Dress Project v3

[Hyades]

Ah so I return again! Nah, nvm, I did post a couple days ago >,>. Well, my work schedule has now been cleared for almost like.........2-3 months and now I have about a 2-3 week break then its off to college again. So lets see what I can accomplish during my 2-3 weeks of lazyness.

About
Ok, about this project. I don't know about you, but I have yet to see a fully working dress. Not these halfdone dress mods that you normally see (You will see what I mean at the end of this post).

I've done dress mods in the past, but most of them ended up in failure (Once again, this will be explained at the end of the post). This is due to the legs sticking out or the dress model not having proper animations to it.

Think a couple weeks ago, it hit me. Why not just do what SE did with thier NPC dress models and do the same thing to a PC? It took some clever work, but I accomplished that.

Don't understand what I mean? Look at the NPC's that have a dress. I wonder if they have any legs ? No they don't. This is what I have done with mine.

After getting most of it in a working state, I thought later : "How about we implement the legs after everything else is fixed?" Its very possible for me to add the legs and make it work with the dress pefectly. Though there are some problems with this. Instead of making this post longer, I am not going to say what these problems are.

So, I don't know how many dress mods have actually been released, but here is what the difference is between mine and theirs are :

1. My dress actually works with the legs/feet. To elaborate on this, what I mean is that every animation it does, it will look right. The dress won't be flapping up and down when you do x animation. Everything is executed smoothly and looks great in my opinion.

2. Real dress animation. Not just yet in this version yet. In the final, it may be there. Then again, I may not add it as I think its fine as is. If I add the legs, I will have to do this most likely.

What other versions have that mine doesn't :

1. You can edit the dress easily in other people's dress mods. You would have to wait on me to release new designs.

2. Mine = don't look right when sitting. This may be fixed or may not be. I am leaning toward leaving this alone as I think it looks fine except she looks like she's doing some yoga stuff or something xD.

3. Mine = No legs, just yet.

4. Mine = Doesn't look all that right when you rest aka heal from the back point of view. This would easily be fixed when I add the legs.

So here, before I show some pics, here is status report.
v3.3
Modeling
Dress 1 - 95%
Dress 2 - 95%

Textures
Dress - 0% (Technically, it shouldn't be 0% since this is just the solid color black version. If you're looking for one with some actual textures, you need to wait which is why I say 0%)

Animations
Dress - 50% (It may be 50% or 100%. Unfortunately, I do not feel like explaining this. I will another time in another post or maybe not.)

For now, it uses the same body as my skirt project that I did awhile back. Note, that I will change the design of it in the final version.....the body that is to many different types of designs.

Ah the high heels. Finally releasing these. Made a minor update to them, but they are far from done.....texture wise. Have some minor issues to deal with then its done. Would of been done ages ago, but doing the textures annoyed the crap out of me and still do.

The shots
Ok, now on to the shots. The reason why the gloves are that color and doesn't match the main outfit is because I'm exprimenting with things for the light aka white version. Thats why the high heels are a light color....that and the fact I was tired of black >,>.

This body version is not compatible with my dress just yet. More on this later.


This is the body version that I made compatible with this dress mod, but it still have minor clipping issues near her waist. I could of fixed this if I wanted, but for now, FORGET IT! Oh and one more thing, her feet pop out of the dress in some of the shots. There is NO WAY for me to fix this. I may of got it working really well in all animations, but small things like this is unavoidable. One viable solution is to decrease the length of the dress which I WILL NOT do.



Backhand blow. As you can see, I made sure this dress follows almost every animation.


Didn't know dresses can extend like this very well xD. Well some do I suppose.


Feet sticking out? Like I said, I cannot fix it. I fix one thing, I break the rest.


Hmm savage blade.......should see it in motion though.


Ah the sitting problem. Now, I can fix this when I add the legs, but, I may end up breaking the other 95% of animations that actually look right. Hmm so, what do I sacrifice? You wanting to sit right or you not looking right when you fight ?


Ah, now lets go back to what I said at the start of this post. Lets compare a dress that most modders make (Take some model, and stretch it) compared to mine. Now, for a example, I was going to use my old blue dress that I made 2 years ago, but, I couldn't find it =.=. So I found one that I did have, but was complete crap. Since I didn't want to look about for my old dress mods, I used this.

