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Anonymous

July 12, 2020

Hi Aardvark, I read on your Twitter about the Lulu model debacle. Damn shame, I hope that you eventually recover the motivation to finish it, because the model looks great, noticeably better than the DAZv4 one. In any case, I downloaded the unfinished model, and I wanted to know if there's something in particular to be wary of when using it, like if there are any particular broken flexes or bones, or something like that. I noticed that the hair is quite broken, but it is usable with a bit of scaling in certain bones, I'm asking about the main model itself. Thanks!

LordAardvark

Not sure what's broken about the hair. It worked fine in my testing, which admittedly wasn't exhaustive because reasons.

There's nothing broken per se, it's mostly just incomplete. There's a few questionable bits of rigging on the outfit, but nothing I'd say is a straight dealbreaker - just below the threshold of quality I try to maintain.

Anonymous

July 11, 2020

Hey Lord Aardvark I have two questions. The first question is how do you get a flex that is on two body grouped objects to work, when having multiple flexes with the same name causes none of them to work? Example might be a shirt and shirt pulled both having a pregnancy flex. Second question is how does one set up the materials for opaque objects such as glass or gems?

LordAardvark

First question is export settings.

For 3dsMax using Game Zombie's DMX tools, I wrote a program available on my website called DMXProc. You write out your QC with all of the $model and $bodygroup lines out, then throw the QC at DMXProc, and it will process the DMX files and rip out the duplicate flex sliders. End result is a single set of flexes that work for all of the bodygroups.

For Blender, the way I understand it is you have to manually turn on Advanced Options and turn off exporting sliders for everything except the first bodygroup that has your flexes. Note that this causes problems if your bodygroups have different flexes. It sounds like a really clunky solution to me, but I don't think the Blender DMX tools can export as ASCII model 18, which is the DMX format that DMXProc is built for. So you'll have to figure that out yourself.

Second question requires a little bit of mesh and material hoo-hah.

For brevity, we are going to refer to four things. You start with these two:

TRANSPARENT MESH is the normal mesh you want to make transparent. TRANSPARENT MATERIAL is the VMT that is applied to it.

What you do now is you make a duplicate of TRANSPARENT MESH. Refer to this duplicate as ALPHA MESH. Apply a material to it referred to as ALPHA MATERIAL.

Flip all of the normals of ALPHA MESH, and then export both TRANSPARENT MESH and ALPHA MESH as a single model or bodygroup. They will be perfectly on top of each other, normals facing opposite directions, with two different materials on them.

Now, make sure that TRANSPARENT MATERIAL and ALPHA MATERIAL have identical material settings. Same basetexture, same phong, etc. They must also both have the parameter $ambientocclusion 0.

These following parameters are exclusive, meaning that while one material has it, the other does not.

TRANSPARENT MATERIAL needs to have the following settings: $translucent 1 and $nocull 0

ALPHA MATERIAL needs to have the following settings: $alphatest 1 and $nocull 1

If you get the meshes, normals, and materials all correct, then your transparent material should work correctly.

 

UKKeliteBen#3020

July 10, 2020

How do I join your discord?

LordAardvark

Check previous Ask! Good timing on that question.

Anonymous

July 10, 2020

Is there a reason that SOMETIMES when i touch up a SFM model in blender and recompile it back with crowbar for SFM use it has some stray points in the mesh?

LordAardvark

Could be a number of reasons. Might be worth hopping into my Discord and asking in #model-work. You can find the link at the top of my Patreon's description. It's open to the public.

Anonymous

July 5, 2020

Glad to see that you're redoing Lulu's head, it was creepy as hell to see her without her hair. And now, it will be possible to give her alternatve hairstyles too, so it's great. Compared to Elizabeth or the DOA models, her old face was also quite low-poly, specially her lips, mouth and tongue. Will you upgrade that too?

LordAardvark