Rigging a Coat for La Femme

I’m going to rig Deacon215’s dForce fur coat for G8F (at Renderosity: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/dforce-fur-coat-for-genesis-8-female/139892/) to work with La Femme (LF). Rest assured that the fur coat consists of genetically engineered, manufactured faux furs; no animals were harmed during this process, nor is this intended to encourage people to wear murdered animals. I’m starting from scratch with a version for Evolution because I don’t need the majority of morphs from the Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD).

1. As usual, load the coat in DAZ Studio. It has what I assume to be a yellow LIE layer for the materials. Click it and delete it. The coat doesn’t look like much at this point, but we’ll apply materials to it later. Click each shoulder and pose the coat to a T position. The mesh is lousy for posing and created big bumps on the sleeve bottoms near the armpits. Don’t worry. Those will meet their match at the hands of the morph brush. Export an obj.

2. Load the PE beta dress mannequin in Poser, import the coat, position it, and go to the Material room with the obj selected. The coat material should already be selected. Click the browse button and find Deacon215’s folder in the DAZ 3D Library textures folder and select FurCoat.jpg, and apply it. I added it to the Highlight, too. Click the Bump Map box, browse, and load FurCoat_B.jpg. Back to the Pose room. SAVE.

3. Go to work with the morph brush. I attacked those ugly lumps with the flatten and smooth tools at 5000 magnitude, and tidied up with the loosen tool. The mesh is asymmetrical, so I had to do more work after I fixed the left side and mirrored it. [Image 1]

4. Go to the Fitting room. Select the coat prop as the object (don’t zero) and the mannequin as the goal (zero). I always use the rigid features setting on the pulldown menu. You should have already fitted the obj to the mannequin, so create a new figure. Follow the procedure described in my earlier post to rig the coat and transfer the morphs from the mannequin. In this case, I don’t transfer the thighs because I won’t need them for subtle adjustments, like a gown, so just the skirt control handles and the upper body to the neck and forearms. Also, I notice after the first run through the fitting room that I didn’t get the T-pose perfectly when I exported the coat obj from DS, so now that I have body parts in the sleeve, I adjust the sleeve to center the arm and attack the armpit bumps again with the morph brush. I don’t need to auto group again, so I do the second run (do NOT zero the coat because of changes) to add the body handles. Name the final version Fur Coat PE or something similar. [Images 2 and 3]

5. Now find a coat that has open and close morphs. I used the ReiverTCoat for V4. Load it and copy all the morphs to your new coat. I will also load V4_MFD and copy the sitting and kneeling morphs, ‘cause La Femme gotta sit sometime! Save it in your Character library as Fur Coat PE or something similar. This is the coat you will conform to LF. [Image 4].

6. Open a scene with La Femme. Set her subd preview to zero. Conform the coat to LF and copy joint zones from. [Image 5]

7. Use the morph brush to create a new morph, LF Fit. Use the loosen tool to make the dress fit. You will still be able to pose the sleeve forearms to get the arm centered if you want when you pose LF. Rename the coat to Fur Coat LF or something similar and save it to your library. Done! [Image 6]

8. I use MAT Writer Panel 2014 to save a material setting because Deacon215 provides two shades of fur. Just go to the Material room choose the other jpeg in the texture folder, as you did above. [Image 7]