dat porting for dummies

[Taskmage]

So, I did this recolor of the duelist set for Yoko, Elvaan F, and decided I really like it and want to use it on my Taru. I'm pretty new to this, and I was under the impression that there was a magical process called "porting" that would take a skin I'd made for one model and adapt it to another with much less work than it took to create the original. So I open up the taru version of the body piece and ... crap. Not only is the layout completely different, but some things are actually larger on the taru skin than on the elvaan one. So I could hack up the original skin and resize it to overlay the Taru version, but I'd lose a lot of detail in the squashing and especially the stretching. Even then, if I didn't redo a few parts entirely, my Taru would end up with certain unwanted features ... like a pair of elvaan breasts shaded onto his chest.

So .. am I missing something or is "porting" essentially synonymous with "redoing" with the possibility of taking shortcuts by mangling the original skin with transforms to make it fit?

And, if I did decide to take shortcuts by resizing parts of the original, I would much rather scale down than scale up. With that in mind, if I plan to make a skin for all seven models, I would want to start on the model where all the elements are larger. Which one is that usually? The obvious answer is galka, but seeing as the shoulder pads are larger on tarutaru Duelist than Elvaan Duelist, maybe that isn't the case. Is that just something I'm going to have to look at individually for every texture I work on?

[Stromgarde]

Re: dat porting for dummies

I don't generally make custom armor for this very reason. It's a complete nightmare to get all the weights set correctly when you can't just swap the textures. Which is what I usually do, anyhow.