Let’s convert a shorter dress with sleeves!
This is not a double click solution. You have to suck it up and do some really easy fiddling with the rig in the Setup room after you apply it to your obj. I am going to use Loving You for G3F.
- Load La Femme. Remember to change the preview subd to zero. Load your obj. Fortunately, G3F’s zero arms pose isn’t that far from LF’s as far as the elbow, and Loving You needs very little morph brush work using the loosen and tighten settings. Two clicks of X Rotate gets the garment ready for morphing. With the mesh already closely matching LF down to the elbows, don’t do morph brush work on the forearms. We’re going to let rigging and minor posing see to the forearms. [Image 5]
- As above, export a new obj, in this case Loving You LF. Reimport and position the obj. With it selected, click the Setup tab. Follow the procedure above to inject the rigging and morphs into the dress. [Image 6]
- When you work in the Setup room, only use the front, right, left, back, top, and bottom cameras so that when you adjust bones, they only move along x, y, and z axes. Pick Display menu, Camera View, From Top. Click the left forearm bone. Close the library so you can see the control dials. Bend the forearm back until it aligns with the dress. Do the exact same on the right. (There is also a rigging symmetry selection on the figure menu if you want to use that). [Image 7]
- Loving You, though, has a knee-length, form fitting skirt, and It’s necessary to adapt the skirt handles to the mesh. They need to be shorter and coincide with the lines of the skirt. Select a bone (e.g., Left Control, looking from the front camera) by clicking on it or choosing it in the body parts menu and then move the cursor to the tip until it turns into a circle with a dot in the middle. Click and drag the tip of the bone to a new position. I repeat: Do it ONLY using the front, left, right, and rear cameras, never the main camera. You can drag the tip laterally and also make the bone longer or shorter. Use the left or right view to adjust the front and back controls. Here is the rigging with the skirt controls repositioned. [Images 8 and 9]
- You are done and can click the Pose tab and conform your new dress. The forearms will not align properly. Pose the dress forearms by bending them to fit. That’s the only kink in a dress with sleeves! [Image 10] You can now use the new dress as the donor for similar dresses in the future.
- Just FYI. I tried converting Belle dress for G3F, which has a wide flouncy skirt. Even with the skirt handles aligned to it, the auto-group process did not work right, so there does appear to be an upper limit to skirt size that will take MFD LF as a donor rig.
