I have no choice but to make my own HD morphs, so how do I do it? I have zbrush.
Flortale
Posts: 611
I want to modify Victoria 8 HD addon in Zbrush so I can add more detail like pores, skin anamolies, detail in the feet, hands, veins, things that should've been done properl in the HD addon but were neglected due to laziness. The Genesis 7 HD addons were very well done, but Genesis 8 HD addons are pretty bad.
I can GOZ the figure from DAZ to Zbrush, but it only exports the lowest subdivision level. Is there anyway to export the higher sub division levels?
Post edited by Flortale on
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Why not just use displacement maps? Easier to paint over a 50% grey template with blacker and whiter areas than edit a mesh.
Is there a guide on how to create displacement maps or normal maps that work with DAZ? Those maps seem to often have unique requirements, something like X+, Y-, Z+, something like that. Does Zbrush have a preset setting to make displacement maps with the press of a button for DAZ?
Example:
1. I export base G8F model to Zbrush VIA Goz.
2. I subdivide and then begin sculpting.
3. I click "create displacement map for DAZ Studio"
4. Then it's done.
5. Use map in DAZ studio.
Is it that easy?
Here's another question. If displacement maps are so much better, then why doesn't DAZ use displacement maps instead of releasing HD addons?
You might want to read through this thread.
That's odd that users can't make HD addons of their own. Hmmm. Looks like I have to make a displacement map then.
If anyone finds this post in future, I think making displacement map in Zbrush is as easy as just clicking the generate displacement map button. The X+,Y+,Z- stuff is for normal maps when using a program like xnormal with low res and high res mesh.
Here is how to make displacement maps that work with DAZ: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/8287/displacement-map-information-or-tutorials
Nobody said they were better. They're more of a sideways step than a forwards one; they do much the same job, but they do it in a different way.
As far as Zbrush, I don't know. I certainly know that Blender can be used to calculate displacements between the low-poly and high-poly meshes, so you could actually start with an HD morph as a base and then project your version back onto the base mesh, but most of what I know about Zbrush can be summarised as that "it's very different in purpose and function to Blender".
The term you probably need to Google for is "Displacement baking" to find out if you can transfer back to the low-poly mesh, but not knowing much about the functionality within Zbrush, I'm not very qualified to give feedback on which guides would work.
(A fallback solution would be to export an OBJ to Blender and bake there, which is a pretty easy process once you get around the general awkwardness of every one of these programs having different interfacing. Jumping back and forth between Daz and Blender is certainly a headache, as they've got completely different viewport controls).
I'd be happy enough to see a detailed tutorial showing how to create details in Blender and export as a Normal Map (or displacement). I think I get the general idea but some confirmation of the complete process would be good. Also, some explanation of the cost of normal/displacement maps in terms of render time or VRAM compared to HD morphs. We all have access to Blender but I'm guessing that few have the spare cash for ZBrush or even Substance Painter. DAZ are not going to release the HD tool but @Oso3D posted an impressive example of using Normals instead (although he used Substance Painter to do so).
Displacement is often the better choice but it’s also dependent on maps being available or made using the HD mesh, I have rehashed this argument endlessly with PA’s who insist including those maps which they can export anyway creating the HD mesh is too big a download for them to add to their product and too much work.
If they added them we could edit the maps for needs such as removing displacement where not wanted which you cannot do with a HD full body morph.
It is also better for those FBX exporting stuff to other programs like iClone as FBX only does base mesh.
I can accept DAZ keeping the HD technology for PA’s but wish at least they could then supply the displacement maps for the characters as well as creating them myself has not gone well.
While displaement/normals are a good approximation theya re limited (without a custom shader) to moving in/out along the normal direction, while an HD moprh can move the mesh in any direction
Creatures I get it but pores and wrinkles?
I love the few vascularity, wrinkly, muscly and porey maps I do have and mix them with other figures
We can at least now use a HD obj export to displace the mesh in Carrara thanks to Philemo but iClone I still rely on maps on a tessellated mesh
Liked the look of the displacement maps way more than the normal or bump maps. There was a thread someone made here many years ago that showed with images the quality of those 3 maps. His conclusion was that displacament was just better quality than the other two.
But during my testing found that big issue was you need to make a displacement for all surfaces or the seams at the mat edges become visible. And displacing head and neck likely leads to new issues (did not actually check that...yet). That in turn made me believe the only option was to take it into a 3d app and redo/smooth the displacement maps for the head/torso transition so that you can leave the head witout adding a displacement map to smoothing out the seams. Can do that, but with multiple characters that adds alot of time. If anyone has found a working or different or a better approach would love to hear it.
In my experience, converting an HD morph to a displacement is actually a pretty easy process, only really limited by the lag of trying to handle very high poly meshes in real time in Blender.
