First step is determining how well "clothing" works as a second skin. It works very well with one caveat. It will no move with the viseme morphs for speech. I had discovered this previously when I figured out how to make beards in CC.

Anyway, here is a test of a second skin for the body only. This has implications for varying mesh resolution, UV mapping, and so on. It also behaves exactly like the original skin.

Very nice rampa, I was introduced to the 'second skin' concept in DAZ and am happy to see it used in CC!


Dell XPS 8900, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), 16 GB RAM, - 4 GB GeForce GTX 745, NVIDIA compatible.
Acer Aspire V Nitro Laptop,  2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor with 6MB cache,  256GB solid state drive, 16GB Ram,  4 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics.

And some early second skin experiment. The reason to make a second skin, rather than just use the original is three-fold. Firstly, it can differ from the actual skin in terms of polycount and UV's. Secondly, it can have physics attributes assigned. Thirdly, it can be used as replacement body parts.

Toying with a different method of transitioning from legs to tail. No nice texture blending yet.

Nice thing is that if the CC skeleton and mesh are retained, 3DX will set the character up with the CC visemes/muscle morphs. One BIG difference is that you can add extra bones to the skeleton. You lose CC compatibility, but retain everything else.

Interesting (and useful) tip. Great work so far! I 

Here is my first video documenting the actual modeling of my mermaid character. This is part one.

I'll love too see this finished, great work

Thank you Jimklein!

I took a break to recharge a bit, and here goes the basic concept for the hands......or rather, fins. I figured that being a sea creature, she maybe didn't really need hands at all. By using the existing hands as the basis for her fins, I can use the hand animation controls in the motion layer in iClone. This is sticking to my idea of staying as iClone compatible as possible. The leg bones may end up being re-purposed as fluke fins as well. 

These "hand fins" have a kind of Asian fan feel to them that I really like. I had thought earlier of having her use fans as such and have fins to match. I thought it might be more interesting to actually have her hands be the fans....err....fins.

Cool. How do you add bones to the CC? is there a tutorial?