I guess I should get back to this project! ;)

The big idea behind this is to maintain the facial morphs. It won't actually be CC compatible when I'm done, but will be facial animation compatible.

I am adding bones in Blender, and then importing to iClone through 3DXchange. I did discover that additional bone chains will cause an error, and not be imported, but not crash CC. The extra bone chains can be set to "Extend Bones" in 3DX, and then animated in iClone using the Motion Layer tool.

I am making sure to not remove any bones or mesh.

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

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.

I'll love too see this finished, great work

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

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

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. :)

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

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.

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


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