- Create All Masks: Create mask modifiers and vertex groups for all meshes on the active mesh.
- Create Selected Masks: Create mask modifiers and vertex groups for all selected meshes on the active mesh.
- Add Visibility Drivers: Create visibility drivers for all mesh children of the active armature.
- Remove Visibility Drivers: Remove all visibility drivers from the active armature.
Parts of the skin is covered by clothes, but the character mesh is still
there right below. This may be a problem because the skin can poke
through the clothes in some places. The simplest solution is simply to
delete the hidden vertices. This is also the best option if you know that the
character will always be dressed in the same way, because removing vertices will increase performance. However, if Maria will
take off some of her clothes at some stage, it will look strange if there is no
body beneath.
Another
solution is to use mask modifiers, and the DAZ importer provides some
support to facilitate this. Select all clothes that need to mask the underlying skin, and the shift-select the character mesh to make it active. Finally press Create Selected Masks.
Maria's mesh has acquired four mask modifiers, one for each piece of clothing that need masking. Four empty vertex groups have also been created.
If we had pressed Create All Masks instead, masks would have been created for all meshes that belong to Maria, including the hair. In that case it is not necessary to select the clothes.
Populate the vertex groups with the vertices that are covered by the corresponding piece of clothing. Since masking works as if the corresponding vertices were deleted, all faces which contain at least one masked vertex will be hidden. We must therefore be careful to not let the mask extend too far. It is not important that all covered vertices are masked, but only those that may poke through the clothes.
We can see the effect of the mask modifiers if we move the clothes to a different layer.
With the armature selected, press Add Visibility Drivers. All meshes that are children of the armature acquire visibility drivers. The viewport and render visibility icons in the outliner turn purple which indicates that these properties have drivers.
A new Visibility panel appears when the armature is selected. Here we can toggle the visibility of the individual clothes on and off. When a piece of clothing is hidden, the corresponding mask modifier is muted, so the underlying vertices are no longer invisible.
Since visibility is driven by rig properties, this functionality works with file linking.
