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Description
I thought it might be worth talking about what I'm doing here, because I haven't seen other people doing it like this. This is just something I'm experimenting with.

I'm doing my skinning with automatic weights in Blender. Automatic weights basically work by proximity. If mesh is near a bone, it get weighted. If it's near the tail, it gets weighted heavily. The further the mesh is from the bone, the "blurrier" the weights.

So you can see here that I have tons of bones, way more than a reasonable model ought to have, but it's not a big issue because they're basically just for the generation of auto weights. When a bone doesn't have quite the extent that it ought to, doesn't affect a part of the mesh in the correct way, I give that bone a child and put it someplace to grab more of the weights. Probably, you never end up using these bones, they're just used for weight generation. But some of them end up being kind of cool, so I'll keep them, rather than subsume their weights. Like I have a couple of "belly" bones just to give a different sort of weighting to the belly, but they actually make some cool deforms, stuff that would be useful for breathing.

I don't like envelope weights, because the bones end up getting scaled up in every axis. A lot of the time, I want the envelope to be more directional than that. But maybe I'll experiment with that some more too.

I figure after I get my base weights, I'll make a duplicate of the skeleton and re-parent without changing weights so that I can adjust the position of the bones. So I have a skeleton for weight generation, and a different skeleton for bone position. Because sometimes those bones' origins need tweaking. Still want to keep the weight gen skeleton for adjustments later on. Trying to avoid by-hand tweaking, because I know too much of the mesh is going to change, want to save that kind of stuff for near the end.

And, here I have my new underwear. Used a combination of cloth and manual techniques; the cloth didn't end up mattering, it's not wrinkled (although come to think of it, I ought to use it to make some stretch wrinkles in the bottom, why didn't I think of that.) Found myself increasing the quality of the sim a lot to be able to use higher shrink/sew values. Sometimes I used cloth to generate the outlines, then created new meshes based on those outlines and pinned the edge vertices. For whatever else, the lines are cleaner than what I was doing before, and the mesh is a lot smoother than doing it by hand.

Description
I thought it might be worth talking about what I'm doing here, because I haven't seen other people doing it like this. This is just something I'm experimenting with.

I'm doing my skinning with automatic weights in Blender. Automatic weights basically work by proximity. If mesh is near a bone, it get weighted. If it's near the tail, it gets weighted heavily. The further the mesh is from the bone, the "blurrier" the weights.

So you can see here that I have tons of bones, way more than a reasonable model ought to have, but it's not a big issue because they're basically just for the generation of auto weights. When a bone doesn't have quite the extent that it ought to, doesn't affect a part of the mesh in the correct way, I give that bone a child and put it someplace to grab more of the weights. Probably, you never end up using these bones, they're just used for weight generation. But some of them end up being kind of cool, so I'll keep them, rather than subsume their weights. Like I have a couple of "belly" bones just to give a different sort of weighting to the belly, but they actually make some cool deforms, stuff that would be useful for breathing.

I don't like envelope weights, because the bones end up getting scaled up in every axis. A lot of the time, I want the envelope to be more directional than that. But maybe I'll experiment with that some more too.

I figure after I get my base weights, I'll make a duplicate of the skeleton and re-parent without changing weights so that I can adjust the position of the bones. So I have a skeleton for weight generation, and a different skeleton for bone position. Because sometimes those bones' origins need tweaking. Still want to keep the weight gen skeleton for adjustments later on. Trying to avoid by-hand tweaking, because I know too much of the mesh is going to change, want to save that kind of stuff for near the end.

And, here I have my new underwear. Used a combination of cloth and manual techniques; the cloth didn't end up mattering, it's not wrinkled (although come to think of it, I ought to use it to make some stretch wrinkles in the bottom, why didn't I think of that.) Found myself increasing the quality of the sim a lot to be able to use higher shrink/sew values. Sometimes I used cloth to generate the outlines, then created new meshes based on those outlines and pinned the edge vertices. For whatever else, the lines are cleaner than what I was doing before, and the mesh is a lot smoother than doing it by hand.