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The real thing is pretty dull and all that I've really seen around for the most part, but there have been amazing designs over the years in gaming (Koreans are especially good at it for some reason.) But yes, now I understand why it's so tricky to do with a posable figure. I could model it fine, but making a complicated fantasy armour piece adjust to basically any user poses without deforming? It almost feels simpler to just make a brand new figure from scratch (ie armour instead of skin) with a new set of limits. But of course rigging all looks alien and confusing to me, so I don't know much about what can and can't be done in that area yet so I don't know how accurate that is.
That's where making armor as a parented prop as opposed to conforming clothing makes more sense...but then if the parts are individual items, it is less dependent on what figure it is for and less likely to need to be redone.
Do we have enough melodramatic villains?
Okay I just had an aha moment. Please don't laugh at me it seems so obvious now that I figured it out. You can actually use the templates given with the items to add your own patterns and colors to correct? Can you also take those patterns (which I just figured out are uv maps) add colors to them and use them as new materials for a piece of that clothing?
And is it possible to use a triangle polygon methos to make clothing for Daz? Or does it have to be square?
Yep!
Or even resize it -- a lot of older clothes are lower resolution, but you can make it larger, use some intelligent blur and masking to fix edges. I haven't done much with it myself, because just putting in a simple paisley or whatever works fine most of the time, but I've been thinking about it. (Although the biggest reason to try this is for some of the stuff like buildings, where it's a lot more glaring when you've put in a completely new shader, and windows and such are baked into the texture)
Thank you. So is there a specific way to import it or can you just use the diffuse channel (I think that's it) and use it that way?
I have Hexagon, which I have just had a chance to glance at and I have sculptrix which i have played with a tiny bit. The sculptrix is very intuitive and a lot like Zbrush but it adds polys as you go and you don't have to turn this on or turn that off to work with it. but there isn't much point in spending a huge amount of time on it if Hexagon and or zbrush are the better way to go.
I'm talking strictly texture maps in a photo editor, nothing that fancy. ;) I click on the texture map to get the file location, then open it in GIMP or Paint.net and play with it.
You can do funky things without doing anything to the object. For example, in Iray, an easy way to generate furry surfaces is to get/make a noise map (static looking thing), plug it into Displacement channel. -1, +1, SubD of, oh, 4 to start with, and tile the texture map (Iray Uber Shader lets you tile each channel on it's own with Image Editor) to, oh, 8x8 or something.
Slowly increase tiling until it stops visibly changing in previews, then bump SubD up, repeat until you have a surface that looks like fur!
I think similar things work with some 3DL shaders, and there are some special fur shaders as well.
That's what they are there for...
In some ways they've become less desired with the advent of a bunch of tiling shader presets available, but a good custom fit texture set will beat a tiled preset any day of the week.
Quads are better for smoothing, have 'coherent' edge loops that makes modeling easier and such. They are also easier to UV map. Tris on the other hand are often easier to drape with dynamics. Programs like Marvelous Designer use tris. But...it is much easier to convert quads to tris than go from tris back to quads.
It would be nice to get more superhero stuff other than the basics for male. You know helmets, belts, capes ...
Yes I was planning on starting with textures in photo shop. Will have to play a bit with the furry surfaces, I haven't ventured into Iray waters yet. But it sounds like fun!
Makes sense. The scuptrix is sooo easy to use but its a triangle based software. I would rather go ahead and learn the square if its easier to work with than spend time learning something else and having to figure out how to convert everything.
I've seen that movie! Was pretty funny. :)
I'm going to attempt something tomorrow I think....have no idea what. I'm so new to the modeling seen it will look like a preschooler got into the playdoh. ;)
Okay heres a question, since I'm really new at this. If I create something for Genesis 2 Male will it automatically fit say Michael 6 or Scott?
I've used Sculptris as well, and it is remarkably easy to do very complex sculpts. However, complex is working against rendering and memory efficiency, so when you're ready to render those models, make a sandwich or something.....
I'm using Hexagon2, now, and while I really like the clean, relatively low polys that it can make, I have serious crashing issues, and have never successfully been able to send geometry into Hex from Ds, and bring it back. Crashes out every time, and I'm careful not to over-smooth. Gotta give Blender, Art of Illusion, and Sculptris credit for being FAR more stable than Hexagon for me. Unfortunately, none of them (except Sculptris) are as user friendly to non-Math-Geeks like me as Hexagon is.
So far, I see two places where 3D assets in general are sorely lacking: Male facial hair, and tattoos. There are a few serviceable short beards out there, as well as Garibaldi and LAMH, but even the best examples from them are pretty weak tea. Same with tattoos. They just don't look real in close-up (I've been a professional tattooist for thirty years, so I know what I'm talking about).
So, I'm excited to work on fixing both those issues....
Ya I found Sculptrix to very intuitive. I haven't tried importing and exporting from Hexagon yet.
I'm useless at math, but I find Blender's interface beautifully logical to use (if bewildering before you get used to its way of doing things.) But then I watch tutorials and see people talking about making things and they make it sound so sophisticated and complex, and it really does create this wall that makes new people feel like they couldn't even try. Maybe I'm wrong, but to me, 3d modelling isn't all that complicated, there's just a lot of it. I see it as connecting dots and dragging them around until they're where you want them, then making the squares pretty. There are a billion ways to arrange and manipulate those dots in different programs, and learning all of those and the best situations to use them in will take a very long time, but at the end of the day it's just finding one that puts them in a place that works for you and your project in a way you enjoy or at least are able to do. I know that if I wanted to, I could just sculpt an entire object in Blender with fairly intuitive brushes, or I could use curves to define an object (haven't tried much of nurbs though I understand the concept) but mostly I just like dragging the dots around on one axis at a time, or along the path (vertex slide.)
