Hello people, ImAFutureGuitarHero here.
If you remember a few months ago, I released the "Soup Store" animation,
in which I used anthropomorphic versions of Sunset and Starlight as the main characters.
When I made that, I mentioned in the description that I might eventually do a tutorial on how I go about setting up these models,
since it's not exactly a straight-forward process,
and more recently I've been getting questions on DeviantART and on Derpibooru about how it's done –
or comments about how my style of anthro is different from nearly all of the other SFM anthro art out there –
and the occasional comment about how the head's too big, but hey,
I figured I'd do one for you guys.
Also, I'd possibly be doing some other tutorials on my methods in Source Filmmaker,
so stay tuned for that.
SUNSET: [Exclaims]
Uh, with all that said, let's start by turning this human model of Sunset
into an abominati--
[oy blyat]
into an anthropomorphic version of her.
Let's begin.
SUNSET: [Grunts]
Before we load Source Filmmaker and get to making an anthro,
we need to do some prep work involving the texture files for the models we'll be using.
We need to make sure that the coat colour for the head will match that of the body.
With the Sunset model, the coat colour is a honey yellow colour,
and that's way darker than that of the EQG Sunset model, which is closer to a light skin tone.
What I'll be showing here is how to match the two skin colours using the EQG model as a base,
but if you wanted to, you could easily do it the other way around, using the pony model colour as a base.
The textures you'll be looking for will be:
"body.vtf" for the pony model;
and then "skin.vtf" and "lips.vtf" for the EQG model.
Locate these three textures and open them with VTFEdit.
If you don't have VTFEdit, there's a download link in the description,
it's a free program and it comes in hella handy for any texture modifications, like this one.
What we'll be using VTFEdit for is to export the .vtf file to a format that can be read by Photoshop,
or indeed any image editing software, like Paint.NET or Gimp.
Go to "File" and then "Export" to save it as a .tga file.
You can also save it as a .png if you want to.
Or a .jpg.
Not
Not sure why you'd want to, but there's the option anyway.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Now that you have the textures exported, you can open them in your image editor of choice.
I'll be using Photoshop for this example, and as such the methods I show will pertain more to Photoshop,
but you should be able to achieve basically the same thing in any other software you decide to use.
In "body.tga", you want to use the Magic Wand tool –
If you don't see it, it should be under the Quick Select tool. – and select the body colour.
I'm using a tolerance of 32 for this.
If we just fill this as-is, we'll have some sharp and pixellated edges,
so we need to go to "Select and Mask..." at the top here,
and in the control panel that appears, turn up the "Smooth" slider a bit.
Don't go overboard with this, otherwise it'll interpolate the pixels too much
and you'll lose some definition in sharp angles like on the corners of the lips.
You can also play with the "Shift Edge" control a little bit to taste, see how that works.
Once you're done with that, click "OK".
With this selection made, you want to go to the "skin.tga" file from the EQG model,
and use the Eyedropper tool to select the colour from this texture file.
Now you go back to "body.tga", and you now want to make a new layer,
and using the Paint Bucket tool, fill in the area we selected from before.
You can deselect that now.
Since we have made this edit on a new layer, separate from the background,
to adjust the lip colour (if we need to) is very simple.
You just make a new layer between the "Background" and the skin colour layer,
and we can just use the Brush tool to colour over the original lip colour.
It's a bit more involved though for the lip colour around the inner mouth area,
due to this gradient that happens here.
For this, we need to use the Magic Wand tool again, this time on the pink area of the texture,
and then under "Select and Mask..." we need to adjust the sliders to recreate that gradient in the selection.
Setting the "Feather" slider to 6 px and "Shift Edge" to +30% gets pretty close to the original gradient level.
Then click "OK".
Use the Eyedropper tool on the pink colour, make a new layer above the layer you're using for the lip colour,
and fill the selection in with pink on this layer.
Then you can colour in on the lip layer with the new lip colour.
With that, the updated texture is now finished.
You can save this as a Photoshop file (.psd), preferrably with a different name from the original texture so you don't overwrite it.
I'm just naming it "body_2.psd".
And then the same file, as a .tga file this time.
You can now import the new texture into VTFEdit,
making sure that the "Resize", "Generate Mipmaps" and "Generate Normal Map" options are unchecked.
Once it loads up in VTFEdit successfully (might take a little while),
you can save this as a .vtf file.
If you're overwriting the original texture, that's all you'll have to do –
the model will have the new texture by default in Source Filmmaker now.
But since we're saving a copy so we retain the original texture as a backup,
we need to edit the .vmt file so that Source Filmmaker uses the new texture instead of the old one.
Open "body.vmt" and look for the "$basetexture" line, should be somewhere at the top.
Change the filename and directory following "$basetexture" to the new filename, in this case, "body_2".
Save the .vmt file, and now the pony model is ready to be used in an anthro setup.
Alright, once you've loaded into Source Filmmaker
and you've loaded the map and camera position
and SFM hasn't crashed yet,
we will start with headhacking.
If you don't know what headhacking is, it can be summarised as
taking the head from one model, and putting it onto another.
