Hello.

First things first:

Congratulations to the winner; I'll message you in a bit. You better have a great idea.

Now, to the main topic.

One rig to rule them all

You know, when you use premade models, it really makes your life easier. It really does. You don't need to rip them from games yourself; you just download them and start animating. Everything is great, you are in a good mood. That is, until you take a closer look.

It's a classic trap: you sacrifice future convenience for a quicker start.

When I first started, things such as missing bones, bugs, and spaghetti material shaders often confused and irritated me. I thought, if I download a model, shouldn't these things be taken care of?

Imagine seeing this in a material. How can you possibly understand it or make a change?

Later, I stopped caring and simply started going through the motions.

Download the model.

Inspect it and fix any bugs found.

The hair isn't rigged, of course; do something quick about it.

Is there physics? No? Sure, I'll add it.

Now you can use it.

And I get it, nobody wants to rig hair; it's annoying, boring, and time-consuming. But for fuck's sake, can a person downloading an NSFW model expect at least it's butt to be rigged?

It seems insignificant, but you do this over and over and over. And you do it all for models that should be one-offs, models that I'll probably never use again. The same thing happened with "Venom." His rig was so bare-bones that I had to add not only physics but also modify the rig itself. And for what?

When the poll ended, I realized that I will now need to port my updated physics setup to the other two models. gg

That's funny.

Also:

If deformation rigs are different, you can't interchangeably use their animations.

If U

Vs are different, they can't share the same textures.

If the topology is different, you can't apply the same shapekeys.

Long story short: if it's a one-off, you really can tolerate a dick in your ass. But if it's a regular occurrence, shouldn't you do something about it?

The start

After a long research period, I confirmed what I already knew - yes, making all your characters out of a base mesh and using a single rig is the way to go.

I decided to start small: combining Ciri, Yennefer, and Triss into a single model.

The only problem is that their original models are completely different and don't share anything. Now, I must find a way to put them into a single model/rig.

If I were to start from scratch, I would have used a MetaHuman head with a Daz3D body, but that's not a reality. In reality, I have a modified Daz3D body with a custom head.

This is it. This is my base and my life for now.

But worry not, it's already done, here is the final result:

And this is how I did it:

I separated Ciri's head from the body and exported it to Wrap. I did the same for Yennefer's head.

I wrapped Ciri's head onto Yennefer's, transferred the textures, and then imported it back into Blender.

Now, you must add that new head shape as a shapekey to your old head. There are a couple of ways to do that. I did this using the shapekeys "New from Objects" option. Your vertex order would likely be incorrect, and you'll have to fix that if you want to use the same route. This is the addon

.

Now, if you combine your old head back onto the body, you should have everything working as it was, and now you have your new shapekey.It should look something like this.

There was a slight texture drift after the texture transfer; I fixed it in Blender using the "Relax Slide" brush in Sculpt Mode.

About the textures

I didn't like the fact that most of them were procedural. I baked everything except the micro-details, then simply recreated the original look as well as I could.

A few touches in Substance, and this is the result. The lighting is different, but I would say it's close enough.

You can test your own perception and try to pinpoint what is wrong with the first image.

Switching

All of them have the same rig, but each of them has its own rig and shapekey actions, where its data is stored. The rig action is about the length of their limbs, and the shapekey action is about the volume of their bodies.

A script sets these actions based on a value from a custom property; materials react to changes as well.

I don't know... it's a first draft, a bit clunky to use. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. Individual elements still require additional work and the silver bullet didn't happen the way I thought it would be.

Still, I think this is a better way, at least for models that will be used frequently.

I already made something using them, and everything worked fine. (Waiting for the alt variant to post it, otherwise what's the point?)

That's pretty much it. Now I need to put in some work to prove to myself that this was worth it.

Or even better - probably should write this "Venom" post, since I've been writing all day anyway.