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I wanted to share here the steps to add your own clothing assets to the characters:
- Steps to add Clothing
- Design the clothing (or get them from some where). I found fuse to have a nice library of clothing
- Use the base character to fit the clothing
- Make sure to Ctrl+A (Apply transformation)
- Parent the clothing item to the armature
- Transfer the weights from the model to the clothing item
- Select the mesh with the weights (the body of the character in this case)
- Select the target (the clothing item in this case)
- Go to weight paint mode
- Weights (menu item) -> Transfer weights
- Use "by Name"
- Transfer the shape-keys from the character to the clothing. To do that we need an add-on (Shape Key Tools) - I have made some modification to this add-on which aren't published yet.
- Select the source mesh
- Select the destination mesh
- Copy the list of shape keys by using the "Copy Shape Keys" button
- Remove any unneeded shape keys. In my case its the face shape keys as they don't really apply to the clothing
- Paste them back in the list of shape keys to transfer using the "Insert Shape keys" button
- Hit the "Transfer Listed Shape Keys". This will transfer the shape keys to the clothing
- Do any required cleanups
- Hit the transfer drivers from shape keys
- Copy the drivers on the shape keys
- This will require modifying the add-on to copy the driver from each shape key and then add it to the copied shape key
- Drivers are needed so the clothing can follow the modification in the body variants
- Modify the pose_bones['body_variants']['clothes_top'] and pose_bones['body_variants']['clothes_bottom'] to account for the new clothing
- Modify the driver on the mask modifier invert button so that when the variable is set to whatever specific value make the clothes appear or disappear
- Modify the mask drivers on the model to make sure that they kick in when the clothes are selected.
Depending on time I might do a video tutorial on this