clothing shells

[pronzilla]

In the course of my experiments with making clothes, I've bumped into a few niggles with the clothing shells.  This is what's been bugging me.

Texture resolution around the crotch
When I was making the plain white vest, I was driven round the bend trying to get the "pulled aside" panties to (a) look reasonable and (b) not go right through the guy's cock. 

The two problems I kept hitting were:

• In the crotch area of the UVW map, individual pixels in the texture map over to cover surprisingly large areas of flesh; miss by a single pixel and you end up with crazy things happening
• the texture gets fairly heavily distorted on transformation, so trying to get a sensible "edge" on a garment is very difficult indeed - an apparently fairly smooth edge turns into a horrifically jagged polygon

These two add up to make it rather difficult to get the front/back parts of the briefs to meet neatly in the middle, too.

Now, in most 3d games, this wouldn't be an issue, because people don't spend their entire time looking at the crotch of the game characters.  This game? Um, well, er... that's a significant fraction of the entire point, isn't it?

(I found similar, but lesser, issues around the armpit, but that's a rather more... niche... interest)

regular shell centerline between the boobs
See image 1 below, which focuses on a favourite part of Layla's anatomy in the plain white vest.  Ignore the complete mess I made of the shoulder strap, and look at the neckline of the vest as it crosses her cleavage.  Whoa, crazy!  For the full effect, load it up and watch while she does her warmup stretches ready for the exertion ahead.  As her boobs jiggle in their fascinating way, any clothing stretched across the middle of her boobs does some rather geometrically improbable things.  Anything you can do about that?

More boobs, boobs, boobs (not that I'm obsessed, or anything)
This is one I found while working on the red corset: the tight shell has areas on the ribcage around the bottom/side of the boobs that distort a lot as the boobs jiggle; not the boobs themselves, but the skin over the ribs just under them.  Not so noticeable for a lacy body; not good at all for the corset - which is why it's low-cut to avoid those areas.  I'd love to make something similar that went much closer under the breasts, but it looks insane as soon as the boobs move at all. 

Which leads to another thing - some undies (like, most bras) actually support the body, and resist the jiggle.  Not supress it totally, but provide some restraint at least.  So, how about a tight shell variant that actually acts like a bra and constrains the boobies on their mission to jiggle?

Elbows
Image 2 shows the back of Robyn's elbow (I know, another niche interest), as she models the fishnet body wot I made.  I've highlighted a point where her elbow (the very end of her forearm, I think) pokes through the shell.


Being a full-time programmer myself (albeit working on far, far, more mundane subject matter) I know that some bugs can be a lot harder to sort out than they may first appear.  I appreciate that resolving some of these problems is going to be utterly impractical, but I'm posting 'em in case I'm wrong about that, because, let's face it, what I know about 3d modelling could be written on the back of a postage stamp with a jumbo marker, and fixes for any of 'em would be fab.

Finally (for now) thanks for making a game that's simple enough to customise that total noobs like me can make reasonable stuff in less than an eon or three.  Here's Looking forward to stockings and skirts...

[Jak (ripened peach)]

Thanks for your thoughts on this. 

About the pulled over pixels, I agree that it can be difficult to do definitely just by eyeing it.  I have a Photoshop Liquify setting that I use for doing the pulled over bottoms pretty much automatically.  I've been planning on releasing it along with the actual shells and some other things as soon as I can, but with all the other things I'm working on for the sim it's just waiting in line.  If you have Photoshop and can use the Liquify filter then let me know and I'll post the setting file for whoever wants it.

In addition to the existing clothing shells, I was thinking about making some specific ones for certain clothing types, so if I do that down the road I will definitely try to make sure all the pixels work as they should.  The biggest issue with the pixels stretching is that while I was making the clothing shells I tried out as many types of clothes as I could to make sure it all worked right, but there's always going to be something that stretches more than we'd like.

I do plan to release the actual clothing shells in OBJ format very soon with some templates, etc.  Pretty much any 3d program out there (including free ones) can load OBJ format so I hope releasing them will open the way for some enterprising people to use them in their own tools for making things for the sim.  I've seen that happen for Second Life avatars, etc. and I would love to see things like that happen for Sex Sim as time goes on.

I think having the ability to make some clothes hold the boobs tight is a great idea so I'll try to add that into the next update.  Good call on that.

The elbows poking through (and other parts) is a difficult thing to solve completely perfectly, as the clothing shells are just that; shells that overlay the actual body model, and sometimes the body pokes through.  I'm going to be making some adjustments to them over the next month or so that will hopefully solve a lot of that issue, but I don't anticipate it ever being gone totally for good.  One thing I am going to try is a graphic shader that will automatically force the clothes to render in front of the skin no matter what, so if I get that working then maybe all will be well.  Hard to say at this point.

Glad to see other programmers in here.   I started off in the mid 90s working on video games at EA, etc. but as an artist.  I didn't start coding until around 2001 when I made some things for flight sims, and after that I was hooked.  I had done BASIC on my old TRS-80 back when I was a kid, but beyond that I never did anything more with it until 2001.  I like both art and coding but there's just something about programming that really makes me feel great.  It's like a constant challenge and I love that.  If you don't mind my asking, what kind of programming do you do?

Anyway thanks again for the post.  More good stuff on the way.

[pronzilla]

I'm using GIMP, so PS stuff won't be much use for me, but I'm sure others can use it.  Hopefully I'll figure out some way to do it eventually; I'm already doing some things much quicker than when I started, just from learning how to use GIMP properly (y'see, this stuff is educational!) and there are zillions of things I don't know how to use at all yet.

TRS-80!  I started out on a Dragon 32 in the mid-80s, which was a slightly tweaked British TRS-80 CoCo clone.  These days, it's J2EE stuff deep in the guts of webservers, though I've been known to dabble in HTML/CSS/JS, too.

[Jak (ripened peach)]

I'm using GIMP, so PS stuff won't be much use for me, but I'm sure others can use it.  Hopefully I'll figure out some way to do it eventually; I'm already doing some things much quicker than when I started, just from learning how to use GIMP properly (y'see, this stuff is educational!) and there are zillions of things I don't know how to use at all yet.

Ok yeah I'm not sure how to do the same thing in GIMP, but what you could always do is use one of the existing pulled over textures as sort of a template to go by.  Just paste it in as a layer over your own texture and then follow the curves to shape yours to match.

TRS-80!  I started out on a Dragon 32 in the mid-80s, which was a slightly tweaked British TRS-80 CoCo clone.  These days, it's J2EE stuff deep in the guts of webservers, though I've been known to dabble in HTML/CSS/JS, too.

Awesome, yeah I remember the Dragons.  I used to read Rainbow Magazine voraciously as a kid and would pretty often see ads for Dragon stuff.  Mine was a TRS-80 CoCo 2 witha  modified keyboard so I didn't have to use the chicklets, haha.  I also had a sweet amber monitor, lol.  I loved that computer.  Wish I still had it.  I found an emulator a few years back and was able to load in some of my old programs I wrote from cassette.  That was fun.

[mech1]

Basic, Pascal ... Atari ... cassettes ... guyes you are old as me ;-)

[Jak (ripened peach)]

Basic, Pascal ... Atari ... cassettes ... guyes you are old as me ;-)

Hahaha!

[BigDaddyBane]

Basic, Pascal ... Atari ... cassettes ... guyes you are old as me ;-)

I may not be quite as old as you guys, but I'm pretty close. At least i know what your talking about and saw those. In real life even, not even a museum or anything.