CollabInsp3: Someone's in the kitchen with Tchanun

Collab-inspired 3, that is, but that wouldn't all fit in the title field.

The last of a set of three; you can get the inspirational background in "Collab-Inspired" (about equally NSFW, I think). The only part that was in the original for this is that the guy was at the stove; he was rather ... differently dressed in the original. (Leather was involved.) The cat was actually in the image that inspired the Meowl image (MUCH more NSFW), but he fit better here. We are still in TruForm's Industrial Loft, over in the kitchen. (If it were a real place, you'd need SERIOUS money to afford this loft. That said, the bedroom and office is over the kitchen. Not sure anyone would do that if they had the money for this space.) Floor was resurfaced from cement, just because, and a bunch of other Iray shaders used here and there.

Jinn got rebuilt for this because I wanted to keep him and Tchanun together for the scene, and I wanted to try out the dForce Weekend Casual Suit. Since that would have otherwise required autofit or reworking it to go backwards to G3M -- it was built for G8M -- and I'd already redone his texture for G8/G3, I just spun a bunch of dials to get a character that looked something like him.

The dForce Weekend Casual Suit ... had issues. Big issues. In fact, it's no longer in the store, it turns out. (I found that out when I looked in my product library to refresh my memory on the exact name.) First issue was probably one of those "this is the way the PA is used to working, and they just didn't think things through" things. To wit: the pants automatically hid the geometry of the leg when put on the character. Which is understandable -- it eliminates pokethrough -- and wildly annoying to just about everyone, I think. However, in this case, it wasn't just annoying, it caused problems, because hiding the geometry means that dForce -- which, leave us remember, is explicitly meant to make clothing collide with the body in realistic ways -- had nothing with which to collide. It made the pants all weirdly dangly and rubber-legged. Second issue: despite having dForce surfaces, the suit jacket absolutely would not move when simulated. Not one fraction of a centimeter. The third issue, frankly, was just baffling. The materials presets didn't work correctly. As far as could be told, it was in part because there were weird crosslinks between the different pieces of clothing, so that the material presets wouldn't apply correctly to any one piece of clothing. There was a related issue -- which would likely not have mattered but for the weird crosslinks -- that every piece of clothing had a default surface called "default." Which meant that when you tried to use the jacket materials, the crosslink and the surface name meant that it would apply incorrectly to every piece. So, while it's startling that it's not in the store already -- it's all of a month old! -- it's actually not surprising. I'm guessing it got taken back into the garage for a refit, as it were, and may return later.

What I wound up doing with Jinn was leaving the shirt and pants from Weekend Casual on him, and using the coat from the H&C Coat Outfit A instead. Added dForce surfaces to the coat, turned dynamic strength on the buttons down to zero, and it simmed perfectly. The buttons moved with the coat (... mostly; no idea how the lapel wound up under one of the buttons), didn't get drippy, almost everything was as it should be. (It's possible that the shirt and pants simmed correctly as well. They're all very tight, so it's kind of hard to notice.)

It also turns out that dForce and aprons ... need work. I suspect that it may work best for vendors to build aprons for dForce, rather than trying to retrofit. For one thing, there have to be the right number of surfaces; for another, they're going to have to do different things; finally, parts of this may need to be semi-rigid -- or at least have varying levels of dynamic strength and stiffness here and there. In this scene, I used one of Wilmap/Pusey Designs' older aprons and tried to make it work. The difficulties I ran into were: the neck straps and bib aren't separate surfaces, and both overstretched a bit; however, when I tried to reduce dynamic strength even a little, they just didn't move at all. Same thing happened with the belt, and with the part of the apron below the belt. I think that it's just going to require a lot of tinkering to get things right on that -- well, that and weight maps, and I've already mentioned more than once that weight mapping and I are not friends, so someone else will need to do that.

I did discover the perfect way to make a dForce sim take an eternity:
1) put body hair on your characters arms and legs
2) put dForce clothing on them
3) forget to turn off the body hair
4) sim.

An hour later, you'll be scratching your head and wondering what on earth is going on here when it's only 12% stabilized.

The cat is the Hivewire Cat. He's been fed. Doesn't care. Humans have food. Cat should be fed again.