If you're comparing to bump and normal maps, that's no great revelation; that can be guessed from just how the technologies work. Displacement maps actually alter the mesh surface, while bump and normal maps just make the surface pretend that it has contours.
(They influence the surface normal vector that is used for calculations, making that part of the surface reflect/refract/transmit light as if it were angled differently to what the raw mesh would suggest).
However it does often make for a good approximation, normal maps are however much more efficient in terms of processing power and memory, which is a huge boon for real-time applications like video games.
@Matt_Castle
The quality and res of the displacement map which is usually baked does play a key diff. Having used normal maps alot and had happy results in vid-games like you say. But with IRAY we are trading real-time with physics for much slower but higher detail & realistic light and almost total control over mesh deforms. This higher visible quality in IRAY renders due to displacement maps (and turning off bump & normal) was really a treat to see.
Have you done a full figure displacement, including head? If so, what did you find?
Also do you have a sample file of your HD morph to displacement? Would love to see it.
If you want displacement only on the torso, make sure the edges are mid gray (128,128,128) and make midgray maps for the other material zones.
How far would you have to feather that out inwards from the seams to make sure there are no wierd lumps ? My worry is for a good displacement you need to use higher impact settings in the parameters tab. Or at least that's what I found with my 1 test so far on a G8F. Then throw in some light situations for a character you use in many scenes and eventually you will likley get questionable skin-depressions or skin-mound projections for those transition areas. It's why am thinking having to brush it in a 3d app to make sure the projection surface holds up from all angles, and especially when subject to good contrasting light.
Yes.
This is the only picture I currently have access to (I'm away from home at the moment), and it was a test where I hadn't entirely nailed down the parameters yet (or even had the correct recipe for the character on hand), but this was a G8F conversion of a gorgon character I based on Lekkulion for G3F, originally an HD figure.
The finalised version of the conversion is very hard to tell apart from the original, at least without relying on differences in the base figures themselves, such as their expression details or bending.
The main issue with converting to a displacement rather than an HD morph is that the displacements only apply at the rendering stage, so they can't be taken into account in collisions, which does make them more liable to have issues with mesh clipping.
However, displacement maps are also compatible with the bump map parameter, so it is possible to partially apply the results as bump maps rather than entirely as displacements, so reducing the positive displacement slightly and dialling some of it in on the bump map channel reaches a compromise where you get to keep most of the detail in the silhouette but with much the same look otherwise and no need to slap adjustment modifiers on everything.
Not one I can share; the files obviously contain Daz morph data, and while the Daz licence covers me for the personal modification of assets, I'd be breaching the terms if I shared the Blend files or final displacement maps with anyone else.
Well a few pixels would be enough. Actually, if the displ. map is correctly made, based on a mid gray value, there should be no need to use maps for the other zones. I use 3DL and use displacement maps on pretty much every character I create. Well 3DL uses micro displacement so it doesn't handle it the same way as Iray, so not sure if there's a difference. Anyway, I've found that displacement is not properly calibrated. Don't know if it's a DS issue or a 3DL issue, though. When using that midgray map that should equal zero displacement I actually use a min value of -1.01 with a max value of 1:) With those values I can use a map for the torso only with no visible seams even at high strenght. Granted, if you insert graymaps for the other mat zones there should be no issues.
Thanks for sharing. The render though doesn't really show properly where the torso & head seams meet. Hair obstructs forehead seam and under jaw is not visible due to angle. And with my test found the seams only in a full sunlight and using iray live preview as I panned around the character. They didn't show in several light situations or from several angles. But still very interesting possibility that you present.
Mmmm, that sounds problematic. Will have to test that. That's a potentially big negative.
Many of the bump maps I find unnatural looking for skin textures on certain zones of the body. Will check it out, but am guessing from all my test renders so far, will continue to minimize or stay away from normal & bump maps. Thanks to a quality Belladzine's product where there was something incomplete (minor bug) think maybe I found a better way
. Will test when I get time again.
If you ever do a HQ render @4k with the 2 characters side by side and showing the skin details, would love to see it. (4k so a person can zoom in and pan through)
Thanks Sven for input. Will try adding a mid-grey to the head/neck transition. Honestly am cynical that it will work with only a few pixels. But guesses based on experince can be wrong. So I will test when I get time again. Will be a while before i can get that in depth again Did find that the arm and leg displacement maps matched well with the torso. But if what Matt says about collision is right, that could add additional issues with clothing and so on.
Seems would be much simpler if Daz let me buy the HD-addon techno for a fair price.
I would be very interested in learning exactly how the
The Normal maps were generated for characters like Ivan 7 or Darious 6
as Iwould like to make similar for my G2 custom Morphed figures.
