Dressing Up Your Avatar Using DAZ Studio

From Multiverse

Creating and Importing Models

Creating Assets  •  Creating Collision Volumes  •  Exporting Models to COLLADA  •  Targeting a Wide Range of Hardware  •  Model Conversion Tool  •  Creating Material Scripts

Using 3ds Max

Using the 3ds Max Export Tool Creating Attachment Models Creating Morph Animations Transferring Biped Skeletons Implementing Vertex Lighting

Other Tools

Blender: Static Model  •  Blender: Anim. Model  •  Blender Physics  •  DeleD: Static Model  •  DAZ Studio: Creating Characters  •  DAZ Studio: Avatars  •  Using Poser

This tutorial will show you how to add clothes to your character you are creating in DAZ and then how to export the fully clothed avatar into Multiverse. I am doing this using my Mindie (Metaverse Independent Developer) Standard Avatar which is the same mesh as used in Second Life. The reason I am doing this is that my Daughter (well known Second Life Fashionista - Dixie Starr) and I have created a lot of clothes in Second Life that I want to use them in my Multiverse world. This will also work with standard DAZ figures. This tutorial will show you how I did it for the Mindie Avatar.

The first thing to do is to get your model into DAZ. I have saved mine as a scene from a previous tutorial. I bring in the testmale scene which has my testmale character.

You put clothes on an avatar in DAZ by using the Surfaces tool. You need to activate the surfaces tool by choosing View / Tabs / Surfaces from the main menu at the top of the screen. I pin it to the right hand side for ease of use.

The Mindie Avatar only has three basic submeshes with materials tied to them. This is done to make the a fairly compact mesh, as well as, to match the Second Life clothing templates. The three Submesh Materials are Material_Head, Material_lowerbody and Material_Upperbody. These are tied to three basic clothing/skinning templates in Second Life.

The following is the 512 X 512 templates for the head with an example skin (this is my avi's head in SL):

This is the 512 X 512 templates for lower body and an example of a pair of my daughters designer jeans in SL:

This is the 512 X 512 template for uppper body and one of my tee shirts I sell in SL. Kind of ironic I chose an I Love SL teeshirt for a Multiverse demo :)

You attach these textures to the model in DAZ using the Surfaces basic tab. In the following example, you would first click on Material_Upperbody so it is highlighted in the SL_Male grid.

Next you would click on the Color | Diffuse color bar that is currently blue and set the color to white.

Than you click on the bar that says "None" underneath the color bar and selected Browse to find the texture you want to apply. I chose to apply my LindenLand.jpg texture.You then selected the skin for your head and the pants for your lowerbody. I chose my skin/head from Second Life and a pair of my daugher's designer jeans.

You then export the DAE file as described in the previous DAZ Studio Article. You then use the Multiverse Collada DAE Importer tool to overlay your existing testmale model. Make sure to not save the skeleton because you had already saved a skeleton with all your animations described in the previous article and you don't want to have redo that. You just want to save the mesh, materials and textures because you are just changing the appearance of the avatar. Then get into Model Viewer and see the results!

Again this should also apply to dressing up Victoria and other native DAZ models. I just haven't tried that yet. Just being able to get the basic SL avatar at the right scale and using DAZ to get them "dressed up" provides an easy transition for Second Life Residents to move to Multiverse worlds and bring some of their own content into your world. My plan is to build a Character Factory and Clothes Dressing plug in using DAZ into the basic integration of Character Factory in Multiverse. Stay tuned!