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It's Raining Men Again Competition
Entry 1 and only -
Title: Ritual#Re-purposed
Re-purposed Historical Armor for V4 By DAZ Originals/Arien
http://www.daz3d.com/historical-armor-for-v4
Sword Sisterhood texture pack for Historical Armor
http://www.daz3d.com/sword-sisterhood
Fitted to M4
Rendered in DAZ Studio with 3Delight, no postwork.
I decided that if I was going to try to re-purpase a piece of female clothing to a male figure, I would
make it somewhat challenging. Since I always liked the Victoria 4 Historical armor, especially when used
in conjunction with the Swird Sisterhood texture pack, and the given the fact that it seemed like a
suitably difficult item given its form-fitting nature, I decided to try fitting it to Michael 4. Let me first say
this: Aarrgh!
It was a fairly long and tedious process, with many false starts. The most problematic parts would be
associated with the torso armor I guessed, particularly the chest/breast and waist areas. I pulled it into a
modelling program to see if I could make the necessary adjustments there, but discovered that the mesh
was more complex than it seemed, and would require far more work than a few simple deformations,
especially without breaking some of the movement/posing morphs. So back to DAZ Studio.
Long story short, after a great deal of trial-and-error, I ended up managing a passable fit as seen in the
central character in my render, through a combination of some of the built-in morphs in the armor, some
sizing/scaling, use of mesh smoothing and collision and finally a few deformers.
Unfortunately, the result did not allow the armor to self-adjust to changes in the figures morphs or poses,
and more tweaking was required each time I made a change to these. So certainly not a permanent fit
by any stretch of the imagination. Not having punished myself enough, I decided to go through it all
again with a second M4, crouched in the lower left of the render. The extreme pose here caused me
even more grief than with the first character, but I managed to beat it into shape in the end. I was
unpleasantly surprised when the extremities (arms and legs) caused me more difficulties here than with the torso.
There may be some outfits that can be re-purposed relatively easily, but this certainly isn't one of them.
To do it properly might leave one asking whether it wouldn't be easier to make a new outfit from scratch.
Ah well, I did say I wanted a challenge. :)
I included a V4 in the render wearing the armor for comparison purposes.
Good luck everyone, and Happy New Year to all!
@SixDs Thank you for your entry. Would it be possible for you to adjust the size of you image in the the thread to 800 px? It works better for the forums. You can edit your thread and then right click on your image to bring the info box back up and adjust the size. Thank you. :)
Sorry about that, KM. Fixed now. I actually had tried to reduce the dimensions when I first noticed the problem, but it didn't seem to have any affect. I guess that I hadn't dropped it down enough. Happy New Year!
Perfect, thank you, @SixDs. :)
Happy New Year from Moscow, Russia =) We're in 2017 already.
Entry # 2
"Re-purposed": I don't know if these items count, but in case they do, here's some info.
I re-purposed two OptiTex dynamic clothing freebies for V4, a tank shirt from this page and "elephant bell bottoms". The male figure I used is a Genesis character based on Hiro3 body shape and a combination of face morph dials (including a male resource pack by Thorneworks/Handspan Studio) and custom sculpting and deformers.
Many OptiTex dynamic items are supposed to be used rigged, so that they sort of conform first and then you run the dynamic sim, but these items have a V4 rig, and dynamic rigs cannot be autofitted to Genesis. So I draped an animated sim from the standing T-pose (60 frames to the final pose, then another 30-something to settle the cloth better).
The cut of the shirt is straight enough not to hang suspiciously around the chest area. The pants, now they were a bit tricky because they were made for wider hips and so they basically slid off during simulation. Thankfully, setting friction to the max on the waistband solved this.
Actually the hair was also originally for V4 (Glamour hair, used to be free with some ancient version of DS). I didn't autofit it to Genesis because it created silly kinks around the shoulder area, so I parented it to the head with some scaling etc. I also made a shorter transmap for the back because, well, this isn't really the sort of character to wear his hair waist-long.
Then there are these free fibermesh eyebrows that are sort of unisex but were designed for G3F. I made a simple backwards clone for Genesis, but fibermesh doesn't really like being autofitted. So I just parented the eyebrows and used their built-in morphs to make them fit my character.
// click for full size //
PS: used an HDRI from Greg Zaal's free HDRI Haven bundle as part of the lighting.
ENTRY #2 - DECEMBER SUMMER HOLIDAYS
Only 15 minutes left everyone. Contest closing real soon!
I would like to thank all those who have generously donated prizes for the contest, namely, in alphabetical order: Darwins Mishap, Daz 3D, Diomede, FirstBastion, Gerterasmus, Isidorn, Knittingmommy, NGartplay, Nonesuch00 and Wgdjohn. An extra special thank you to Knittingmommy for organizing the whole thing and shepherding us through the whole thing! Great contest, folks!
Contest is now officially closed! Thank you for entering. I'll update this thread when there are winners! :)
Yes, Good Luck, hope you had fun.
Thank you organising and hosting it.
You're welcome. I learned a lot about doing contests. It was loads of fun seeing all of the great entries. I think everyone did a great job with their entries. I'm very grateful so many people decided to participate. Good luck everyone!
You did a great job, KM. I hope this can be an annual event that people will look forward to. I am awed and inspired by everyone's tremendous entries. I don't envy the judges.