And to do this, you want to start by spawning in the body model.
I generally use the Equestria Girls V2 models by Sindroom,
but you can use the original ones made from CreatorOfPony's base.
There are some slight differences between them, mainly with anatomical proportions,
and so this tutorial will be focusing on the V2 models, so keep that in mind.
A word of advice at this point: I would avoid moving the camera or rotating the models from their base orientation
until you've finished setting up the character, and I'll show the reason for this in a moment.
You now want to load in the pony model you'll be using for the head.
Both of these models should be facing the same orientation, which will make it easier to join the head onto the body.
Now you want to navigate to where the head bone on each of the models are located in the Animation Set Editor,
and click and drag the head bone from the body model onto the head bone of the pony model,
which will lock the pony model's head to that of the body model.
This is where we start joining the models together.
You want to enter the Motion Editor, click only the "pos" attribute, or position – this is important –
and slide the "Zero" slider all the way to the right.
If you were to select both "pos" and "rot", "rot" being rotation,
it would also rotate it, which is not what we want.
As of right now, this looks extremely weird, and that's because the head is extremely big and the rest of the pony body is still showing,
but this is what the model should look like right now.
SUNSET: [Grunts]
Something's not quite right here.
So, we need to hide the rest of the pony body, and the way we can do that,
we can use the same method we used for the head, now for the neck and pelvis bones.
You need to lock the neck bone of the pony model to the neck bone of the body,
and then the pelvis bone of the pony model to "spine_2" on the body,
and then using the "Zero" slider on both of these.
At this point, you'll also need to re-lock the head, this time to the neck bone,
because we will be needing to hide the original head from the body model.
Select the head, neck and pelvis bones on the body model, right-click on any one of them, and select "Add Scale Control to Transforms".
This will allow you to change the size of each of these bones.
For the pelvis bone, you'd want to size that down to 0 to hide it completely,
And for the head and neck bones, I generally go with 0.06 on the head and 0.045 or 0.05 on the neck.
These sizes obviously depend on the body model you decide to use, and partly personal preference.
You also need to right-click on the pony model, go to "Utilities" and click "Bake Procedural Bones".
This'll keep the mane the size it should be in relation to the head,
because by default, scaling down the head doesn't scale down the jigglebones in the hair or the ears,
therefore you'd get something that looks like it came out of the 80s, if you know what I mean.
We have a few more things to fix.
Notice we still have the head from the body model that's visible.
We can fix that by adding a scale control to that and sizing it down.
However! You don't want to size it down to 0,
because that can cause the body model to cull and disappear when you aim the camera too far down, as shown here.
Instead, it needs to be a number like 0.001, or something extremely small.
This means that you'll also need to bake the jiggles on the body model,
but it also prevents the culling that happened before.
The other thing to fix is the neck, which, by default, from the "Zero" slider, is a bit too high up.
You can simply move it down a bit to fix it.
One more thing left is the eyeposing controls. This is optional, but I prefer to do this, it just makes it easier for me.
You want to go to where the "viewTarget" controls are on the two models,
and lock the control on the pony model to the same control on the body, and then "Zero" that.
What this means is that the "viewTarget" control on the human model now works on the eyes on the pony head.
And with that, we have set up a basic anthro model.
A couple of things to keep in mind is that
the neck seam is pretty much unavoidable without at least some post-processing,
so if you're doing animation with an anthro model, you'll need to put extra work into hiding the seam with lighting and positioning in SFM.
Speaking of animating, if you do intend to animate an anthro model and you want to use the default jigglebones,
you'll need to re-enable the jigglebones and bake them again once you've animated the character.
However, ideally, or at least for me, I'd want jiggles enabled while I animate,
so what I would recommend is to add a scale control to the "rootTransform" bone of the body model
and then size it up so that the jiggles stay the same size whether they're baked or enabled.
For the size of 0.06 on the head, you want to set the "rootTransform" scale to 0.166 repeated. (0.16666666...)
Now this does mean that everything else in the scene will have to be sized appropriately to match,
but it does mean that you can animate with jiggles activated.
This segues into the next stage of anthro setup:
hair replacement.
Let's say you don't want the mane that comes on the pony model by default,
and you want to replace it with the Equestria Girls variant that looks more natural in a bipedal context.
For this I've found the V1 models to work best due to the shape of the head and the extra jigglebones in the hair, at least for the most part.
In the case of Sunset here, I'm going to grab the Equestria Girls V1 model of Sunset that's made by EmpireOfTime.
Also I want to mention that if you do this step, and that you do want to change the hair out for one from an Equestria Girls model,
usually these models have a slightly different colour palette used on the hair compared to the pony counterparts,
and by default they have a bump map.
Which frankly, looks
Which frankly, looks bloody hideous to me.
In the case of Sunset here I haven't changed the hair colour because it looks alright as it is, actually,
but I have disabled the bump map, and you can do this by
going into the .vmt file for the hair using either Notepad++ or VTFEdit, or even regular old Notepad works as well,
and commenting out or removing the "$bumpmap" line altogether.
If you do decide to do this, you'll also need to add "$basemapalphaphongmask" "1".
