New Crystal Dragon Has Me Questioning Iray's Shader Capabilities in DS

scorpio

timmins.william said:

Huh, I hadn't tried that... worth a shot! And worse comes to worst, if it's CLOSE I can probably healbrush it in Photoshop.

You don't need to do it manually the mat will apply if that zone is selected, yea some do need to be blended a bit in post some need a bit more than that.

Oso3D

Holy smoke... ok, now I feel dumb. ;)

So, the torso mat by itself usually has big holes where the wings go, so that doesn't work by itself (at least in what I've tried so far).

BUT... Photoshop's content fill does the job REALLY WELL -- just had to select the two holes, fill > content-aware, and bam. Filled it with a reasonable fascimile of the texture. Wow.

Render incoming.

 

I ran into this problem before with Komodo which lacks a wingless texture, when I really kind of wanted a giant komodo-like monster (with no wings), and had been forced to adapt other textures. Well... yay!

Oso3D

And lo...

 

BlueIrene

timmins.william said:

And lo...

 

Nice!

cdpro_2831bbd990

scorpio said:

drzap said:

 

nicstt said:

drzap said:

nicstt said:

drzap said:

Would they?

You are presuming there would be enough sales to support all this. Studio used to be a paid for product, and no longer is; that suggests to me that this is better for Daz.

I would love to know what you are basing your assurances on; what sales data for Daz products do you have access to that supports your claims?

You are right of course.  I have no idea what their financial situation was when Daz was a paid for product.  But we can assume it failed because of lack of sales.  My point was that Daz Studio doesn't bring in any direct revenue.  That fact isn't lost on the company.  They will put as little effort as they can get away with in supporting it, thus, incomplete docs.

It was Free, then they produced an Advanced and a Pro version both paid for but even then there was a free sandard version, it was about six months later that they then returned to all free again.

I'm guessing that sales in general, went up when Studio became all free.  They might hold off on some development because of the free status...but, I doubt it.  It is very much worthwhile for Daz to keep improving Studio and make it a viable platform for hobbyists and some pros.  I've spent more in the past few years on Daz content for my free Studio software, than I would ever have done for a more expensive application like 3D Studio Max...etc.  And, here's the important thing.  Even though Daz is less sophisticated than some pro modeling and animation software, it is accessible - meaning I was using it to render within minutes of installing.  I had very little idea of how the program worked, but I still managed to make some nice pictures.  This inspired me to learn more about the program and most importantly to Daz, to start buying content.  I never planned to buy a truckload of digital content...But, a couple of years later, I've spent 2 or three times as much on content as it would have cost me to buy one of the big name modeling suites.  Believe me when I say that Daz does not lose out by giving away Studio. ;)  I'm sure it costs a lot to develop the software.  But, they wouldn't give it away if it wasn't working as a great sales strategy.

I do wish that they'd spend some of those profits on creating an in depth manual for Studio.  I've said it many times on these forums that I'd be happy to pay for a really good paper reference manual with both explanations of what each menu item and setting does and how to apply it, and examples of the effects of these actions.  All the tutorials that people post are great.  But, it would be really nice to actually be able to pick up a physical manual and quickly look up a setting / menu item.

Oso3D

What I love about the crystal skin textures is that they look a lot like aged rough metal or rock to me, like ORE. And incredibly detailed.

Mmm. Man, I have a lot of dragons. I think I have 10 just from RawArt.

 

L'Adair

drzap said:

 

nicstt said:

drzap said:

nicstt said:

drzap said:

Would they?

You are presuming there would be enough sales to support all this. Studio used to be a paid for product, and no longer is; that suggests to me that this is better for Daz.

I would love to know what you are basing your assurances on; what sales data for Daz products do you have access to that supports your claims?

You are right of course.  I have no idea what their financial situation was when Daz was a paid for product.  But we can assume it failed because of lack of sales.  My point was that Daz Studio doesn't bring in any direct revenue.  That fact isn't lost on the company.  They will put as little effort as they can get away with in supporting it, thus, incomplete docs.

I respectfully disagree.

