Screen renders & computers/model devices

kksmith6515

I have a basic question but I'm not sure how much sense what I'm about to say will make, so bare with me please!

I own these products and I'm planning on obtaining more such as these......

https://www.daz3d.com/the-boys-room

https://www.daz3d.com/hipster-girl-2017-for-genesis-3-female-s

https://www.daz3d.com/selfie-stick-and-smart-phone

Here's the question. I know each of these products contains default surface materials for the screen of the phone/computer. In the case of "selfie-stick-and-smart-phone" I believe it can be customized but I haven't yet looked into the details of how to do it. My question is this, how diffificut or what would be involved if say I rendered a scene, then I reduced it down in Photo Elements because I don't own Photoshop and then somehow swapped out the default material with my render so it looked as though what they were seeing on their device was actually my render? Is that sounding too confusing?? Basically, I'd just like to replace the default materials with ones I created. I figure there must be a way to do this on the surfaces tab.

Thanks! 

Richard Haseltine

If you are lucky the area of the model has its own surface, and takes the full extent of the image applied. Then you'd just render your image, with the right proportions for the sceen, select the screen surface in the Surfaces pane, and in the Editor tab click the base colour/diffuse colour micro-thumbnail for the current map, Browse, and select your image. If the screen wasn't a separate surface, or if it didn't take up the whole of a map, then you'd need to adjust your render to fit the target area and drop it into a copy of the existing map over the existing screen imaeg before again applying that map through the Surfaces pane.

kksmith6515

Well, lets begin with the selfie-stick-and-smart-phone, since in the product description, it claims to have PSD files for adding futher customization. My question is where are the files? I've searched everywhere and I can't seem to even find them. 

kksmith6515

Alright, nevermind what I said before. I finally figured it out but here's another question. I select my texture but then how do I control in Studio whether it is to be displayed as either landscape or portrait? 

SixDs

I don't own the products that you are referring to, but a lot will depend on whether the item, including the screen area, has been UV mapped or not. The best approach, to avoid distortion, would be to ensure that the "aspect ratio" of the image you wish to display on the screen is the same as the aspect ratio of the screen itself. If the item has been UV mapped, then any existing texture template or diffuse/base colour image for the object should indicate the orientation and your desired image would be applied to a diffuse or base colour map before using it in DAZ Studio. If the screen area is simply a material zone, then you can look at any of the images that are included with the product for use on the screen to determine the aspect ratio, resolution (dimensions in pixels) and orientation. Normally I would expect that a computer monitor or television would be landscape, but a smartphone would be portrait.