Today's work was getting the UUNP conversion of those new Edhildil legs done. Getting the caps lined up to the new shape was less onerous than I was afraid it would be, thanks to some judicious use of the mask and positioning tools. And they respond pretty well to getting conformed to the bodymorphs, aside from some of the more esoteric presets making them distinctly wavy. The rest of the leg, though...

All those nice new mechanical bits above the knee do not like getting slammed down by the thigh sliders. And the knees aren't exactly happy about it either, but since pretty much every UUNP preset has the legs on a significantly different plane from the base shape, for some damn reason, it's impossible to avoid warping them. I hadn't really thought about it until I worked on these, but I ended up neatly sidestepping the knee issue with the original Edhildil legs by basing my UUNP conversion on the existing UNPB conversion (did I credit that? I should credit that) instead of Edhildil's original meshes. My initial conversion actually pre-dates the rest of this set by several months, and was one of the first UUNP conversions I'd attempted, so I hadn't really considered the import of the fact that converting it from UNPB caused distortions to the UUNP base shape's knees which would then be reversed when the legs were moved back to the plane the actual UNP family presets have them on. The result of that most of the possible generated bodies using those legs will have relatively round side-gear thingies, which is most decidedly not the result I'm getting from these new legs. 

I also ran into a problem in another area. A large part of the personal appeal of these new legs are those nice, clean leg caps, so of course I want to do a Disassembled version of them. It looks damn good, too!

Except...

They got a hole in 'em. Now I certainly could just find something to use as a filler there, as I have in other cases of unfortunate holes (*cough*), but I'm not exactly satisfied by the idea. Throwing something else into an area that's already getting crunched up weirdly by the bodymorphs doesn't seem like the best way to go, either.

So I've got two problems: parts of the mesh that I don't want to be affected by bodymorphs, and parts of the mesh that I need to leave covered. Looking at how the parts were originally built, the obvious solution is to make like Solomon and split these babies.

By splitting the caps and the 'connector' piece off from the rest of the legs, I can conform the former to the bodymorphs while leaving the latter completely unaffected by them. 

This does cause the robot thighs to remain static as the morphs move the cap pieces about them, but the deformation of the 'connector' piece generally has enough play to it for the connection to be as believable as any of this wonky-ass Dwarven automaton shit ever is. (My first attempt, which left that connector as part of the lower leg, needs never be spoken of again)

(Slim Thighs / Thighs / Chubby Legs Sliders)

And leaving the 'connector' on the thigh caps has the added bonus of providing a cover for those holes.

Although I do personally kind of prefer the original look with just the caps... Maybe I'll find another use for those somewhere along the line. For the immediate issue, this is an acceptably elegant solution.

I mean, really, this'll do just fine.