Digital Art Zone

futurebiscuit - 05 November 2012 06:11 PM

mjc1016 - 04 November 2012 04:01 PM

The curves are very, very RAM intensive...more so than anything else with this.

I need to write some documentation at some point about better management of memory with garibaldi.
Memory usable while rendering the example files should not exceed 2.5GB with 100% of curves when I've tested them on MacOS/Win 64bit.
On particular 32bit machine setups processes may be restricted to using 2GB of memory. If you are finding it hard to render the examples then reduce the render percentage in the garibaldi daz studio parameters.

As mentioned in the beta email, on the website and in this forum a 64bit machine with 4GB of memory is currently recommended as the minimum requirements for the current early beta versions.
I sorry but I can't guarantee a good experience for using the Garibaldi Express examples with anything less at the moment.
Hopefully memory usage can be optimised with time, but I can't promise miracles.

One of the nice things about WINE...I've got 'full' access' to the 4 GBs, but with the example, it will 'eat' 3.85 GB of RAM during a render...which basically means everything else is dumped to swap space, but still chugs along. Without the shadowmaps, it is a little 'tamer', but still memory intensive.

I'm having a problem with creation...basically, I can get any single section to work, but moving from, let's say, painting to the next step, I get a crash. I'll email you a dump later.

I suppose I could always dump it on the media center box, create there and use on my machine...(now, if I can get the kids away from the TV, maybe I'll give it a go...).

RKane_1 - 04 November 2012 10:44 PM

I had a strange problem with the paint and distribute section in that there was a visible line where hair was not created and I painted and repainted the areas but to no avail. The hairless line was along a section where the face uv map and the body uv map meet.

Yes there is a known issue with the paint tool leaving a 1 pixel gap at uv seams (this will cause a slight bald strip on the hair but is almost impossible to notice in final output normally). It will be fixed in later betas but is not a priority.

The main issue here is that the distribution preview is using the wrong surface normals. I made some changes for beta 3, so now during hair transforms on animated/morphing meshes a more stable custom generated surface normal which are used to re-orientated the hair. Unfortunately this change seems to have propagated into the distribution hair preview. This will be fixed in the next beta.
It does not affect the styled hair output as the direction of the style curves set the direction of the outputted hair.
So it's basically a previewing glitch.

ecocam - 05 November 2012 08:17 AM

Pushes selected guide hairs toward a perpendicular orientation to the surface. The bias for this tool is closer to the root of the hair than to the endpoint."

Sounds like the effect when using the surface attract tool set from -1 to 0?

Alisa Uh-Lisa - 05 November 2012 09:48 AM

I haven't had time to even look at all the tutorials which I think will make a huge difference - all I've done is open it up and play for a second. Seriously cool, though I have a LOT to figure out...

Unfortually I haven't had time to make more than the simple introduction tutorial as I hoped.
After I get the next beta out I'll hopefully have some more time to do this.

MrPoser - 05 November 2012 01:46 PM

Here is a ponytail.... but when I add a texture to genesis... the hair vanishes..

Yes, this is a known issue when the UVs maps settings are changed. The uv maps in daz dictate what part of a character is in which surface it appears.
I've almost finished writing a solution to this which will be in the next version of the beta.

fivecat - 05 November 2012 05:26 PM

MrPoser was correct, it is the UV set -- I just tested it.. I had gone from Genesis Female to V4 and that had affected the hair. So you need to start with the UV set you intend to use before adding the hair.

At the moment that what I would recommend.

fivecat - 05 November 2012 05:26 PM

Does anyone know how to make the hair texture follow the base texture?

1) Create a new colour texture in the Garibaldi paint workspace.
2) Use the export button. This will save a directory containing the textures as png image files for each surface.
3) Edit the image files in your favourite image manipulation program such as pasting in existing surface textures (make sure the saved image files are 1024x1024 png files of the orginal file names).
4) Use the import button in the garibaldi paint workspace to load the directory of edited image files back in as a new garibaldi texture. Make sure you use a new texture name and select colour from the popup menu.
5) You can now select these textures in the colour options in the garibaldi distribution workspace.

futurebiscuit - 05 November 2012 07:19 PM

fivecat - 05 November 2012 05:26 PM

Does anyone know how to make the hair texture follow the base texture?

1) Create a new colour texture in the Garibaldi paint workspace.
2) Use the export button. This will save a directory containing the textures as png image files for each surface.
3) Edit the image files in your favourite image manipulation program such as pasting in existing surface textures (make sure the saved image files are 1024x1024 png files of the orginal file names).
4) Use the import button in the garibaldi paint workspace to load the directory of edited image files back in as a new garibaldi texture. Make sure you use a new texture name and select colour from the popup menu.
5) You can now select these textures in the colour options in the garibaldi distribution workspace.

Thanks, I'm off to try it now.

My first bash ...

mjc1016 - 05 November 2012 06:44 PM

One of the nice things about WINE...I've got 'full' access' to the 4 GBs, but with the example, it will 'eat' 3.85 GB of RAM during a render...

Wow I don't know what WINE does but that does not sound right at all. I just did a quick test render of one of the examples and the memory peak was around 1.75GB of RAM.
During preview in the Garibaldi editor even with 100% and hair as mesh it only peaks at 2.2GB. With normal non mesh hair at 100% is less than 1GB. But using 100% preview with this amount of hair is not recomended anyway.
That scene uses about 370MB when in the daz workspace, a blank scene with genesis default figue uses about 250MB as comparision.

This is with Windows 7 64bit. I know Mac OS X is slightly more memory hungry but not much.
Like I said before WINE won't be supported, so use it at your own risk with Garibaldi.

I'm going to do some more runs later...

MrPoser - 05 November 2012 01:46 PM

This is a nice looking system but it easily overwhelmed my system if I do more than a simple hair or work with a character instead of the bare genesis.

If all you need is simple smooth'ish hair try turning the segment length size up in the interpolation options in the garibaldi style workspace.

I tried using a hair texture with a brightly colored bong figure so the hair would have obvious color changes. For anyone trying this, be aware you'll need to flip your texture in your image editor (it is vertically flipped like in zbrush). It seems to work okay so it'll be nice for animal fur.

fivecat - 05 November 2012 08:18 PM

I tried using a hair texture with a brightly colored bong figure so the hair would have obvious color changes. For anyone trying this, be aware you'll need to flip your texture in your image editor (it is vertically flipped like in zbrush). It seems to work okay so it'll be nice for animal fur.

Do you think it would be best if I flip the textures during import and export to conform to the Daz texture convention?
Glad you got the import/export feature to work. Seems to be working well for you.

futurebiscuit - 05 November 2012 08:40 PM

fivecat - 05 November 2012 08:18 PM

I tried using a hair texture with a brightly colored bong figure so the hair would have obvious color changes. For anyone trying this, be aware you'll need to flip your texture in your image editor (it is vertically flipped like in zbrush). It seems to work okay so it'll be nice for animal fur.

Do you think it would be best if I flip the textures during import and export to conform to the Daz texture convention?

It doesn't matter to me, as I have to use photoshop anyway to prepare the images, but it probably wouldn't hurt to flip the texture on import/export. One less thing for people to get confused over.

fivecat - 05 November 2012 08:18 PM

I tried using a hair texture with a brightly colored bong figure so the hair would have obvious color changes. For anyone trying this, be aware you'll need to flip your texture in your image editor (it is vertically flipped like in zbrush). It seems to work okay so it'll be nice for animal fur.

In Zbrush you have the option to flip the UV map...

But maybe on import for this plugin an option to flip UV's from ZBrush would be nice for folks that don't know about this feature in ZB...