Now this is the bad example of a dress. When I do x kind of animation, the dress flaps up and down as shown. Forget how bad it looks, it shows you what I mean lol.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...t/Baddress.jpg

Here is the same animation with my new dress model.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3.../GoodDress.jpg

Dresses aren't supposed to be flapping up and down like shown in the first picture. Do you see a dress flap up like that in real life if the person wearing the dress pushed you lol? Its not really a dress if its like that. Anyways, this what I have seen in most other people's dress mods back in the days. Either that or when you preform any animation, it does not follow the legs and feet.

Ports
Currently for Hume Female. It will stay this way from my perspective. I have no intentions of doing a EF, TF, or mithra version. When the final product is finished, you can port it to x race, just let me know about it.

Release?
Hah, I figure majority of you want to see what I'm talking about instead of looking at static images. I do not like releasing half done or beta work, but unlike other projects, this project is actually ok to release in its current state.

http://mods.shadow-ffxi.com/HF/Dress...tv34BetaHF.rar

Some notes
- Clipping issues. I already know about this crap. It usually happens in certain animations from her waist down.
- Bug issues. I already know about this crap also.
- For now, you only get the black version. While the hi heels are included, the new hands are not. I packaged the black gloves from the skirt project in the rar file.
- The hi heels may be like super bright in the game. This is due to the lighting probably. Unfortunately, I did not feel like fixing this. Once again, that is why this is a beta. Complaints aren't allowed.
- Any complaints about x this or that = ignore. You don't have to tell me things I already know. Anything you probably will say in your post I am well aware of.
- OH, its beta...yeah thats right. At some point, I will post a almost completed version and then the final version. The final version will look different from what you seen above and the hi heels would actually be completed.

Other things
Guys, I do not know when I am going to complete this. Unlike other projects, I am interested in finishing this and working out the kinks. I will not give any date, but I will try and come back and post updated shots of stuff. I think I've failed at this 90% of the time with previous work, but I can assure you not this time lol.

If you know you can change the color/design of the dress, I wouldn't bother doing that right now. Results can be........either good or bad. The final version would be fine though.

Didn't test it in game lol. Logged on my friend's account, but I had to update crap and I didn't feel like sitting there waiting for it to check then update the files. I will tomorrow though and if I find out it doesn't work ingame, well thats another project that goes in the scrapbook and I'll take the mod off my server xD. Should work though.......be kinda wierd if it didn't....

One last thing. Your favorite dead mod site lol, Shadow's Lair, will be recieving one final site update (visually). If you wish to see what the new site will look like, I suggest you go to my domain mainpage (that is www.shadow-ffxi.com ). For even further reference on how it will look, select Archlord Central site from the domain mainpage. The reason why I am doing this is because I'm retiring from web design. I had enough of it. So I will redesign the 2 remaining sites I control one final time and then no more web design for me. I would still update any site I maintain though.

That should be happening this week actually. As for mods, that won't be possible yet. I do not feel like reclaiming the mod throne and have the most mods a site could ever have just yet. Ok, I think I've said enough so this is Shadow signing off.

[Lunetta]

Re: Dress Project v3

This is wonderful great work and the dress i have been looking for a working dress for awhile now good work ^^

[Akai]

Re: Dress Project v3

hehe it looks very nice^^ good work :D
if i had a female char, id so use it :x

[Linra]

Re: Dress Project v3

With a new, better way to make dresses. This could open a door to a lot of more mods, good luck! ^^

Can't wait to see what this looks and acts like when it's done hehe.

[LostCross]

Re: Dress Project v3

you said yours dont got legs? if you take out the dat for legs and just leave shoes. then yeah. that would solve alot of clipping. because the're not there to clip into. and there are working dresses that are working now.

just most people are to lazy ( me included ) to do weights for them.

sorry if i am misreading. and maybe i am swayed the other direction because i dont like it. but none the less. alot of people are enjoying it so i wish you the best of luck,

[Kuro]

Re: Dress Project v3

/glomp akai

Guess who ^,~

lol verry nice, animations seem a lot better than some of the others out there

[Tsikuro]

Re: Dress Project v3

The dress is nice, but the face and hands on the character model are just scary. It's like an old puppet.

[dabadking]

Re: Dress Project v3

nice as always shadow ...I'm still in school so I cant mod for a while but I come back for a visit, and its nice to see some awesome work being done

[Hyades]

Re: Dress Project v3

Hmm.......ok, had some time to continue working on this. Let me tell you this first off..

