Geografts And Shells

A geograft is a high-density mesh which can replace a low-density region of another mesh. This is typically used to add pieces of anatomy to characters. It is most commonly used for genitalia, but can be used for other types of anatomy as well, such as horns or tails.

In DAZ Studio, we add some detailed anatomy to Aiko, as well as the associated shells. In Blender, the extra anatomy are separate meshes, and this causes problems because they are not seamlessly integrated with the body, and also because the underlying body vertices are still present.

Also note that the shells are absent. A geometry shell is a mesh with zero vertices which modifies the appearance in Daz Studio, but in Blender an empty mesh is never visible in renders. Instead, the shell becomes a node group in corresponding material.

Here is the last nodes of the Golden Palace Torso-1 node tree. The GoldenPalace Shell has become a node group. The shell node tree can be changed if the need arises. This can also be done with the Replace Shells tool. The shell can be turned off and on with the Influence value, or equivalently with the Set Shell Visibility tool in the Visibility panel. For the intended use, see the blog post on Multiple geoshells.

If we open up the node group we see that it contains a quite complicated node tree in itself, which is mixed with the underlying torso material.