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Thanks, Laurie!
Here is a thread devoted to Hexagon tutorials. Lots and lots of free ones with associated links.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/298/hexagon-tutorial-list/p1
Ooops....sorry ;). Didn't know about that thread :)
Laurie
A huge thank you! I'll begin working on this later on, I'm about to prep dinner here. I'm really keen to get started!
I'm always learning new stuff! Been a Silo user, because in the past Hexagon crashed a lot and was too buggy on my side. But since the beta it's much MUCH more stable and after a few years, I was able to jump into it again without much trouble!
Thanks for reactivating this thread, Diomede - I've been wanting to get into modeling. And thanks for letting us know what Daz3D is currently doing with Hexagon.
What do you use for unwrapping UV's and texturing?
Just a reminder because I realize I've only used Hexagon since reviving the thread. All software packages are encouraged and welcome. Hexagon is fine, and is getting some nice updates. I plan on using it more. And, I plan on adding a few more examples of content creation using Hexagon. Two enthusiastic thumbs up for Hexagon.
However, I'm not tying to sell people on Hexagon. I've tried as much as possible to keep my contributions to the thread software agnostic, meaning that the lessons are useful for people using the software of their choice. If people are comfortable using Blender, Silo, Modo, or whatever, then use that. And, I encourage you to share some examples of your workflow in whatever software you use. I will often use Carrara for simple things because I am ultra-comfortable with that software. In this thread, I'm not encouraging people to use Carrara, it is just often quicker and easier for me, and the screensots have more contrast, than if I use other software. I'm just using Carrara when the tools it lacks are irrelevant, because a model is just a collection of vertexes, however you get them.
So, use Blender or Silo, or Hexagon or whatever. And if you have the time and inclination, take some screenshots and show us how you did it in that software. If you don't have the time or inclination to go into that much detail, then just share what you can, when you can, and ask questions - and maybe share frustration. And if you are not ready to create content yet, then cheer the rest of us on. The point of this thread is to encourage more (male) content creation, so help us....
...Stay Motivated!
Good! thanks
I don't know how I missed your post. We must have been typing at the same time. At the moment, I UVMap in Hexagon or Carrara (do not recommend Carrara as a uvmapper). I am considering getting UVLayout because that is what so many of the more experienced people say they use, but I have not tried a trial version so can't say much about it. In the deep dark past I used the free UVMapper program but it has been a very long time. I just bought Substance Painter and Substance Designer so am going through tutorials for that. I hope to be doing my texturing in SP as soon as I can get up to speed. So far, it seems to fit my needs.
If anyone has review of UVMapping and 3D paint programs, I'd love to read them. For texturing, I know some folks use Blacksmith, others use 3DCoat, and more options as well.
@GiGi_7, hope you find it useful.
a lot of people seem to like Roadkill, I have not tried it.
update, downloaded it, the Maya installation includes the standalone exe
http://www.pullin-shapes.co.uk/page6.htm
I may get around to trying it one day
Weird, I don't see a stand alone download for RoadKill just the Maya one.
thats the one
read what I said, it includes it
Thank you @Diomede. I've now created my mannequinn in Daz Studio and managed to get it into Hexagon but going back I can't recreate this now.
Initially I had to link to Hexagon in my Daz folder on my Mac. Now, when I go to link to Hexagon it doesn't do anything. I've tried closing down both programmes. Tried with Hexagon launched and unlaunched. I know I must be doing something basically wrong. I'm using Hexagon version 2.5.2.109 for the Mac. From what I can work out there isn't a new update for Macs just yet.
Luckily I saved the figure file in Hexagon itself, so now I'm moving on to the Cape. Or perhaps I should watch some tutorials first :-)
I use Roadkill almost exclusively (for whatever can't be mapped easily in Wings3D) - it's very good. The downside of Roadkill is that it does NOT preserve material zones that you may have made. Your best bet is to uvmap in Roadkill first then reimport the uvmapped obj back into your modeling program and then add the material zones. It's pretty easy, but of course I've been doing it this way for so many years that it takes me no time at all.