Its near impossible for me to add the rest of the feet and the legs. I think I may start documenting for myself what each and every skeleton does for HF (Should of done this long ago), but after messing with it for the longest, her legs are going to stick out. I've tried almost everything possible to my knowledge and currently, the only way for it to work is if I make her legs SUPER small . Even then, I think stuff would still be sticking out.

When I say super small......I mean it looks like she has absolutely no "meat" on her . Like a stick figure. And her butt? Yeah, I don't want to know about that part lol.

I may be able to extend the feet part just a little so it looks like she has legs, but its not going to be the whole shabangabang .

Now I see why SE didn't add any legs to their npcs....even though they have the necessary tools that I don't have access to, they decided to be lazy and not do it like that .

I'll keep working on it though, but its not a huge priority for me now.

Ok, that was the bad news. Good news is this....

Ok, I have kinked out most of the bugs and everything should be looking right from the waist up. I'm not fully done because in order for 0 clipping to occur, I need to add some points around the waist area. So right now, majority of it is looking fine, its just some parts that need to be fixed.

Now we get to the lower part of the dress. After changing my dress to white/purplish (meh, can't tell really), I noticed there were some problems there. I cannot really describe it to you nor show it to you because well........don't feel like lol. Just another complicated paragraph I got to say which you shouldn't be interested in anyways.

So since I'm going to be vauge, I fixed this so called "issue." But oh no, I fix one thing, I break another. Now in some animations, the left foot and lower part of the dress is not working so great.

Concluded that I probably need just a few points at the lower part of it and play around with it.

Now all before that, I said to myself, "Don't you want a real necklace?" Granted, I am fricken tired of that so called "necklace" that is already on the model.......its just part of the texture so its not really a real necklace lol.

So, I had 2 choices.....make one yourself (Time consumer -.-) or take the easy way out and find a necklace thats already made. Obviously, I am not going to make my own necklace because its a time consumer for me.

So after getting everything right and tweaking it according to my head model (should work with any really), I got my own necklace on my dress. Its pretty cool in my opinion. It goes with the black dress really well, didn't feel like doing one for the white one. I can now port this necklace to almost any of my mods now if I want a necklace on them .

So here are some shots:

Front


Side (See, necklace all real )


Is that necklace animated? I saw on npcs where it was, but I don't think I can do this for PCs. Not saying you can't, just that its going to take some time which I don't have. You basically have to play with it hours upon end. Its fine as is, I don't need it animated. Thats just something extra I will do after everything is finished.

So can you replace the textures for the necklace with your own? Nope. Yes, you can extract it as dds, open it in photoshop, edit, and replace the file with changetex. But once you replace your dat file and look at it, the whole thing is gone. To make it reappear again, you would need the original dds file.

There is a little trick though in getting your textures to work with the necklace. VRS not needed. Would I explain the trick? Nah, thats for you to figure out .

So now I'm saying, the beta I released awhile back is crap now. The current version I'm working with has all those nasty problems fixed now along with a cool looking necklace . No, I'm not releasing a near final one just yet. There are still many things I must do and fix. I also have to see with the addition of the necklace if everything looks right in game. More importantly, I have to add a ton of points in order for me to have very unique designs on my dress. That my friend will take a while since adding stuff on this dress is harder than normal stuff I have made.

Thats all for now, should see some other post about a weapon mod I've done sometime or another.

[Monkor]

Re: Dress Project v3

Now I see why SE didn't add any legs to their npcs....even though they have the necessary tools that I don't have access to, they decided to be lazy and not do it like that .

Not necessarily . . . having cloth over skin using a skeleton-driven system doesn't really work, as you've seen with legs coming through the dress. It's really just a matter of that system not working, and having the legs hidden saves space in the memory for ps2 especially. It's just that much more that doesn't have to get rendered. Not to mention we're talking about a game that is five years old now so it's still going to be limited by the engine that's been in place all this time.

Having said all that, your best bet is to either cap off the bottom of the dress or to extrude the cap from the bottom upward a bit so you can see a little bit of leg and just stop there. Unless you were able to build a separate skeleton just for the dress, it will be limited by the existing skeleton.

Oh, and it's looking great by the way

[Shep]

Re: Dress Project v3

you know i always like your work Hyades, but one thing has always bothered me: the faces of your models, mainly the female versions. but nice work as usual.

[angelalliforever]

Re: Dress Project v3

Think you could do Yve'noile's dress with no legs I don't even think it needs feet either considering her dress covers her feet. That dress is real cool. I downloaded the beta one you had and I like ^^. If you could do Yve's dress I'd really appreciate it if not then could you make one similar? thx in advance.