Basic "Body Shape" question

Hi, another very broad "beginner's" question...

I'd like to tweak my body shape, since I want something a little more realistic than what generally appears in SL. I downloaded DAZ Studio and have played with it a bit. My goal is to get into my personal body mesh shape files and make alterations.

Did I miss a DAZ tutorial anywhere on the basics of how to do this? (I tried Search earlier, but it keeps crashing on me. I'm sorry if this has already been answered somewhere.) Is DAZ the right approach?

(Yeah, I know... this is a VERY basic thread... I just want to know I'm on the right track before I go too far down the path and waste my time.)

I'm a quick study and have some experience modifying TGA mapping files (for clothes and appearance) in games like Morrowind. I've just never played with meshes yet.

Thanks for any good direction you might provide.

Hi there There's no way to export a customized SL avatar shape for use in another program. Conversely there's no way to alter the avatar shape in a program like DAZ and transfer it back into SL.

What you can do is load the default avatar into a program like DAZ or Poser or other 3d app for use as a texture previewer or for doing animations (in Poser). I don't use DAZ so I can't help you with the nuts and bolts of it, but if you check the sticky thread of links at the top of this folder there's a link to a thread about setting up DAZ as a texture previewer.

Thanks, Chip.

So does this mean that all shape tweaking (such as what I see sold in various stores) currently happens inside SL using the sliders (and is limited to those slider settings), or are there other ways to manipulate body shape besides the sliders?

That is what it means, yes. All body shapes in SL are slider combos, or in extreme cases are prims covering a shrivelled or otherwise warped body shape.

The first seems a little funny, since people pay for shapes they could make themselves just by fiddling with sliders?

The second, though... I hadn't thought of that. So you could reduce the body shape to something thin and basic, then add prims to it to flesh it out (sort of like putting globs of clay on a wire skeleton) until you get approximately the shape you want.

That's pretty creative.

The first part of your question was already answered, so I'll chime in on this part. Besides the sliders (which are pretty versitile if you play with them enough) there are a couple of options.

First, you'd be suprised what good texturig can do. One of the things I really hate about the sliders is they don't provide for much exaggeration in musculature, which makes the male comic book body-builder superhero look pretty much impossible to "sculpt". However, a well textured muscle suit can do wonders. Shading and highlighting in the right places can make various body parts appear much larger or smaller than they actually are. It's often the case in 3D modeling that the textures make the model much more so than the actual geomoetry does, and this is no exception.

Second, you can sculpt exaggerations to body parts with prims. If you want an extremely obese avatar, for example, or anythig not totally human, this is really your only option. It can be a little tricky to make the prims blend well with the av mesh, but again, with the right texturing, almost anything is possible. Just take a look at any half way decent furry for proof.

Precisely. The thing is, to get really good results with sliders can take a LOT of fiddling. And in some cases, what you need to do isn't obvious. If you're combining a body shape with a detailed texture to reproduce the look of a famous person, or even creating a beautiful new figure, the exact settings you want for facial features and the like are usually pre-set.

As an example, take a furry avatar, like the one I wear. The face and chin are smunched in, so a prim 'muzzle' can be attached to the head, covering the area from just below the eyes down to the throat.

On other furry avatars, the entire head is shrunken, so a whole-head 'mask' can be placed over it, with its own eyes, ears, etc. built all out of prims. Hands might be reduced in size, to fit within prim 'paws'. and so on. A lot of animal characters are done that way. In this case, the initial body shape might be quite necessary to specify, so the prim body part add-ons fit right. For example, I purchased a four foot tall 'Chibi fox' character. She's really cute, and almost all of the arms and legs, as well as the head, are covered in prim parts. If I adjusted her height to normal human size, the parts on her arms and legs would look like a kid's bad-fitting shin guards.

When you see an extremely short avatar, they actually fold the body up on itself! Not only shrink it, but also apply some sort of transform that scrunches it up into a little ball. The 'tinys', waist-high and shorter avatars, are done like that.

I've definitely found that creating attractive avatar shapes is an art form... one which I generally suck at, hehe. Someone who's really good at it shouldn't feel any shame selling them, nor should someone feel any for buying one if they get frustrated mucking about with the sliders.