it out. (You can read more about image editing in Behind the Scenes #5).

This wasn't a clean fix and was incredibly tedious to do. The actual fix turned out to be reapplying his textures. 

Why did the textures get messed up in the first place? No idea. The most important part is that it's a smaller detail that needed addressed, and I took the time to figure out how to definitively address it so it would no longer be an issue.

Let's Revise a Character!

Now that we have a general rundown of what I look at when revising a character, let's revise one character beginning to end to see the process in action. The best example of this is NC17.

The Original Model

NC17 was created from a figure called CC Acacios that was built off the base of Torment 8.1, one of Daz 3D's core figures. Here's a look at the straight-out-of-the-box figures side by side with the first NC17 model.

I used the Acacios body with the head dialed down to blend it with the default Daz 8.1 figure's head, since I wanted the face to look more youthful. I also used Torment's textures with the pale skin darkened a little bit. I used the eyebrows from Acacios with eye textures, hair, and hair color from different assets. There were a few other tiny edits to some features, but nothing major.

From NC17 to Trevor

I was mostly content with NC17 until it came time to make his twin, Trevor, for the Club Update.

The first version of Trevor was a one-to-one copy just with different textures applied, but after adding the textures, I realized I didn't like the overall body shape or face. I messed around with combining different body and head morphs until I got something approximating NC17's build and look, though less slender since Trevor was meant to be more athletic.

(Incidentally, this is the skin texture from a figure called E3D Jacques. I forgot I had used this and later used Jacques to make the bartender Lachlan. I don't like to reuse skin textures, but it wasn't obvious I had, so I kept it as is.)

I was happy enough with the body and face. The exceptions were the eyebrows, which were the same as NC17 but looked different on the new face, and the hair, which looked really fake when I went to make a sprite. There was also one other huge issue. Once posed, the clothes I wanted to use looked like this:

This was when I learned some clothing assets are designed to only work with certain Daz figures, and I'd used a non-compatible figure to make Trevor. I was married to these clothes and happened to have some compatible figures, so I did another round of revisions.

This time I went back to Torment, who was used in NC17, and added Michael 8, both being compatible figures. I decided to make adjustments to keep his body shape closer in line to NC17 than the first version had, and I also found better eyebrows and better quality hair. Version 2 is the version of Trevor that appears in the game.

Remember what I said above about only seeing issues after using the character in CGs? In this case, Trevor looked great in sprites... but then I made the September 2023 Bonus Gallery, which is viewable by Juniors, Seniors, & Graduates. Trevor and Blaze were the two Grind'm finalists at the time, and I wanted them to look their best in their hookup with Lachlan.

I very quickly realized that there was a lot of awkwardness when it came to posing Trevor without any clothes on. I put a lot of effort into hiding the issues, but wasn't necessarily successful. I'll point to this CG in particular, where I had to angle his torso towards the camera and arrange his legs to poorly hide design issues:

I might have been able to tweak it to look better than this, but unfortunately I didn't have time.

The overall problem was proportion. Since Trevor won the Grind'm vote, I knew I needed to enhance his model to save me from needing to spend an extensive amount of time on each Grind'm CG. This led to Trevor version 3.

The changes are subtle but proved impactful. First, I lengthened his legs to be more in proportion with his torso. Then, I made adjustments to his ass—I changed the angle at which it curved out from his back and made the line where it meets his thighs a little more prominent. Lastly, I did the opposite of what I did with Will and shrunk the depth of Trevor's torso.

These changes are so minimal that they're not super apparent even in a side-by-side. But in pose tests, this slightly different side silhouette prevented body distortions that negatively affected the final product.

It's possible I may adjust him even further once I start making his Grind'm scenario, but at this point I decided he was revised to a point I liked.

From Trevor to NC17

Now back to NC17. When it came time to look at him for revisions, I realized Trevor was cuter than him, and since NC17 is a bigger character in the story, I felt I needed to fix that. The easiest way was just to use the Trevor model, give him NC17's skin, and put on NC17's hair.

I went a little farther by looking at the fine details. First was to adjust his hair textures. Originally I applied the neon hair shader to both his hair and what's called a haircap, basically the scalp. This time I used a reddish-hair texture that came with the asset first, and then applied the neon shaders to just the hair. This way there's a very subtle but more realistic transition from "natural" hair to dyed hair.

Second was combining Trevor's skin texture with the original NC17 skin texture. I did this by going into surface settings, then using the Jacques texture in the base diffuse channel and the Torment skin in the translucency channel. This basically added a subtle skin tone adjustment while keeping NC17's look intact. In particular, I wanted to maintain details like the red circles around his eyes.

And there we have it! After many rounds of revisions, the boys are now actual twins. I'm happy with the new version of NC17, especially since he's a character who had a full body shape change but isn't so wildly different as to be distracting.

That's it for this month's Behind the Scenes post. If you want to read more posts like these, be sure to check out the Behind the Scenes collection.