The latest update for Armorsmith Designer is now here! So what does the new version have to offer?
The first big change you'll notice right away is the Avatar. We've completely overhauled the Avatar in Armorsmith Designer. All the measurements are now based more on traditional tailor based measurements to make avatar creation a little easier. To get started with the new avatar creation process click Avatar on the menu bar and choose Create New Avatar.
You'll be greeted with the new Avatar tutorial flow. This flow will take you step by step through all the necessary measurements to build your custom Avatar. Just follow the instructions on each page and it will tell you exactly where you need to measure. Once you're done there's lots of extra detail measurements you can go in and tweak to get the look of your avatar just right. Even more controls will be coming in the near future.
The Avatar posing has also received a large overhaul. The rig on the avatar works a lot better than it did previously. Create cool poses and then swap out the background to make cool previews of your costume in action. The background can be changed via View->Change Background.
Another new feature to help make placement of parts a little easier is the transform widget. A separate element that has all the different transform properties in one place. You can set the translation and rotation in either world or local space. World space is where an object exists in the scene, while local is where it lives relative to the body part it's attached to.
There's also the new ability to load in a number of 3d models together as a group. This is really useful if you're loading in for example a helmet which has been separated into a number of smaller models. This feature will retain the position of all the parts relative to each other when importing and when attaching it will attach it as a single group of parts. This makes scaling these parts much easier. This grouping is also reflected in the workspace window, where it will now show the hierarchy of the group to each individual part. As well as having the ability to import parts as groups, you can also select a number of individual parts and group them together in a single group.
Another big new feature is the addition of clip planes. These are extremely useful for seeing the exact fit of a costume part. You can add one to any attachment or group of attachments and it will remove anything above the clip plane. This shows you exactly how close the fit is for a part on your avatar. These clip planes can be translated and rotated as well to get them into the exact right position. Each attachment can support up to 6 of these clip planes.