[Rise of the Tomb Raider] Lara Croft

Additional download links can be found on my webpage.

This model has been made with the huge help of Calibrator.

Content of the release

• face model from the game
• custom body proportions, resembling the canon ones
• Cycles ready
• Eevee ready with dedicated shaders (all my preview pictures and videos are made with Eevee)
• tons of customization body morphs, emotions
• corrective shape keys for extreme poses, plus tweak bones
• one original outfit
• tons of additional new outfits
• MustardUI 0.21 (also users can now modifiy it, without writing a single line of code)
• physics implemented for breasts and bottom
• poses are available to use

Requirements

• Blender >= 2.93.1. The model currently does NOT support Blender 3.0, I will update it when Blender 3.0 will be released
• Diffeomorphic add-on
• rough minimum PC requirements: GPU >= 4GB VRAM, RAM > 4Gb, CPU with >= 2GHz 4 cores (disabling external morphs, the model might be less demanding)

Instructions

• only Blender >= 2.93.1 is supported. With previous versions, Blender might crash!
• install the add-on Diffeomorphic, with the version provided on this page or from the official website (http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-15.html). You don't need to set Diffeomorphic settings up if you don't want to. But at least be sure to have Diffeomorphic installed and enabled before opening the file! To prevent damaged emotions and morphs, the UI will not show the morphs if Diffeomorphic is not correctly enabled. I'm working on a stand-alone version, that doesn't need diffeomorphic to be installed, but for the moment please install this addon (that is also a great addon with a lot of useful functions).
• all the settings are available in the MustardUI (press N in the viewport and search for the MustardUI tab on the far right). You can tweak the skin options, enable the outfits, enable the physics, etc.. Check the full tutorial if something is not intuitive. Moreover in the UI you can find some pre-made emotions. You can also enable the Face (details) layer in the Armature panel of MustardUI: some additional facial bones will appear to tweak the emotion or make a new one.
• additional retargeting tools for MHX rigs can be found on: http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/bvh-retargeter.html
• some bones to tweak the torso, legs and arms poses are also available, and can be enabled in the Armature section of MustardUI (Tweak and Extra.L/Extra.R layers)
• do not delete drivers unless you know what you are doing! Doing that might break functionalities. The driven shape-keys and properties can be controlled by MustardUI. If you are unsure, please contact me.
• for Eevee users, enable Screen Space Reflections, and inside that panel also enable Refraction and disable Half Res Trace. Failing to do this might create artifacts in the eyes rendering. I also highly suggest to enable Ambient Occlusion.
• The model use Corrective Smooth/Shrinkwrap modifiers. If you find some odd clipping/behaviour while posing the model, try to disable them in the UI.
• some poses/actions might be available, but they support FK. To switch to FK or/and snap to IK, use the operators in the Armature tab of the UI (Diffeomorphic 1.5.1), or the MHX panel (1.6). More informations about this are in the IK/FK note below.
• the Physics can be enabled directly on the UI, for breasts and bottom. I tried to expose some properties (like jiggleness, inertia, etc..), let me know how it works!
• if you have any problem or you have poor performance in viewport, try to check Instructions or the FAQ. If you can't find the solution to your problem, or you would like to report a bug, you can contact me (contacts at the end).

Note on performance

Be aware about the performance. I tried to delete as much as possible useless stuffs to give you the cleanest version I could make, but the big amount of correctives can really slow down the model especially on old PCs. Unfortunately this is a combined problem of how Blender manage shape keys/drivers, and how they are stored and called by the Diffeomorphic addon (which again, should be installed!). If you experience any slowdown, check the video in the model. The steps can be summarized as:

• disable the External Morphs panel in the UI (see the video) once you set up your model with the body morphs. Note that doing this the body morphs won't be reset;
• hide and mute (do both, see the video!) of the hair and extra collections;
• if the above don't help, you can also try to delete the Morphs you don't use after you set up your preferred body shape, as well as the Emotions you don't use. To do this, open the DAZ Import tab (press N in Viewport, selecting the armature), go in the Advanced Setup -> Morphs -> Remove Custom Morphs. Select all the morphs except the ones needed, and this will immediatly boost the viewport FPS. Note that with this second option, the morphs will be permanently removed from the model;
• for better viewport performance in Rendered mode, you can optimize the normal maps for Viewport Rendered mode following this guide.

Finally (thanks to Iognos), if you are having issues with the model freezing every few minutes you can change or disable blender autosaving feature. Go to Blender settings, in Edit -> Preferences -> Save&Load-> Autosave-> change from 2 to something higher like 10 or disable it entirely. This happens because the file is quite big and blender takes too much time to save it on slow storage units.

Note on Diffeomorphic version

A quick note fot those encountering problems with Diffeomorphic support in the UI. If you download diffeomorphic from the repository, Bitbucket will append the name of the commit in the zip name. There are three solutions:

• Use 1.5.1c (deleting the other already installed versions), i.e. the latest stable that you can download from this page or from the link: http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-15.html

• Use the version of Diffeomorphic provided on this page (deleting the other already installed versions).

• Extract the zip you download from https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/downloads/, rename the extracted folder as import_daz (so without Diffeomorphic- and the series of numbers), compress it again (AS ZIP!) and install this instead (delete the other already installed versions).

Unfortunately this is a problem of how Bitbucket versions of Diffeomorphic are shared, and there is not much I can do if not ask you to choose from one of these options.

Note on IK/FK

You have two options, depending on which version of Diffeomorphic you have:

• if 1.6, find the MHX panel in viewport (press N in Viewport). Note that this panel will appear if you also installed http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/mhx-runtime-system.html , which is provided in the 1.6 package but not in the bitbucket repository download.
• if 1.5.1, you can find it in my UI script.

I know it might be confusing, but from 1.5.1 to 1.6 the MHX support has been moved from Diffeomorphic to a new addon (MHX runtime system above). Therefore from 1.6 we have a dedicated panel, and I decided not to add the same operators again in the MustardUI.

Note on Face shape

The mesh used for this model is exactly the same as in game, but with perfect quads topology (so no more insane amount of time to compute subdivision or issues with bendings). However, the materials used are a bit more sophisticated that the ones in game, plus there are some additional features that are not available in in-game models.

If you find the face "not so young" is because the ambient occlusion is acting on the part near the eyes (at least I found that to be the most notable effect that might change the model from the game one). However, in the Body properties tab of MustardUI you can find a Smooth Face shape key, that can help to remove this effect. In addition, you can tweak the Ambient Occlusion in the skin settings (default 0.8) to decrease this effect even further.

Final Notes

• More informations can be found on my website: https://sites.google.com/view/mustardsfm/home-page
• Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mustardnsfw
• Please, if you find any bug report in on my Discord channel: https://discord.gg/dAZYkYg
• Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MustardSFM

Credits

• a very special thank to Calibrator, he's the reason why this model have a lot of new additions with respect to previous ones. In particular he did the pubic hair/eyebrows with particle physics, and provided a lot of feedbakcs during the whole model production.
• a special thanks to all patrons for the support

Changelog

Version 1 (21/11/2021) - first public release

• tomb raider

• lara croft

• character

• blender 2.9
• mhx