Otherwise, ambient occlusion won't show up on the model.
Now that you have that sorted out, you can start doing a similar process to the headhacking from before.
Lock the Equestria Girls head that you're using for the hair, this time to the pony head, and then use the "Zero" slider on the "pos" attribute.
Do the same to lock the pelvis bone of the Equestria Girls model to the head of the pony model, and again with the "Zero" slider.
Since this model has jigglebones that will be showing, you'll also need to bake those as well.
Now you can add a scale control to the head and pelvis, sizing the pelvis down to 0 to hide it altogether,
and sizing up the head so that the hair covers the head properly.
I find that 0.125 on the head works well.
So here we have the Equestria Girls model's hair on the pony head, but we can still see the original hair clipping through it.
SUNSET: [Exclaims]
Depending on the pony model hiding this is either easy or hard.
Most of the enhanced models, or at least the ones by JuiceDane, like the one for Twilight here,
have a bodygroup that allows you to simply hide the mane altogether.
But in the case of Sunset here, she does not, so we'll have to do some extra work to make this work.
We need to hide the original mane through the Element Viewer, through Material Overrides.
Right-click the pony model and select "Add Override Materials".
Then right-click the model again, go to "Show in Element Viewer", and then select "Model."
This window will pop up.
Scroll down to "materials" and find a material called "hair" or "mane", or somethings similar, some models have it named differently.
Right-click on the material, go to "Add Attribute" and then click "float".
In the window that pops up, where it says "newAttribute", you want to type "$alpha", and click "OK".
This will hide the mane.
Now at this point, you might be thinking, "Yes! I'm done with the hair part!"
...
...Not quite.
Let me show you what happens when you enable lighting.
[Loud switch] [Lights turn on]
See, there's a shadow where the mane used to be,
and this happens because the mane is actually still there, and casting shadows;
only difference being that it's not visible.
So now you need to disable shadow-casting on the hair, and there's two methods to go about this.
Method 1 is to add a scale control to the jigglebones for the hair, and size them down to 0.
That'll get rid of most of the shadows, but you might have to play with
moving around the jigglebones inside the head to further remove them.
Other than that, this method does work, for the most part.
Method 2, however, works better than Method 1, and is basically foolproof,
but there's a caveat that I'll get to in a moment.
For method 2 you need to go into the .vmt file for the hair,
and you want to add "$translucent" "1" to it.
And make sure it's before the "$basetexture" line. It has to be before that.
To make this take effect in SFM without actually reloading the program,
you can go into the command console and type "mat_reloadallmaterials", and click Enter.
It might take a moment.
And what "$translucent" does is that it allows the material to let light through it,
and therefore disables shadow casting for that material.
Now the caveat I mentioned is that,
say, in the future, you wanted to use the mane as it was intended without doing this mane-swap/hair-swap process.
You'd need to comment out or remove this line from the .vmt to make it appear as normal again,
since "$translucent" is a .vmt-only command,
so you can't add it through Material Overrides, and you can't edit it through Material Overrides.
so I just generally go with method 1 when I'm doing this.
You'll also notice that some of the parts of the Equestria Girls model are showing through the head,
such as the eyelashes and the human ears.
The way we can fix that is to add "$alpha" to the parts we don't want visible, through the Material Overrides.
The materials marked "oral", "body", "head" and "ink" are the ones that I add "$alpha" to.
With that, the anthro now has a bigger bed of hair.
Depending on the model and the size of the hair,
you might also need to move the ears of the pony model outwards to make them show through the hair,
especially in the case of Sunset's hairstyle here.
The trick to allow jigglebones to be enabled by scaling "rootTransform" also works with this,
but you'd need to scale it to a different amount, since the hair is also scaled.
For the hair being at 0.125 and the head being at 0.06,
setting the "rootTransform" scale to 0.133 repeated (0.13333333...) allows you enable the jigglebones without any issues.
Compared to replacing the hair,
adding a tail is probably the easiest part of setting up an anthro character, comparatively speaking at least.
For this, you need to spawn another instance of the pony model in,
and this time locking the pelvis of the pony model to the pelvis of the body model, and then using the "Zero" slider again.
Next, you need to lock the first tail bone to the pelvis of the body model,
because we need to hide the rest of the pony body with a scale control.
Add a scale control to both "Pelvis" and "Tail1".
Make sure you lock the jigglebones and size the pelvis down to 0.
I generally size the tail around between 0.06 or 0.08,
but the size of the tail depends on how big you want the tail and how big or long the tail is to begin with.
So now your anthro character has a tail.
This is generally the point that I settle on for my anthro pictures,
but there is another step that I occasionally decide to do, and that is
making the legs unguligrade.
[Exclaims]
Like this.
If you wanted to see what goes into replacing the legs, I'll be putting that into a Part 2 video, as
this anthro is set up right now and can be posed or animated in its current state,
and to be honest it's easier to leave it at that.
But if you really want to make the legs unguligrade, there is a video for Part 2 on the screen right now.
So with that, I'll leave you with the end of Part 1 of this anthro tutorial.
Thanks for watching.