Digital Art Zone

One thing I’m quickly learning about Genesis and morphs is ALWAYS send through the bridge at it’s BASE resolution not the Sub-Divided resolution that is loaded as default.  If bridged at the High Def resolution this will smooth out details when it’s imported into ZBrush and then back to DAZ Studio. 

Also I’ve found, since I’m in the middle of redoing all the female morphs to remember to mask off the hands, feet and head.  Then go to the Mask are in the Tools palette and Sharpen once and the Blur once.  This seems to help even it out and gives a tiny bit of give when your morph might affect wrists, ankles and neck areas. 

I had a huge wake up call this AM when I was purring along and realized I wasn’t masking the areas I was mentioning and the teeth, hands, ears and feet (esp the toes) all lost ALLOT of detail.  Toes looked like little skinny worms when the morph was applied in DAZ Studio.  So this is step that might be considered as a “just in case” if your working on the body only. 

Now of course this wouldn’t apply if your working on a face morph.  For that make sure if it’s JUST the face use your Ctrl + Shift while clicking directly on the face and this will hide everything but the face so you can work and not worry about accidentally deforming another part you don’t want touched.  Even with face morphs make sure and export Genesis to ZB at a BASE resolution….

I’ve had a lot of luck when concentrating on a local area in using PolyGroup & Autogroup by UV. This works especially well when dealing with isolated face morphs. I HATE when I am working on a lip morph and I have screwed up the teeth.

YUP, for sure man.  When I zoomed in on the feet and kept sliding the morph from 0 to 100% and saw them become little worms it totally made me wonder what the HELL I did to cause that?  Then I notice the mouth was slightly opened so then I opened the mouth and saw the teeth look like some sauced hillbilly and notice the ears, back of the head and fingers were also muchly reduced in detail and smaller.  SO from now on it’s all about masking those areas to keep things looking normal.  Lotta hours down the drain but that’s the way it goes.  I’m not releasing anything that’s doing that, no way!  Community deserves the best.  I give my best…

Richard Haseltine - 24 September 2012 05:14 AM

A morph can’t subdivide the mesh - but you should, to an extent, be able to save the fine detail as a set of displacement maps that can be applied along with the morph to get the final shape. You will, however, need an OBJ that has had the material groups combined by number and to load that into ZBrush with materials as groups, in order to generate a separate map for each area of the figure (and you will need to decide which uv set to use, of course). There are several tutorials on this (the technique, other than picking an initial UV set, is the same with Genesis and the fourth generation figures).

I came across this after a long search for information on how to produce displacement maps for D|S. You mention tutorials above but, as I’ve indicated, my search skills may be on the decline. Could someone please point me to some of these - or at least one comprehensive document or video?

I’ve seen products which use displacement for ageing effects (wrinkles, veins, etc.) and I have ZBrush but have no clue how to produce these effects. I’d like to make realistic scars and other surface deformations.

Thanks

I think this subject really need better video tutorials, that explain all this.