Behind the scenes lol

I promised to share some of my work-process, so here it is: an essential part of the content is the "squirming" meaning you have some movement under the skin.

This is effectively difficult to create, I once tried with just different morphs I found on different shops, but it never felt satisfying or anywhere near "realistic" or believable. Also it was quite tedious to find the right morphs and time them perfectly in an animation.

So then I tried the collision function that DAZ has, but the problem here is that it is only made for still images and to accomodate for example a couch to the legs or a pillow to a hand. In an animation every image will have the occuring collision calculated as it is now in this frame and without considering the frame before it. 

I tried this once in a post and the result was quite strange, even though each frame on its own looked alright. The first part is animated by hand in the second part you see the shaking, jiggling and vibrations happening because each simulation is independent from the last: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57088457

(Also to have a consistent physics animation, the texture would need physical definitions like weight, density, softness, stiffness, friction, and more. From a technical perspective if one would do a lot of work, maybe these hurdles could be overcome but: DAZ has only the ability to simulate textures, not volumes. This is a major problem from the creators of daz that I believe can not be resoluted.)

So to finally come to my workaround, I made a custom scene where I collide two bodies and create an animation around this.

Then I hide the second body and save the resulting mesh as obj. file that is still deformed by the collision. I do that for 20 frames to get a smooth movement.

Then I reimport the files with the morph loader and create a respective morph for each .obj file.

Then I will set each morph to 100 percent on 1/20th of the timeline so that every morph blends into the next one. I can then create a final morph with ERC freeze, that controls all other morphs. So finally with a slider of 1 to 100 i can control 20 morphs that blend into one another.

The result is something like this:

This work-flow alone is too much and takes too long, at least one and a half hour I'd say. Even longer when I didn't know what I was doing and it took me quite some time to find this workaround and implement it. 

So maybe now you see why I need to go to Blender, this is only one issue I have with DAZ. I hope you enjoyed this little insight, see you next time, stay safe!