I guess the point of this rambling ramble is that if you're new and daunted, there is a hell of a lot to 3d, but just take it in small sections and work on understanding what you're doing in terms that you get, rather than mindlessly following tutorial instructions. Also, have fun. It's easy to feel like everything is super serious and businessy and quality control, etc. Experiment. Be the play doh diver. Just concentrate on keeping it as simple as possible and you'll add in concepts over time and become much faster more quickly than you'd expect when you start out,
Or completely ignore me. But hopefully it'll be ignoring me to do what you want, not the way you think you're supposed to be doing things according to some person.*
* Note: this does not mean tutorials and advice are bad. They're invaluable.
I have Blender and its okay, me and UV mapping didn't get along for some reason. User error I'm sure.
I have Silo 2, it has a nice interface and is easy to learn for the most part. Take a look at it if your need something Hexagon like with a bit more power.
Silo 2: http://www.nevercenter.com/silo/
I will say that Blender is a bit intimidating. But I usually start with the most basic of basic tutorials and once I understand what the controls actually do (mostly) then I move on to more complicated stuff. Yes, its a bit boring to watch someone make a cup BUT its a very basic shape to understand how the interface works. And I am a super visual learner so You Tube is a godsend for me. But I tend to watch a tutorial then go and start to do it, then go off on a tangent. I will get half way through it and think hmmm wonder what happens if I do this? I'm super excited about this thread as I had no idea where to even start to learn to do this kind of stuff. As soon as I really understood that it was something attainable to do I wanted to MAKE things. So this is an awesome opportunity for me to learn how.
UV mapping bewildered me for quite awhile, until I finally realised that the unwrapped shapes in the map window are just dots and lines that you can rearrange anywhere you want to. I was so scared to touch them because I thought it'd break the model and the image or something.
Tattoos are more of a texturing thing than modelling...and if you've been a tattoo artist, then that will be a big plus in upping the level of realism for them, but you will still be limited by the limitations of the mapping.
I saw that. Not sure how you can move the dots around and not change the outfit. I'm still going what? How can you straighten a line that is curvy on the dress and not have it effect the dress?
Think of a UV map as a layer of the model. The points on it represent the actual vertices of the mesh but are not those vertices. They are just points on an image that when flattened out allow you to align an image so it will cover the mesh.
One thing that really helped me was to make a basic organic type model, and then unwrap it and set the background to the colour grid test thing. Then you can look closely at how your model lines up with the uv map (since every square is uniquely labelled) and get a feel for how things move and distort when you rearrange the map parts.
Oh that makes sense then. Thank you!
@Lotheran - Yes, the transfer utility will make your creation compatible with the G2M morphs in a generic way. Therefore, when the M6 morphs for the uderlying G2M are dialed up, Studio will attempt to autofit your creation to M6. There are ways to make it more precise, some of which SickleYield alluded to in those wonderful outlines on the first page. If I understand correctly, it has to do with making your own tailored morph for a particular popular character, then replacing the full body morph (exact name). Then autofit will reference your custom morph instead of the generic morph. Anyone feel free to correct me if that is wrong.
I have been doing some more background research on vintage villains. Here are two collections. One is from the old Republic serials. The other is from images of the Phantom of the Opera (one modern). I think there is something here to draw from. Inspired by these and the melodramas above, I may sketch out some vintage formal clothing, and then some sort of cape/mask/hood accessory. How dastardly can I get?
Note: for those folks who have no modeling experience, the consensus is to keep the first attempt simple. Keeping to that logic, I will start with just one element of the villain outfit (to be determined after I sketch out my reference).
The tricky part of UV mapping is that if you decide to change your mesh in some way, you need to unwrap it again. You may have to adjust the unwrap seams, too. If you've already started making a texture that matches your old UV pattern, it may not work with the changed UV. That's not a problem with repeating textures, but it can be with custom designs where the seams might become visible on your object.
Once your mesh is "finished" and unwrapped, any 3d texture painting that you do on your object can fix the seems, but then your texture depends on that mesh staying exactly as it is (meaning you can't add or delete vertices). You can do anything you like to the object mesh and its UV before texturing, but changes to the mesh and UV anytime after texturing starts will likely require redoing the textures over again for best results. Painting a straight line on the object might make a curved line on the texture, because the UV layout needs to convert 2d space to 3d.
RE: my vintage villain inspirations -
There are of course hundreds of clothing websites on the web. Here are some very helpful places for my villain project.
Warning - commercial links follow
1) My favorite so far because I can find some with that melodramatic feel. This would also be good for those of you who like Jane Austen characters, although the Daz store does have some of that.
Gentleman's Emporium - vintage Victorian clothing for men and women.
http://www.gentlemansemporium.com/mens_victorian_clothing.php
2) Great website to inspire regular vintage menswear.
Beyond Retro
http://www.beyondretro.com/en/men.html#q=&page=0&refinements=%5B%7B%22categories%22%3A%5B%22Men%22%5D%7D%5D&numerics_refinements=%7B%7D&index_name=%22brlive_en_products_news_from_date_desc%22
3) And don't forget the gunfight at high noon!
Sheplers western wear
http://www.sheplers.com/mens-western-shirts.html
Bingo!
I have a major piece of my inspiration. The Phantom of the Speedway. OK, now I will experiment with sketching out some ideas that integrate villainous themes in the outfits posted above with this historic photo of an old time race car driver. Thank you, Library of Congress prints and photographs collection.
Bob Burman, Without Peer, Knew no Fear
http://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.09237/
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