My workflow is: modeling the obj in Wings3D, export to .obj; import exported .obj into Roadkill and cut the uvs, export uv'd .obj; reimport uvmapped .obj into Wings3D and add material zones.
Laurie
With the programs I own(DAZ Studio, Carrara, Hexagon, and Paint.net), what other free or inexpensive programs should I consider getting in order to produce good quality clothing for Studio and Genesis? I am on a very limited budget, but can afford up to $150 for a program. I plan to model with Hexagon, but I was wondering what software I should use for UV mapping and texturing.
UV mapping - Is Hexagon adequate, or should I get something like Roadkill, Ultimate Unwrap 3D, or something similar?
Textures - I have Paint.net, but I have heard a bit about Substance Painter. Should I buy Substance Painter, stick with a paint program, or look into something else?
@Mollytabby I found another tutorial by Fugazi1968 I forgot I had https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-starter-kit/. This tutorial might be more appropriate for this topic than his classic bikini tutorial I mentioned earlier.
I also found this tutorial for Hexagon and DAZ Studio in the store https://www.daz3d.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-creating-complex-outfits-bundle. Buying tutorials can get pretty expensive!
I think Substance Painter can be excellent for texturing outfits (however, it cannot, at this point, paint across boundaries of UDIM tiles as used on DAZ human figures). I know that PAs are using it for clothing items (for example Aeon Soul confirmed to me that they are using it, and it's clear from others' work as SP produced textures have that SP "look").
However, I would be prepare yourself for a considerable time of training as it uses concepts and methods, from one end of the workflow to the other, that you are probably not going to be familiar with. Most SP tutorials are based on hard surface models, but don't let that put you off as you will learn a lot from them and you will be able to apply what you have learned to anything else that you create.
I recommend getting the 30 days' free trial and carefully following the Allegorithmic tutorial series "Getting Started with Substance Painter 2018". This uses a storm lamp as a project and you can see that here: https://academy.allegorithmic.com/ ; I followed this tutorial at least twice and still refer to it occasionally to refresh my memory on some points.
Substance Painter is particularly strong on layered textures. You have probably seen the effects, such as dirt, scratches, rust, roughness, edge wear, on products in the DAZ store. Good examples are Aeon Soul's The Legend armour and Slide3D's various boots. As my SP "apprentice piece" I completely retextured the mask below using a lot of the layer effects mentioned above:
Hiro Protaganist, thank you for the information on Substance Painter. It sounds really useful, especially since the other thing I want to model is houses.
Glad you have one saved. Remember, you can use the Daz Studio bridge instead of a saved mannequin - once you get your Hexagon and Studio in sync. I'm sorry, I'm not a Mac user and I do't know hw t sync this stuff up. You might have to ask in the Hexagon forum.
On the previous page, I used the Studio/Hexagon bridge, started with a cylinder in Hexagon, and made a yucky cape for DForce. Before I add more detail to that explanation, I thought it might be useful to just explain the steps of creating a simple cylinder in Hexagon, assign shading domains and materials, UVMap, send the result to Studio, apply Iray shaders, and save as a prop to the content library. Besides making things look nice, assigning shading domains is very helpful when used with DForce for conforming figures.
First steps - to create a simple cylinder in Hexagon, assign shader domains, project a UVMap, sned to Daz Studio, assign Iray shader presets, and save as a prop.
Note - on previous page, started with a cylinder to create a DForce cape for G8M. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3770386/#Comment_3770386
- In a new Hexagon scene, the Windows tab a the top menu has check boxes to show or hide the panes for the scene, object properties, dynamic geometry, shader domains and materials.
