Basic clothing mods: bones and meshes

This post will eventually discuss the relationship between bones and meshes, which basically dictate whether your mods will work the way you want them to.


1. Mesh replacement is important. You need to choose the correct mesh index to replace. Case in point: my first attempt at connecting wings left me quite stumped. I didn't know you could specify the mesh index, and when I did find out, I found that the left wing was pointing to mesh 0, and the right wing was pointing to mesh 1. These were the defaults that it offered, and I was wondering why the left wing was attached while the right wing wasn't. So I'm inclined to believe which mesh you replace does make a difference.

Most clothing mods I believe will be done on the karada mesh (body)

For viara,

index 0 is the main body, which includes the upper body (excluding arms), torso, breasts, butt, legs, and feet.
index 1 are the arms and the nipples
index 2 are the fingernailss and toenails (ok probably useless for the most part, but I guess if you wanted to make a real wolfgirl...)
Rest I'm not sure, but probably genitals and tail, which probably aren't too important...

For other characters, you'll have to figure out what the meshes are yourself cause I'm not interested in most of them, which isn't too hard if you just export the object and examine it in meta.

2. bone connecting is important. This is the real part: getting your clothes (and perhaps extra limbs?) to behave correctly when you move the body.
In SB3U, the renderer has a bones option which will show you all the bones in the current mesh. You'll see that the body has a lot of bones, and my guess is that when you're replacing meshes using "copy near" for bones, your meshes will be connected to any nearby bones.

For some meshes, this isn't a big deal. Like simple wings; those are really the easiest things to attach since all you need to do is make sure that you connect it to their spine and nothing else lol Next I suppose would be undergarments.

For me I went straight for a miko outfit so I had great difficulty trying to avoid the hips and breasts while connecting to all of the arm bones. Just connecting to, say, the elbow isn't enough. You need to connect to the entire arm, which may pose a challenge.

Fortunately, illusion morpher makes it really easy with the xdiff-based morphing and meta's scaling which allows you to quickly slap on custom shape that spans across the bones you want, insert it onto the body, and then morph it to its intended shape.