Cross Race Posing
Firstly if you wish to pose your character you should first save their looks by clicking the following button and saving it. You will need that later so don’t forget to do it! Click on the „Save Appearance“ button (1), give it a name (2), and then confirm with „OK“ button (3).
When you have saved your character’s looks use CMTools to change your character to the race you want to pose as. So for example if you want to pose as Miqo’te Female doing the Eulmore Pole Dancing pose change your character to female Miqo. This can be done by either changing the race to the one you want (1), randomizing appearance until you get what you want (2), or choosing a specific „NPC Appearance“ from „Equipment“ tab (3). Either of them work, up to you how you do it, if you use first option make sure to check the box next to race, you might also have to change the clan beneath it and gender.
And then pose them. Start by checking the box next to „Idle Animation“ on main screen (1), open up the list of animations using „View“ button (2), and choose the animation you want (3).
When you are done with changing the race and animating the character, stop at specific animation frame you want to pose as, for example this one (I think both stopping in FFXIV or using CMTools works):
Then go to the „Posing Matrix” tab (1) and hit save current bone positions for every body part, that is: Head, Torso, Left and Right Arms, Left and Right Legs (2). You do it by clicking on save button next to them, as shown here:
Now switch back to race you want to pose as, it is done by choosing „Load Appearance“ button next to where you saved, then choosing the „Load All Character“ option from list (1) and picking your saved file (2).
When your character is ready enter „/gpose” and immediately stop motion, „2” is the default shortcut key for it.
Go back to the „Posing Matrix” tab and enable editing (1), and then load the bone positions that you have just saved (2).
That’s all! Your character should use the pose from another race without any of the normal squishing or stretching. Current process is not perfect and if there are huge discrepancies between character skeletons and bones then you might have to do some adjustments.
For comparison here are the poses done using this method and straight up skeleton overriding using „Data Path“ option, the difference is quite visible. Here I showcase Male Lalafell Play Dead emote. „Data Path“ on the left, and „Skeleton Editing“ on the right.
Made by MormonJesus69420#6942 on Discord, inspired by work of people on The Crystalline Means Discord server https://discord.gg/hq3DnBa.