I've been going through the thread pulling out entries and doing counts and I noticed that I might not have completely answered a question that @scorpio had about the Carrara entries being posted elsewhere before being entered here so I thought I'd explain the Carrara entries a little bit. I'm sorry this is kind of after the fact as I thought I had answered it, but maybe not sufficiently for any of you wondering about the Carrara thing. A lot of the people on the Carrara forum don't visit the other forums here that much and I'm sure the same is true for those of you who don't use Carrara in that you don't visit their forum all that often.
For those who are not familiar with the Carrara forum, they have a regular contest with a WIP thread and, per their rules, entries to the contest need to be entered there first, usually. They have a very fluid contest in that the person who runs the contest is the who won the previous contest. That winner gets to change the rules if needed or wanted depending on the person and/or the theme happening during the contest period. Their contest can flow with the needs of their entrants very well in that way.
Diomede was the contest master (not sure if there is an actual title for that) for the period when the Raining Men contest was also happening and he changed the rules to allow for Carrara participants to enter their entries here first. The main question of where and how had to do with the WIP thread and that their entries would have been posted on the Carrara boards first because of that. However, the basis of the rule to be posted here first is to ensure that the images submitted for entry be new. The very fact that Carrara contest has a WIP thread denotes the very newness of their Works in Progress. By the way, if anyone enjoys watching how an image is born or curious about others' workflow WIP threads can be very educational. At any rate, I kept a close watch on the Carrara thread so that I could be knowledgeable and answer any questions that came up.
My point is that the Carrara thread is part of the DAZ forums so all images stay within DAZ borders per the current rules and the final images were posted here as soon as they were ready to be submitted. As I mentioned a few times, whether your image is posted here or your gallery or the Carrara contest, I'm not going to quibble about just a couple of minutes in either direction or try to track you down and beat you into submission. The point was to have fun, create great images and embrace the beauty of the male figure.
This is definitely a rule we can discuss further for next year's contest should we decide to run it again. A lot of people had issues with the idea behind this rule and the one about posting or storing images offsite like on their DA pages. I didn't want to do any major changes to the rules from last year, but I'm open to suggestions if anyone wishes to talk about possible rule changes for next year's contest should we decide to run it again. Please keep in mind that DAZ 3D was very nice enough to sponsor this contest this year and we are very lucky to have had that backing. I don't think that asking for images to be kept on site during the run of the contest is too much to ask. I know that other sites have similar rules for some of their contests.
So, if there is a rule that you would like to see modified, please let me know and we can discuss it. I'm not making any promises, but I'll keep an open mind. I think making this an annual event could very well happen given the numbers I've seen today of our total number of entrants and entries as I go through and get things ready for voting. We didn't quite get the high number of entries that we got last year, but we got close to 100 entries which I think was a pretty good indication that, yes, there is still a lot of interest in our digital men. It might take a little bit to time to judge so many great images. :)
I will have final numbers soon for those who love statistics. :)
Knittingmommy, you did a great job running the contest. Thanks for all the time ane effort you put into it. It is always a fun one to participate. I't is great to see the men get used more.
Wishes of good luck and Happy New Year to everyone! Great work folks... keep up the good work.
Bravo Knittingmommy... Wonderful job hosting.
A note about Carrara Challenges... The latest change is that the winner does not need to host the next Challenge for any reason. Voting is done by anyone but mostly by the participants who never vote for their own image, an unspoken rule. I imagine that more than myself always welcome DAZ Studio, Bryce etc, users as well as us judging which entries are best.
Happy New Year to everyone!
Knittingmommy, thank you for wonderful contest management.
End of contest stats:
98 Entries Total
27 Entries in the RePurposed Category
Be patient everyone. We will have a winner soon and I'll make an announcement when that happens. Thank you all for making this a great contest. While we didn't beat last year's mammoth amount of entries, I think we showed that this is still a very popular contest. We came really close to 100 entries which is not a shabby number of entries by any means. I hope we can manage to pull it off again next year. If I manage to recover from this year! ;)
Ya you did a great job KM!
Thanks, Sonja!
Thank you for your hard work! I haven't entered a contest in about 4 years but this one sounded so fun I had to jump back on the band wagon. Its much appreciated.
Thank you Knittingmommy for being such a great host =)
You're welcome, guys! It was definitely worth the effort to see it happen again.
Yes, thanks KnittingMommy. The contest ran very smoothly despite the deluge of questions you got.
Just an update to let you know that the tough job of voting is still ongoing. I hope to have winners announced very soon. You guys have made it really tough on the judges! However, I will announce the winners real as soon as the judging is finished. :)
I know I am so glad I am not a judge in this contest wow so many beautiful renders this year!!!!!
I do not envy the judges at all!!
No pressure, KM. The contest did run for two months, so it is more than reasonable to expect it would take a little longer to determine the outcome. As Saphirewild has said, it is an unenviable task, and your efforts and those of all the judges are appreciated.
I second that SixDs!!!!
I hope anyone doesn't mind me asking this...
Is this there going to be a female character competiton at somepoint this year, or is it just going to be male characters only for the forseeable future on here?
@Knittingmommy don't worry about how long it takes. I think we all sympathize with the job of doing the judging this year. I know I certainly wouldn't want to do it, lol. again, many thanks for the great job you did hosting this :D