Intro

I'm newbee to 3D modeling and the guides in the tutorials section helped me a lot. My experiments with accessories and gags inspired me to create something more complex.

I'm a fan of the old series of slasher games Bloodrayne and decided to make outfit for her. Outfit packs (from MG and for v7.5) already have miss Rayne's standard black-red leather outfit, so I chose her stylish evening dress from the last part of the game. It's quite simple, but memorable.

The Plan

My plan was simple and ingenious:

- rip the 3D model out of the gameplay directly using third-party 3D rippers. Import this sample into Max and save it as OBJ for future editing

- separate the mesh of the dress, gloves and boots from the sample

- add polygons and adjust them to the body shape of FBV2

- add H5 textures and detailing

- ...

- PROFIT!

So lets go!

The Fail

I successfully ripped a couple of scenes out of the game and got to work. What I saw in Max was simply terrible. It was a mess of hitboxes, mesh, various duplicates and crooked textures.
It became obvious that it would take a very long time to start working with outfit models
At one time, this game had a fairly large community of fans and modders. I decided to look for programs to work with models from this game. And luckily I was able to find them and to convert models from the game archives to format OBJ. I also successfully obtained textures in the usual TGA format.

The real mesh of Miss Rayne's model was quite large in size (~10 times larger than the models in our game), was low poly, and each significant part of the body was made with a separate piece of mesh. In addition to this, the dress had additional layers to accommodate impacts. Also, the basic body pose was A-type, while we use a T-pose.

Nevertheless, this already made it possible to have a real visual example for work.

Plan B

I will not Give Up. Although the clothes turned out to be just textures on the mesh and divided into body parts, it made it possible to create the necessary meshes manually with the required proportions.

- for boots, create a sole with a heel in Blender, focusing on the existing sample
- create boot tops in Marvelous Designer(MD) for FBV2 body with the correct bend of the legs
- combine the tops and soles in Blender
- create gloves completely in MD and fit them to body shape in Blender
- dress can also be created in MD for a specific FBV2 figure with a sufficient degree of realism
- create textures in Substance Painter

WIP:Boots

With the help of YouTube guides I was able to create a pretty good sole mesh. There were some minor problems with upside-down normals and torn seams on the UV, but overall it turned out successfully

In MD I essentially created stockings. Although in the original model it is generally unclear what exactly the boots look like in the knee area

After combining 2 meshes and several scale edits in Blender, the result turned out quite good

Working in Substance Painter turned out to be much easier than in Blender and MD.

WIP:Gloves

Making the gloves was the fastest. There were some minor problems with the correct position of the shoulders and finger joints, but they were resolved

WIP:Dress (Great fail No2)

I spent a huge amount of time trying to create a dress similar to the sample. But unsuccessfully. Overall, the dress has a fairly simple pattern, but it stubbornly refused to hug the body like in the example. I tried different materials and simulation parameters, changed patterns and seams. Fail. The dress looked either saggy or skewed in different parts of the body.

Out of desperation, I started working with a low-poly sample and manually adjusted all the vertices to the body.

Then i increased the number of vertices and adjusted it again.

This is tedious and long work. Especially for a noob. Although, even when working on the boots, I figured out to work with only half of the mesh and then use a mirror.

CTK(Evil inside)

In my previous experiments I encountered big problems. In general, the work of CTK and bat files is easy to understand. But I spent a lot of time figuring out the reasons for the wrong porting of the addon into the game. The meshes turned out to be upside down, folders and script files were not created, etc. As a result, a search on the forum gave a solution - to rewrite the bat files for VX completely since they were damaged or not working initially. After that everything worked perfectly.
When working with boots, I again encountered the problem of the shoes shifting relative to the model's feet.

Having wasted time again, I figured out to change the “ -as "Setting/Anim_Skeleton/default.txt" ^” line in the bat file. Unfortunately, no one in the guides mentioned that for high-heeled shoes you need to change the animation settings in the bat file.

Texturing(Picasso's spirit)

As I already said, working in painter turned out to be quite simple. Load the model, bake normal maps, select a material, change its color, scale, orientation and export a rich set of textures. If you want to add details, then working with layers, masks, brushes, stamps will not be a surprise for you if you have worked in PS or another good editor.

Unfortunately, the texture set does not contain specular maps, which we are used to in H5. But I don't give up. I noticed that the roughness map suspiciously resembles our specular map. Only it consists of shades of gray.

I tried using a regular frame-dimensional specular map (latex, metal or glass) from the H5 set as a background and overlaid a roughness map in PS on it.

It worked! I suspect this is a very bad solution, but it's simple and quick for a newbie like me.

Weights! Weights everywhere!(Almost fail)

Сreating weights through transfer from a sample is quite well described in guides and questions on the forum. in outline.
As said - working with the distribution of weights is the most fun part. Is it true(nope).

The boots did not cause any problems; I just needed to simplify the weight of the sole and adjust the heel.

The boot tops fit the leg quite tightly and with active movements the skin of the shin shows through the surface of the boot. I solved it simply - I disabled the model's lower leg and foot.
I did roughly the same thing with the gloves. Adjusted the tips of the shoulders and disabled the wrists, hands and fingernails.
Working on the dress took me a week. In our game there are almost no dresses or skirts with long hemlines. and this is not without reason. Realistic movement of non-tight fabric when moving legs requires good physics in the game engine. Perhaps using PhysX tools in H5 you can create something similar, but in reality the long skirt is forced to strictly track the movements of the bones of the hips, knees and legs.

And it looks rude.

And after few iterations it was much more better:

Another problem was the medallion on the chest. This is not just a decoration, but a connecting link that connects both breasts and the collar. and it is not at all plastic. the movements of the breasts tried to stretch him in different directions. It was difficult to make it both independent and not hanging in the air. the medallion tracks the movements of the spine.

Outro
Overall I am satisfied with the result of my work. A short version of the dress is in work for now. for convenience during the game.

To complete the image, all that remains is to make a hair model (we already have quite similar ones) and blades (we also have them, but they are quite bad)

I want to tell beginners only one thing - you will succeed, but it will take a lot of time.