Native Dancer: Motion and Male Regalia Update

Author: Ariann Rousu – Native Dancer Digital Artist

Progress with Native Dancer this past week has gone well. I have been continuing to work on moving clothing pieces and outfits from Marvelous Designer (MD) into Character Creator 4 (CC4), applying them to the characters and going through the processes needed to achieve movement.

Another part of this was getting the character body to not peek through the clothing in certain motions and poses. This process is slow moving as there has been a lot of trial and error on my part as I have been learning to modify the skin wights to work with each individual piece of clothing. Each time I would try a different edit to the skin weights I would need to reapply the motion to the character to see the results. Overall, I feel like I understand it and it is going faster than before.

Now that I am feeling confident in the clothing on the characters not peeking through, I will be going back and modifying areas of the mesh to ensure the designs on the clothing do not stretch so much with the motions the character makes. For now, I have put on hold adding the jingles to the dress.

Something I have noticed is that when I use CC4 for longer periods of time, I start to see the program close randomly. To avoid this, I am working for a couple hours in CC4 then saving my progress and giving it a break. In the meantime, I have been also working in MD more on the male Grass dancer regalia. I have made a few more sketches and adjustments to the original design but have decided to stick with the color scheme in one of the first few sketches. So far it is going really well. Below you can see the progress of the Male Character Regalia. There will be more color and designed patterns when the 2D patters are applied.

One of my next major goals for each of the characters is to design some accessories such as moccasin styles to apply to the characters. I will be doing this in marvelous designer and exploring other 3D programs.