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Deviation Actions
(I will link a YouTube version when I have one. Hopefully I can fix my mic's current issues soon.)
Today I'm going to show you how to force a figure in Daz Studio to indent when in contact with clothes, ropes, or other objects. This is not a feature of the program at the moment (figures having physics is still a long way out, I suspect). We can use a kludge to make it happen.
I was asked about this via PM, and I realized I hadn't actually tried it on the assumption that it would not work. When I did try it, it actually DID work. It's very unstable and somewhat crash-prone in my testing, and the higher poly the colliding object is the more unstable it is, but it works.
Here is the workflow I used.
1. Load a figure into the scene. I don't know if the geometry of Generation 4 is too different or not, but it might still work. Definitely any Genesis figure will.
2. Set up everything else in your scene: the clothes, the props, the lighting, etc. You want it all to be done BEFORE you do this next step, including all the items with which you want the figure to collide.
3. Save the scene.
4. Hide everything except the intended collision items (hide the figure, the props they're not touching, the skydome if it's 3delight, etc.). You do this by clicking the eye icon in the scene tab next to the item's name.
5. Export all those intended collision items to obj.
6. Unhide everything.
7. Import the merged collision obj. Hide it.
8. NOW SAVE AGAIN. SERIOUSLY DO IT. IT'S PROBABLY GOING TO CRASH AT THE NEXT STEP.
9. Select the figure in the scene tab and click the little button in the top right or left corner. Go to Edit--Geometry--Apply Smoothing Modifier. Set Smoothing iterations to 1 and collision to 7 or higher. Set the collision object as that merged obj you imported, the one that is now hidden.
10. Now either your figure collides with your hidden item, and it looks like it's colliding with all the visible props, or the program has crashed. If it crashed, reload and try this step again. Usually it works on the second try. Unless the collision object has too many polygons for your system. It'll be fun finding that part out.
11. When you have reached a state of collision and the program is still running, now you're ready to render. Afterward I would set the modifier to "off" before saving in case this might cause reload problems (I haven't had any yet but I'm wary of it for no reason I can explain).
Today I'm going to show you how to force a figure in Daz Studio to indent when in contact with clothes, ropes, or other objects. This is not a feature of the program at the moment (figures having physics is still a long way out, I suspect). We can use a kludge to make it happen.
I was asked about this via PM, and I realized I hadn't actually tried it on the assumption that it would not work. When I did try it, it actually DID work. It's very unstable and somewhat crash-prone in my testing, and the higher poly the colliding object is the more unstable it is, but it works.
Here is the workflow I used.
1. Load a figure into the scene. I don't know if the geometry of Generation 4 is too different or not, but it might still work. Definitely any Genesis figure will.
2. Set up everything else in your scene: the clothes, the props, the lighting, etc. You want it all to be done BEFORE you do this next step, including all the items with which you want the figure to collide.
3. Save the scene.
4. Hide everything except the intended collision items (hide the figure, the props they're not touching, the skydome if it's 3delight, etc.). You do this by clicking the eye icon in the scene tab next to the item's name.
5. Export all those intended collision items to obj.
6. Unhide everything.
7. Import the merged collision obj. Hide it.
8. NOW SAVE AGAIN. SERIOUSLY DO IT. IT'S PROBABLY GOING TO CRASH AT THE NEXT STEP.
9. Select the figure in the scene tab and click the little button in the top right or left corner. Go to Edit--Geometry--Apply Smoothing Modifier. Set Smoothing iterations to 1 and collision to 7 or higher. Set the collision object as that merged obj you imported, the one that is now hidden.
10. Now either your figure collides with your hidden item, and it looks like it's colliding with all the visible props, or the program has crashed. If it crashed, reload and try this step again. Usually it works on the second try. Unless the collision object has too many polygons for your system. It'll be fun finding that part out.
11. When you have reached a state of collision and the program is still running, now you're ready to render. Afterward I would set the modifier to "off" before saving in case this might cause reload problems (I haven't had any yet but I'm wary of it for no reason I can explain).
Default VS. PBR Skin Shader: Alexandra 8 Tests
User @DigitalHallucination had some interesting comments and questions about shaders under the old Iray Surfaces tutorial from 2015. That led to some experimentation with shaders this morning, the results of which I will share now. Please, please feel free to comment and debate. I think this is an issue of interest to more or less all of us. I commented offhand that I didn't think the PBRSkin shader was an improvement, but that the maps in use were what made the difference, and DH disagreed with this and provided some comparison renders using Alexandra 8. They definitely looked definitive, so I decided to run my own tests. At first I tried it with base G8F, but that wasn't an apples to apples comparison because G8F originally uses the old glossiness method, so she's going to look worse compared to any shader that uses the new spec. So, like DH, I went to Alexandra. In this case I used the default lighting with the camera headlamp turned off, Subd1, Alexandra 8 at 100%, and the
Deviantart's Default AI Opt-In
EDIT: They put in a mass opt out! Thanks for letting me know when I missed the news, lovely watchers! I'm not thrilled about dA making AI opt-out and not opt-in, and putting it so you have to opt-out on each individual artwork. I have little to lose from this, because my product is 3D models and not the 2D promotional images, but it's especially predatory of people whose product and ouevre is 2D art. I don't know how many people are still here, but it's one more reason for people who draw and paint to delete their accounts.
Color Differences in DS 4.20.1.38
This was introduced by my notice by Snarl, and verified by my own render testing. I will show my results in the following discussion. There is a visible color difference in Iray render results in Daz Studio 4.20.1.38 vs. the pre-VDB, pre-ghost light fix 4.16.1.21 build I was able to test against. I rendered out to pngs and looked at both pngs on the same monitor to account for that type of differences. Here shown is G8F up close in default lighting on both builds. I checked all of the render settings to make sure they were the same, too, because if we could just change a render setting it would be an easy fix. This difference is relatively subtle. Let me show those separately so you can download them separately to compare. Here's 4.20: And here's 4.16: You might have to zoom in and set them overlapping so you see top part and top part or right and right, etc., but it's there. I don't know how or why this change has happened. Maybe it's because Daz decided the default was too
Babbling About Fluid Simulation
I have some feelings about sims right now. I have a lot of them, and I've just had caffeine. So I'm going to share them with you all. So, I recently submitted a water set for Daz Studio. Three times. You see, Daz3d didn't like either of my first two interpretations of the slosh pieces and pouring pieces that were simulated in Blender, so I ended up having to hand-sculpt parts of it and combine that with parts of the simmed pieces. The sloshes are entirely hand-sculpted from me staring at photo references, except for bits of the flying droplets I salvaged from the original simmed meshes. I wouldn't even have gotten that far if not for the very specific and detailed feedback they gave me, a privilege of working with the Review committee since 2011 and, I sincerely hope, demonstrating an eagerness to accept professional criticism when it gets me paid. I know for a fact that they have some artists where they just say an unvarnished yes or no because it's not worth getting yelled at
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I use a variation on this technique all the time for fingers and hands touching stockings or other clothing that already use smoothing modifier collision. Duplicate the base figure, move the hand away from the clothing, then hide this new figure. Update the collision object of the clothing to this new figure. This makes for hands that don't push clothing into the body.
You can do somewhat similar to create HD skindentation effects between characters, but honestly becoming a PA or just migrating your final detail work and rendering process to Blender is easier.