I honestly did not expect this to work.

 

The first thing I noticed when I tried tossing the Gynoid limbs onto the existing lower torso assembly from the Bikini Robot was that it looked better than I expected. The second was that it still didn't look great. The thin, skeletal mid-torso provided by the existing spinal mesh in particular felt terribly off-balance with the almost fully-human limbs. So I wanted a replacement for that, but I wasn't entirely sure how to go about it.

 

That spine piece was the big hangup when it came to building the first Edhildil robot body. I had no idea how to do the weighting on it. My attempts to hand-paint it like I managed to do with the neck piece on the heads did not end well, and I couldn't copy the weights from the UUNP reference body because Outfit Studio wouldn't transfer them to something placed in the very middle of the mesh. It wasn't until I realized I could load other meshes in as references and stole the weighting from the Dwarven Trooper model that I got the damn thing working, and I've treated it as something kind of precious ever since. I didn't even try to use anything different for the Bikini Robots, basically building those around it. And it worked great with the Bikini set's equally skeletal limbs. 

 

I've always kind of wished I had built something a bit more robust for that first Edhildil version, though. It could've used something to fill out the mid-torso just as much as the Gynoid does, but the Sphere Centurion spine was pretty much the only really workable option in the parts I had available at the time.

 

I've been piling up a lot of new parts since then.

 

However, I'm still not that much better at weight-painting. A bit past the 'what the fuck is even going on here' stage, maybe, but it still terrifies me.

 

But I wanted a break from all the chest-related stuff I've been doing (more on that at a later date) and I had some general ideas for what wanted to do for the Gynoid-style lower torso, so I figured I could toss some parts together and take my chances on the weighting afterwards. 

 

The base model turned out quite nice. 

 

 

My initial intent was to carry over the boiler and Sphere wing pieces from the Bikini version, but it quickly became clear that the Scroll Chamber rings that I wanted to use to fill out the torso would be hard to fit with the breastplates at any decent size without modification, while the Gilded pipe meshes I wanted to use to fill in the space inside the rings didn't fit well with the boiler mesh at the one end and had nowhere to go at all on the other. Swapping in the two spool pieces cut from the Dwarven Ballista and compressing the whole lot into a more humanoid oval shape solved both problems, and sticking the 'pelvic' cup from the Ballista on the top gave me a nice way to connect to the upper torso models. The downside was that the crotch and butt pieces I made with the Sphere wings for the Bikini version didn't really mesh visually with this assembly at all, but I had been thinking about using the Spider undercarriage piece in a way similar to the Extras pack's Modesty Plating anyway, so I just tossed that on there. Reusing it for the butt pieces that the Gynoid legs in particular need was a happy bit of early morning inspiration.

 

So I had this all built, but none of it was weighted. I had no clue if I could even get it weighted. But I had ended up with something pretty close to human-shaped, unlike last time, so I decided to load in the UUNP reference and try copying from it.

 

 

And holy fucking shit, it actually worked.

 

 

Almost completely worked, anyway. There was still stuff at the very core of it, about half of the central column and some of the innermost chunks of the pipes, that I had to add weight to by hand, but with properly weighted bits right next to them that wan't any kind of an issue. I hadn't expected to get anything usable out of building this at all, and here I ended up almost instantly with a nearly perfectly workable part.

 

 

Nearly.

 

The broad strokes and even most of the medium strokes were fine, but it still took another five hours of work to iron out all the little details. Lots of small changes to the weight painting and component positions to eliminate movement clipping, particularly with the rings and the Remodeled back plate and the inner pipes and the rings. Deleting unneeded bones from certain components so they'd stay solid in motion. Even swapping out a couple of parts here and there. And of course constantly popping in and out of the game to see if the latest changes worked. But all that still went far faster than it would've if I tried to do it all by hand, and I ended up with something I'm quite happy with.

 

I think I can best express this with a pic dump.

 

 

Glee.

 

I'd like to draw particular note to that last image, to point out two things: one that's working and one that's not working.

 

What is working is the connection between the upper and lower torsos. I've always been annoyed by how the sphere at the bottom of the upper torso would slip out of the spine model on the Bikini Robots, but since I didn't want to mess with the spine's weighting I didn't do anything about it. Here, though, the whole upper part of the lower torso is weighted solid to the same bone as the upper torso, with the bend lower down where any weirdness is hidden by the rings and further minimized by being, y'know, closer to where the actual joint on the game's skeleton is. So the torso connection here never pops out. 

 

What's not working is the original weighting for the Gynoid hip cap plates. Like with the shoulder caps the original weighting has a connection to a flesh body in mind, and equally like them it ends up looking all distorted and terrible when the flesh is missing. But I had been planning on fixing that anyway.

 

 

Again, generating the limbs and the caps out as separate parts let me mess with the weighting on the caps and get nice solid pieces to clip onto the torso piece. I was a bit worried that the original weighting on the legs would want to clip through them weird, but it seems to be working out fine. Still have to test them out with the Beast leg adaptors, though.

 

I was also a bit worried about the other chests fitting. Well, not the Sexy one, obviously...

 

 

...but while the rings were positioned in the building stage with clearing the little back-flap on the Remodeled chest in mind, I didn't check them against the Spice chest until I got to the workable in-game model stage.

 

I needn't have been concerned.

 

 

By sheerest happenstance, it fits perfectly. The upper ring of the waist assembly fits exactly into the lower opening of the breastplate. I couldn't have planned it that well. This is the combo for this limb set, as far as I'm concerned.

 

 

Still have to check it against some of those other chests ideas I've been working on, though. At this point, if there's a conflict, the chests have to change. 

 

And now that I know I can get them working, I'm interested to see what else I can do in the spine department...