Will's Tips
Oso3D
Posts: 14,886
Figured I'd put one place for my random advice. ;)
So, here's a new one:
Iray Glossiness
After all sorts of fancy shenanigans, I've found a very functional, plausibly accurate way of doing glossy, which also happens to be VERY EASY. This is geared at PBR Metallicity.
Glossy weight: 1. Glossy color: pure white. Always (although if you are doing funky cloth or something where the colors shift, might put a color here)
Set Glossy Roughness based on objects and desired highlights; low values mean very plasticy/metallic looking stuff, most skin/cloth/etc should be in the .6-.8 range. With rocks and cement, I set to .8-1, plus some diffuse roughness.
Adjust Glossy Reflectivity; cloth, rock, and other low-glossy stuff will be as low as .1-.2. For more sheeny stuff, increase.
If your stuff has maps in Glossy Weight or Color, drop them. Glossy Weight maps should probably go in Reflectivity.
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bookmarked!
:)
j
Interesting. I've played with that some, but it looks like I'll have to play with that a bit more. ;)
You bookmark by clicking on the star icon next to the gear icon, top right ot the first post in the thread.
Well, I've done all sorts of fancy things with top coat and whatnot, and in the end... eh, nuts to all that.
Nowadays I'm more inclined to handle water droplets or whatever as an actual geoshell rather than try to handle it with top coat. Theoretically top coat is 'better' for, say, sweat and oil, but I haven't found it to matter much and it's a lot easier to get a consistent look out of just roughness + reflectivity.
Note that bump is essentially roughness, so if an object has a lot of bump/normal detail, you might want to lower roughness. In fact, you can replace roughness entirely by using bump, but it's easier to save bump for larger details and roughness for 'super tiny microdetail.'
Sweet, Will! Are you open to basic questions (like when, why, and how to use Thin-Walled) or is it better we don't inundate you and just enjoy the mana from heaven?
Ask away, though it may take time for me to have the energy to expound...
Excellent. Really looking forward to this!
There are a lot of functions in DS that seem really weird or hard to understand, but... aren't. Just under documented.
Geoshells.
Geoshells are basically nothing more than copies of an object, that are automatically parented to the object and tweaked a little. One tweak is having a push modifier automatically; a push modifier 'pushes' the mesh outward or inward (positive or negative). This is called Mesh Offset, but you can add the same thing to a regular object (Edit > Geometry > Add Push Modifier)
A geoshell inherits any morphs and resolution of the base object.
A geoshell may be moved or scaled differently than its parent. A simple way to do 'snowcaps', for example, is to increase the Y scale ('stretching' the geoshell) and then giving it some negative Y (sinking it into its parent). The result is that the upper bits of the geoshell poke up through its parent; put a stone texture on the parent and a snow texture on the geoshell, and you have a passable snowy mountain. (Though the line between the two objects is sharp and only as good as the complexity of the object -- displacement can help muddy the line)
Geoshells have visibility flags so you can shut off some surfaces. For example, if you want to put makeup on a character, you can add it to the face of the geoshell, and then hide all the other surfaces.
Geoshells have the same UV options as the base figure. Note that it doesn't have to be the SAME UV map; you could grab a V4 makeup layer on the geoshell, but the skin underneath is M6.
You can have multiple geoshells on the same figure, adding layer after layer. Note, however, that in Iray, geoshells must have unique positions/offsets or you get strangeness (z fighting, for the cgi savvy). So if things look weird between two geoshells, you might want to have one at offset .02 and the other at .03. Or whatever.
Note that you can have negative offsets; you could have an emitting geoshell pattern inside someone's body.
Would a geoshell be a cheap way of doing a DAZ Studio instantiation of a model I hear talked about sometimes?
e.g. Make a DAZ Studio version of this album cover:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterflash_(album)
as a simple example?
You're better off creating instances.
OK
Ooo, been there. Almost everything I know about geoshells, Will taught me! I managed to learn a couple of things on my own, but learned most of it through conversations with Will in various threads.
Thanks for sharing this! Your posts have been very helpful.
Not having been involved with this for very long, I have no back inventory of older characters (I only have a few V4/M4 items to go along with V4/M4), so when you say you could use a V4 makeup on a geoshell of an M6 character, would there be any other reason to use different UV maps beyond the makeup trick?
