Adapting poses to other races

You may have run into this issue before; a pose you downloaded doesn’t look as you expected it to. Perhaps you’ve found a pose you really like but it’s not intended for your character’s race. Or you’re a Lalafell player and suddenly your character looks like a demonic being that will be giving you nightmares for a while.

Good news! This is very easily dealt with. Adapting poses to a different race than it was made for is genuinely a few minutes of work, if that.

This guide assumes basic knowledge of Anamnesis. If you’re not familiar with the tool and are having issues following along with this guide, please have a look at the Anamnesis Wiki or check out my full posing guide.

Identifying the problems

When you create a pose using one specific race as your model, there’s a good chance that the pose will look at the very least slightly different on any of the other races. For some races the difference will be negligible or something another user can easily fix. For other races, you’ll run into bigger problems.

The best example of this would be taken a pose I created using a Miqo’te and trying to apply that to a Lalafell. Very simply put, different proportions call for different adjustments to the bones.

While the above poe looks fine on the Miqo’te, you can see that the Lalafell version has a bunch of problems you need to deal with. The face is messed up, the ears are sticking up and limbs are clipping into the body weirdly.

Fixing the face

Although it might seem the most challenging, fixing the face is actually the easiest part of this all. All we have to do to fix the entire head is to import an expression with Anamnesis.

But what do I mean by import an expression? Well, you can import the expression of basically any existing pose and slap only that onto the pose you’re trying to fix. This means you can save expressions off of your emote list and use them to replace the broken faces.

Next to the import button you will see an arrow pointing down. Clicking this will open up a sub-menu. Here you can select “Expression” to specifically import only the expression on a pose. Anamnesis has default facial expression pose files ready to go for situations like this. You’ll find these in the default pose folder.

Making your own facial expression files

If for whatever reason these files aren’t working for your character, you can also go ahead and make your own for the guaranteed perfect fit.

With your character left in a default and unfrozen state we’re going to open up the Gpose menu. Navigate to the motion tab and open up the emote menu and finally, the expressions tab.

If you want to save multiple expressions, the easiest way to do this is by leaving your character unfrozen and selecting an expression one at a time. Every time you select a new expression, you hit export in the posing tab in Anamnesis.

Don’t worry about the error it gives you for leaving your character unfrozen, for quickly saving expressions it doesn’t matter. Freezing and unfreezing your character everything you save an expression would just be tedious and isn’t needed.

Fixing the clipping

At this point the only thing that is left is fixing the rest of the body. I focus in on problem areas. I can see that the neck is looking a bit weird so I fix that. Furthermore there’s some obvious clipping action on the arms.

When adapting poses to different races I won’t make major changes to the feel of the original pose. However I won’t force myself to retain the exact pose either. The poses don’t need to look identical. What works on one body type might not work on another body type. As long as for the majority they’re the same, you’re good to go.

And there we go, a pose fit for even the smallest of us.

That’s a wrap!

Are you left with any questions? No worries! You can head on over to our Discord to ask questions in our Q & A channel. Alternatively, feel free to message me on Twitter.