Ivan& Darious's maps look great in my C4D render engine even with Ivan exported as .obj/MDD for animation at BASE zero subD resolution!!!
I have the free Xnormal program
MODO and Maxon body paint and 3D coat.
Does anyone here know exact process of how Ivan's normal maps were created???
I use a combination of 4K displacement, normal and bump maps on my characters because I don’t sell through the Daz store and so also don't have access to the HD tools. Displacement can provide decent results when applied correctly. I use Mudbox for sculpting, and it took a large amount of trial and error to get full body displacements working correctly without seams. The materials have been tweaked in all the example renders in my post to exaggerate the details and make it easier to see. Click the attached files for larger images:
When Daz Studio 4.11 was released, I had to go back and rework my displacement maps because something changed with how Iray was handling the files. I'm not sure if it’s a bug with Daz Studio, iRay or Mudbox but I ended up settling on my current workflow: Bake 32-bit .EXR displacement files from Mudbox, open in Photoshop with the free Exr-IO plugin (https://www.exr-io.com/) and re-save as a 32-bit .EXR file using the plugin.
Iray doesn’t handle displacement as well as other render engines. You need to provide a heavily subdivided mesh to give enough polygons for the displacement details to show up. This is why I still also use normal maps and bumps maps alongside my displacement maps. But any time you’re using displacement it will be pretty resource heavy to render.
When rendered all together with subsurface scattering, you can get pretty crisp results (details exaggerated for clarity)
The benefit of using all three maps in a combination is that you have much more control for tweaking each level of detail in Daz Studio. For example, you can dial in each map so it looks exactly how you want in different environments and lighting conditions. Or you could use maps from one character on another to add additional details when needed. Even blending between maps in Photoshop to combine features from different characters.
I have plans to do some video tutorials on parts of my workflow, though that is currently hampered by a lack of time. But do yourself a favour and get to know the basics of an image editing application such as Photoshop if you don’t already. It will open up a ton of possibilities for creating your own characters or modifying others.
(Forum software forces width to 800, height remains same, elongating images with a wider dimension. Unfortunately, it looks like the dimensions were unlocked and I didn't notice before saving.)
I do also have a test render of Olympia 7's HD details on G8F, which may possibly illustrate those areas better, although it's not rendered to very high quality. This does at least illustrate the chin and shoulder seam areas. While there are a few creases in those areas, they are true to the HD morph, and don't correlate to the seams on between materials.
(This is not however on Olympia's SD shape, so the HD details don't really match the morph and it may look a little odd in places).
Because they're simultaneously baked from the HD morphs, the displacement maps are consistent across all zones, so as long as they use the same displacement parameters, the displacements on those materials will match.
In this case, the bump map is made directly from the HD morph; although they work in different fashions, bump and displacement maps both use a height map format along the normal vectors of the face, so the actual input data is interchangeable.
The difference here is that you're just trading normals caused by tesselation of the surface for one calculated at the incidence phase, so while there is a slight difference in where the final surface is along the base mesh's normal, the final normals correlating to any given point on the UV map can be exactly the same if correctly configured. As this trade-off reduces issues with mesh clipping while preserving the same apparent surface contours, it's a reasonable compromise.
My hardware really isn't up to 4K rendering, I'm afraid. I'm either on a slightly old ultrabook, or a compact desktop that relies on half-height graphics cards*.
* Although it does have the blessing that other than limited space, it does still use proper desktop hardware, rather than being one of those compact desktops that's really a laptop in disguise. (And although the CPU is now a few generations old, it is nearly the top of said generation, so it holds up reasonably well).
This is great work here. Thanks for sharing.
Here are some test renders of extracting HD details from Michael 8. I exported Michael 8 HD out to obj at SubD 4 and used Mudbox to extract the displacement and normal map information. The 'Base Displacement' and 'Base Normal' renders are a base level Michael 8 exported to obj, reimported back to Daz Studio and converted to SubD. This imitates the workflow used when taking Daz figures to other software packages. The 'Michael 8 HD' renders are at SubD Level 4.
Click on the attachments to see in more detail:
As you can see, the Base Displacement render is very close to the Michael 8 HD render. It is a little bit softer though, and that's a limitation of working at 4k resolution.
The Base Normal render looks even closer to the Michael 8 HD render, but you do loose the physical surface changes that come with displacement maps.
The differences are more apparent around areas such as the ears, which have very minimal detail when exported at base resolution.
One thing this exercise has shown me though is just how little detail there is in the Michael 8 HD Add-on. But if you don't care about it being 1-to-1 accurate with the HD details, you could use both the normal map and displacement map to increase details too.
What bit range have you got on the Displacement maps? The fact that you have got that detail in the 4K normal map implies that the texture resolution is enough to support it, so the fuzziness may be due to the range of the image.