Additional subjects I'd love more insight into include using IRay decals (I know you did a quick example of them previously, but they still behave erratically for me), making/applying geografts, and creating/applying custom morphs--you know, if you're wondering what might make other useful tips. :-)
As soon as I saw who this post was from I bookmarked before I even finished reading. lol I've been hoping you'd start a thread where we could see all your advice and helpful tips accumulated in one spot. Perhaps you could even link us back to other posts/discussions you've had that you think the general community would find helpful. :D
+1
I agree. Thank you
...what about applying skin details though LIE overlays? wouldn't that be simpler for makeup, tattoos, moles, and freckles?
Yeah, I realized my advice kept getting scattered all over the place. And linking back to other discussions would be great, but I'm disorganized and the search here is subpar... so, yeah, no. ;)
PDS: Well, if you happen to have this really cool V4 makeup glitter but you want to put it on a really cool character with a skin texture that's not V4... normally you'd be kind of stuck. This way you have more freedom to mix and match.
kyoto kid: Not really? Here's the thing... if you place a few items and want to move them around, you can just go over to Tile Offset and, well, move the entire layer around. To do that with LIE you have to go into each and every map and adjust them all the same. That can get annoying.
And if you aren't dealing with bump, it's even simpler -- all you really need is an opacity map. You can set everything else to simple values. The opacity map then just says 'put all those effects HERE' and you can tweak how much or little the WhateverItIs covers the skin underneath.
Oh that would be awesome! How do you change a UV map on a Geoshell to be something other than the base figures UV?
UV map is a property of the geoshell surface (or any surface).
...however, for example, let's say I just want to give Leela a flutterby tattoo. Doesn't make sense to create full body geoshell just for the one spot on the shoulder or upper arm where the tattoo will be.
You just change it on the geoshell's surface stuff, no special method. When it comes to shading, it's basically another, different copy of your original object/figure.
I know. Me, too. I've learned so much from Will already, over the last year, I figure he has a lot more that I'd love to learn about. It will be nice to have all Will-isms all in one place for future reference. I have a number threads bookmarked all over the place just for the tidbits of advice Will has shared.
I'll touch on Iray Decals more when I'm more awake, but they are good for things like 'butterfly tattoo.'
Decal advantages over Geoshell: you can do funky things with projection type; by default it just ignores UV and 'projects' onto the figure. It'll cross multiple surfaces without a problem.
Decal disadvantages: Eeexcept that 'cross multiple surfaces' can be a pain, because you can't just 'shut off' surfaces like with Geoshells; if the decal covers part of the face and eyes, it's going to be covering part of the face and eyes. You can't just tell it 'no, everything except the eyes.'
Decals don't have displacement, unlike Geoshells.
Iray Decals are only with Iray (um, duh)
Creating a geoshell of V7 gives the geoshell the V7 UV right? So how do I then change that geoshell's UV to say, V4's UV?
Generally speaking, you can't. There are currently no products out there that give G3F the UV map of V4 because the seams along each surface are far too different. There are a variety of products out there that will either convert an existing V4 texture to G3F, or apply the texture with what is known as a geograft -- literally grafting the geometry of one thing to another.
G2F *is* capable of switching to a V4 UV, provided you have the product to do so. After that, you can just go into the surfaces tab and change the UV Set parameter.
The geoshell may have any UV maps the parent could have, and it's changed in the same way as the parent. Normally when you create a geoshell it just has a daz original blank starting surface; if you want any particular skin/texture on it, you have to add it.
So, you change it the way you change UV maps normally; you go to 'uv map' parameter in the surface settings for the geoshell and change it to whatever.
(Most figures have a few uv map options, and you can add more through things like UV Setter Gen: http://www.sharecg.com/v/73633/view/21/DAZ-Studio/UVSetterGen2-Revised )
@mtl1 Ah ok. Thank you! :D
I was kind of afraid of that. I got all excited when I heard you could change the UV but was worried it might not be possible to use an older gen UV with V7/G3. I think that CaymanStudios has a product over at "that other place" that can do it, but I can't really afford it so I was hoping there was a way to do it myself (with a little work of course). :)
@timmins.william Oh sweet! Thanks, Will! :) I'll have to try out the UV setter.
I like the UV setter and it works across genders, too, so it is easy to use a M4 texture on a V4 body for example. Which leads to a question, not sure I'd want to do this, but could I have a male figure with a male UV texture and give him a geoshell with a female makeup texure on it set with the female UV? Not sure that would work asthetically, but, theoretically, is that possible?