Those are great questions! Indeed, the reason I’m using bone morphs for the bone instead of blendshapes is mostly related to clothing.
Right now, the process to generate clothes is quite straightforward:
- In Blender: Bind the clothes to the armature and then use the “transfer skin weights” modifier from the base body to the clothes.
- In Maya LT: Bind the clothes to the skeleton and then use “Copy skin weights” from the base body to the clothes
This is a 2-minutes process that will ensure that any bone morphs are transferred over to the clothes. If you skin a shirt to a character and then increase the belly size scaling the proper bone, the shirt itself will increase in size and conform to the new body.
This, I’m afraid, can not be done with normal blendshapes (only with bones). That’s why I’m using blendshapes for facial features and bone morphs for body features.
Right now it’s possible to control, using bones: breasts, arms length, neck size & length, head size, upper body size, belly and legs width. Legs length seems to be extremely tricky and I’m still trying to figure out if it’s possible to control this with bones, ensuring that animations still work properly. This is somewhat difficult as increasing the leg size distorts the base of the character (so if you increase the leg size you also have to move the root bone upwards to ensure that the character is still above the ground)
I’ll post some videos soon. I’m happy to see some interest in regards to the project, so thank you very much for your comments!