Displacement is using 32bit float exr files, so range isn't an issue. I get closer results in other render engines using the same displacement map; here is a comparision rendered in Redshift for Maya:
There are a couple of possibilities, but I haven't done enough testing to establish the exact cause. I'm leaning towards a texture filtering issue, either from Mudbox when generating the maps or Iray when rendering the maps. That would explain the difference between the details in the normal map and displacement map. When it comes to map filtering, the displacement only has greyscale values while the normal map has RGB values. So there is more information in the color channels of each pixel in the normal map which may result in less aggressive filtering / interpolation between each pixel.
This can be overcome by using 8K displacement maps because there are more pixels in the image, so the effects of map filtering are reduced. But for a GPU renderer that can be computationally expensive.
Perhaps you can tweak settings within Iray to get better results, but I just don't know enough about it and the implementation within Daz Studio to do so. Or it may be caused by something else I'm overlooking entirely; this is just speculation really. Either way, there will always be some loss of fidelity when you have to take into account different applications, texture filtering methods, color space interpretations, file types, compression and decompression methods, texture extraction methods, subdivision methods, uv subdivision methods, texture resolutions and mesh poly counts. But I assume that for most people a 1-to-1 pixel perfect result isn't required, and the workflow to get 95% of the way there will be more than adequate.
On a related note, I spent some time over the weekend preparing some assets to do a video tutorial on the workflow discussed above. As part of that, I have created my own Development Kit, which helps to speed up a lot of the tedious or repetitive work involved when working on characters. Here is a screenshot of the contents so far:
Some details:
I may still add a few more things, but this will be released either with the video tutorial for the workflow or released before if I can't make time for the video.
I hope I'm not clogging this thread up too much, I'm happy to create a dedicated thread and migrate the information if people would prefer.
Thank you very much for all this, and especially that image of displacement vs normal vs bump. That one is my fav. There can potentially be small differences due to baking setups, but image remains a really nice base comparison. My interest is more in finer things so displacement can be sufficient for my needs. Not really trusting the consistency of nomal maps across many renders with various angles and light setups. Perhaps that is unfair and untrue. But its the current theory am running under. Still a WIP to decide my final render setup in terms of materials
Hmmm. That is interesting that (1) 4.11 caused a changed in your displacement maps and (2) that Redshift in Maya renders more detail. Would guess that Richard's remarks above referencing a shader may explain your issues? Shaders are so integral to everything, or that's what all my experiences and reading has found (as opposed to writing shaders myself). Think it's fair to say Daz relies on normal & bump and HD (based on many character setups have looked at). So displacement map support (ie. Shaders) may not be as full as possible? Just a guess. Maybe a DAZ expert will correct this if that is wrong. Would be interested to hear if you do render a 8k displ.map to see if there is a diff.
+1 to image editing, plus would add an on-screen drawing tablet/pen.
This is great quality stuff! You sure are dedicated! And really really nice of you to share this!
Feel it would seem to make sense to make your own thread. That would be my vote. There may not be alot of people wanting to operate at this level, but over time, there will surely be others that ask about DAZ HD to displacement map creation. Given how involved this is and not so many people would see this through, can't see how Daz would begrudge a dedicated thread for this, even though it's kinda-sorta-itsy-bitsy "subverting" the PA-only coveted desireable HD.
Thanks! Will have to do same, and then pan through my scene with bright sun and see if I can find any seams.
That's a really good point. Will have to check how some of the PA's HD's look as well, so have more options. If I can setup a workflow in my 3d app, I can maybe bake them out one by one.
LOL, that's what I was doing for several of my tests. Plug Bump map into displ and turn off bump.
Still not sure where am going to end up with displacement strength setting in Daz mat parameters. As soon as I fiddle with that, which i did, it's where things start needing more tweaking. Really have to sit down soon and work on this in depth to see what's what to meet my needs in various scenes, distances, angles and lighting.
Well that's pretty cool that your processing HD subD 4 with that well-matured system and making it work! Hope a windfall of money finds your way and you get a computer upgrade. ;)
What a great thread. Thanks InTheFlesh for your astounding research and examples! WOW!
Deleted by me. Not required.
@Intheflesh
That Development Kit looks realy nice. I would not need a video tutorial to understand how to use the assets great work. I did bake normal and displacement maps by myself in ZBrush and was aware of the possibility to convert HD morphs into those shader maps like normal and displacement but I thought this is something like reverse engeneering the work of the PAs and so I never tried.
I especaily like the Single UV tile and Explode Eyes and Theet shape preset. This will enable you to easily export and work with the mesh in 3D modelers that don't support UDIM UVs like ZBrush. I've done those things manualy in the past all the time.