When I started with this hobby nearly three years ago, the release version was 4.7. Early the following year, they put out the 4.8 beta with Iray. A few months after that, they released 4.8. The first 4.9 beta with Daz Connect, was soon made available and at the beginning of the year, 2016, 4.9.1 was released. (Along with a big bruhaha about encrypted content!) Little more than a year after 4.9.1 was released, we are up to 4.9.4; that's three more releases in 14 or 15 months. And when the community finds an issue, the Daz programmers rush to fix it. The current Private build is 4.10.0, but that didn't stop Daz from releasing another 4.9.4 beta to resolve a crashing issue some folks were having. The Daz programmers are constantly working to improve Daz Studio, updating some some features and adding others. I suspect the real reason there is no written manual is it would be incredibly out-of-date by the time it got published.

 

timmins.william said:

What I love about the crystal skin textures is that they look a lot like aged rough metal or rock to me, like ORE. And incredibly detailed.

Mmm. Man, I have a lot of dragons. I think I have 10 just from RawArt.

Of course, you do! lol... RawArt makes wonderful creatures. And who can resist a good dragon? I've got a few in my runtime, too. The Wyvern 2.0 is what sucked me into this addictive world. (Love the dragon you posted in the Iray thread. I've got to break down and get that Eastern Dragon!)

ben98120000 said:

Not bad for some random maps and 10 minutes of tinkering.

I think this one turned out especially well.

L'Adair

Well... I'm considering returning the Crystal Dragon.

I bought it for the iray skins, but I'm not real pleased with the head materials. The body materials are really great, but with the head, the details seem to get lost. Even when setting Bump to 15. Even more annoying are the areas of blurred out nothingness in map. They all correspond to where the horns stick out in the original Dragon, except for two that are for the crystal horns. So if you're using the skin without the crystals, there are these two weird blurry spots on the top of his head. For the green dragon, the "horns" on the map are a solid green, and there is a perfectly round green spot on the side of the head, if you don't use the crystals, and don't also apply horn material, either using a shader on the horns or using one of the older head maps with actual horn material.

I suppose it doesn't matter if you don't get closeup... but it does irritate me the horns on the map aren't better matched to the head.

Aine

Llynara said:

Loving the renders! Neat to see all the different looks this dragon has! I'm going to play with making the crystals emissive and see what happens.

Has anyone purchased the PB Black Dragon textures? I'd be interested in seeing some user renders of that one.

I actually bought the PB Black Dragon first, since it says it works with the DAZ 3 Dragon base. Then went back and picked up the crystal dragon, just for some fun.

Oso3D

One thing you could try, if you have Photoshop, is to go into the textures and mask the horn areas, delete the same spot from each texture (color, bump, etc), then do a Content-Aware fill; this might create a more varied patch.

 

L'Adair

timmins.william said:

One thing you could try, if you have Photoshop, is to go into the textures and mask the horn areas, delete the same spot from each texture (color, bump, etc), then do a Content-Aware fill; this might create a more varied patch.

I tried that already, Will. I couldn't get anything I liked. The areas are too close to the edge. (I'm using CS6, so I may not have access to all that you do, if you're using CC.) I spent several hours trying to get a decent patch there.

Oso3D

I don't think my tools are better. Unfortunate. :/

pds

Storypilot said:

I just want to add to others... get it for the skin, use the crystals if you like that. I probably will not be using the crystals much. The underlying morph and skin are great and for me give the Dragon 3 a pretty nice new & improved look (I also picked up 3D universe's Mythical Dragon for its iray skin since with the sale it became quite affordable). 

I got to try it today and here's an early test of how it's looking for me with the blue default skin, no crystals, horns added that i'm still figuring out textures for, and eye textures from Mythical Dragon. Helpful to switch the horn UVs to another set (one that uses horns) if you bring the horn morphs out of hiding. At some point I might go into my image editor to fix the gray area on the top of the nose, but with the little horn nubbins I added there, I'm not too bothered by it. 

I'm really digging the tail texture details and scale variation in the leg areas. 

This looks terrific! Not a fan of the crystals in the new dragon, but your render proves this beast looks great without them!