In Search Of The Perfect Wattle Jawl

[Ricardo2020]

In Search of the Perfect Wattle Jawl

I have been making full body targets in MakeHuman for a good while now. Currently, there are about a thousand of these in my custom files collection. Almost all of them depict women of size. These ladies have lovely curves and full features. Many excellent paintings and photographs have depicted the total beauty of these gals.

As all who model human figures know, big girls are difficult to realistically model. They have rolls and pillows and chins which move with gravety and g forces. There are soft ones and firm ones. They vary with age and race. Genetics and environment shape them in infinite ways. But gravity and motion vector are most key.

Two areas which are difficult to get right are the belly and the chin. Thanks to the efforts of Elvaerwyn, these issues have been mostly brought under control. She selflessly worked hard to make many custom targets which address the needs of those who do larger ladies like the ones I put together.

Her work has enabled me to get some vey true-to-form round women. Elv's highly effective and precise targets within the Assets pages on this site are spacific to certain areas not covered by the default sliders. She has also solved many issues and vastly made things easier and more realistic with her hormonal body shape keys within the current nightly build and as a plugin for prior versions of MakeHuman 1.2.0 stable.

And now to describe a problem which crops up as the figure gets heaver. When dialing down muscle while increasing weight, a seam appears at the neck to jaw area. This is very evident when the face is puffy and the neck is double. Using Elv's targets gets rid of most of the seem, and in some models, completely fixes it. By fine tuning the defaults and her targets with the sliders, one can create that perfect full featured round face.

This method is tedious and not for the impatient or heavy handed, and you really need to have subdivisions maxed out in the mesh using that little subdivisions button on the toolbar at the top of the MH window. Many models have a seem at the neck which cannot be fixed without actually going into something like Blender and fiddling with an exported mesh of the model in question.

Most people are not going to do this.

In the future, I will be adding to this thread showing some examples of the perfect wattle and the flaws one gets while trying to model this important facial feature. But first, I want to introduced the uninitiated to the wattle, what it is, and how to model it correctly and realistically within MakeHuman.

Pull up a seat and have a cuppa at ye elbow...

The wattle is a facial feature consisting of a fatty area below and around the chin and down onto the neck. It is the result of weak musculature under the chin and the metabolism of the person who has one. Fat can gather here because of hormones, genetics, activity, gender, and race, as well as age and stress.

Most folks wih a wattle usually have a slow thyroid or other endocrine variable. Although many therapies exist with hopes of wattle reduction, it is mostly a function of obesity and age. In some cultures, the round firm wattle of a big woman is considered a thing of beauty as it signifies to all that this lady is well fed and with a good husband.

There are many kinds and sizes of wattles, depending on neck leagth/girth/position, along with head size/shape. The fat to muscle ratio and bone size are major factors shaping a wattle jawl. In MakeHuman, you can get a wattle with the stock sliders for double neck and head fatness. Be very careful here, because the sliders are sensative, they interact, and they can tear the mesh.

So, let us say we want to make a super size big beautiful woman. What does this mean? Well. she will have a mass of 200 pounds at five feet, 300 pounds at 5'6, and 400 pounds at six feet, for example. This is the first consideration: weight verses height. Then there is the fat to muscle rario and bone size, which will cause her to be firm or flabby. Muscle is firm under load but flabby at rest. Fat is firm if dense but flabby if not.

There is the proportion variable to consider as well since a big body with short limbs will tend to be flabby wherein a smaller body with longer limbs will tend to be more firm. When combined with age and race, these lines can get very blurry if you try to chart all the variables as a logical visual graph.

It is for all these reasons that making this heavy girl is a challenge if you want her to look real. Know that all the sliders of every target you use will affect all the others. Move one and they all change. As such, you will find that dialing things in might take many trips around the sliders as you figure out which ones to move to get the result you are after. I cannot write out generic instructions on how to do this since there are so many sliders which interact in an infinite number of ways.

I can get you started though. Here is how:

1. Launch MakeHuman.

2. Go to Nodeling>Main tab.

3. Gender full left. Age in middle. Muscle left. Weight right. Height in middle. Proportions in middle. No adjustments to three Race sliders yet.

4. Go to Face tab and look at the right pane to see facial elements.

5. Face Size is Head Fat to right.

6. Double Neck is toward the right.

7. Go to the Arms and Legs tab.

8. Make all the linbs fatter.

9. Go to Utilities>Save Targets tab. Save the target.

10. Close and relaunch MakeHuman to load the new target under the Modeling>Custom tab.

Now, all this does not sound too hard, and really it is not hard at all. But it is time consuming. The first few tries will be wonky until you learn how to be gentle with so many controls. It helps to go look at photos of the kind of lady you are modelling. Reference pictures are handy. But you also need to play around with the sliders until you understand how they work alone and together. This takes practice. And now you know why I have a thousand targets. About 600 of those have been made into models. Around 60 of those models are pretty good. But I am still going for one good enough to share with the world.

I have a high bar for said model. It boils down to this. Posing must not create artifacts such as mesh tears or warped shapes. Expressions must not cause poke-throughs of tongue and teeth. Clothes must fit. Hair must fit. Even then, 3D CGI has limits such as physics which thwart total realism. However, I would settle for static poses for a virtual photoshoot showing off all those wonderful curves...

Stay tuned for some examples of wattles both in real life and computer generated.

[Ricardo2020]

As promised many moons ago (life happens), I present the first batch of profile images depicting women with wattle jawls. Modelling this feature requires many slider adjustments, custom targets, and a lot of patience through trial and error. There are no hard and fast rules.

You will note that there are custom textures on the models, with the hair being the most apparent. I made these additional colors using the GIMP. I also used the GIMP to create the images below which are mosaics of cropped screen shots taken while the folder containing the renders was open on the desktop. In Linux Mint Cinnamon, you can set the thumbnail size and use a dark theme to make them stand out above their labels.

My monitor runs at 1920x1080 and the shell widgets take up some of that space. Thus, I cropped the screen captures to show only the folder contents. Since there are more files than will fit within the view, I had to take several shots and splice them together after cropping.

Large Ladies with Wattle Jawls

Click the image above to download. Once it is loaded, you can view it full size at 1719x2423 pixels.

[Ricardo2020]

I decided to start at the beginning of my long list of tourists who are BBW models. There are about 400 of these as of this post.

See the beginning of this thread to read about the process of making the images. Click the picture below to download the full size file.

More Large Ladies with Wattle Jawls