- To create a simple cylinder, under 3D Primitives menu, click the cylinder. Then in the viewing area, left click on the floor to start. Then drag your mouse until th diameter of the cylinder is what you want. Then left click again to set that diameter. Then, drag again to choose the height. Then left click again to set that height.
- To create a shader domain, must select some polygons to be assigned. So, in selection mode in upper left, choose the polygon mode (faces). Hold the shift key and select multple faces. In this case, I selected he faces in a vertical column. Note that there are additional tools for selection, such as loop, but not worried about that for now.
- Once the vertical polygons are selected, click "New" in the shading domain pane. A new domain is created with a default name starting with "Domain..."
- Use the little arrow next to the new shader domain for the menu to change its name.
- Use the material pane to choose a name and color for the new material to be assigned to the new shader domain.
- I chose to name the shading domain "Column" and set its material color to red.
- Polygons can be selected by shading doman. I clicked "Unassigned Faces" to select the rest of the cylinder.
- I clicked "New" in the shader domain pane and repeated the steps to rename shading domain and change its color to green.
- Click off the model in empty space in the viewport to continue.
- I also renamed the object from "form" to cylinder in the upper right of the properties tray.
- not impotant for this test, but note that the cylinder does not have a cap. Could create one but not necessary for this demonstration.
- To UVMap, Hexagon has a menu along the to called UVMap and Paint.
- When activated, make sure you are in two camera view. The UVMapping view shold be on the right and your model on the left.
- Although could create seams and unwrap, it is sufficient for this project to just use a preset. Hexagon has a cylinder UV preset in the UVMap mnu. Click the preset.
- The polygons of the cylinder will be unrapped i a square and appar on the background in the right hand view.
- We don't need the editing tools because the preset has worked fine.
- The cylinder is good enough for this demonstration.
- Transfer the cylinder to Daz Studio by using FILE : Send To Daz Studio.
- because I did not have Studio already open, I have to wait for Studio to load.
- If Studio was already open, you could toggle between programs.
- The simple cylinder appears in Studio.
- made sure the cylinder was selected in the scene tab. The next steps assume being used for Iray rendering, not 3DL rendering.
- in surfaces tab, confirmed that the cylinder has shading domains for the column and the rest of the model, which I called CylinderMain.
- Select each shader domains and apply the Iray Uber Base preset in turn.
- Then select each shader domain and apply an Iray shader preset of your choice, or choose settings for your own.
- I chose some car paint shaders, cranberry and midnight blue respectively.
- Did a quick test render, which is awful but that is OK.
Now to save the cylinder for future use.
- FILE : SAVE AS - SUPPORT ASSET - FIGURE PROP
- Then navigate to where you want to save your custom content
- The database menu allows for choosing your vendor name (even if for personal use), product name, project name, and smart content categories. Make sure to choose a vendor name and product name. For this, I just use Diomede.
- You can confirm in your content library that the cylinder has been saved as a prop. I don't know why you would want a paper thin cylinder with a vertical stripe and no top, but if you ever do, there it is.
Thank you, @Hiro Protagonist for that very helpful review! I am going through some SP tutorials now. If you have other recommendations or suggestions, please continue.
Thank you, @AllenArt, for sharing your workflow. I've heard good things about Roadkill elsewhere, but a lot of folks report using UVLayout. Whatever works! Do ou have a preference for 3D paint programs?
You're welcome, Diomede. I don't have recommendations for other software, but I can expand a bit on using Substance Painter to create textures from the perspective of a DAZ Studio user. This is aimed at anyone here who is trying SP out and following tutorials.
I mentioned that aspects of the workflow in SP are likely to be unfamiliar or mysterious, and you will come across one of these right at the beginning. You import your model, of course, but the first process after that is to bake a set of what seem to be very odd maps. These include, ID, Curvature, Position, Ambient Occlusion, World Space Normal and Normal. Apart from the last, these aren't maps that you are going to export for use on your model. Instead, they are "utility" maps that SP's materials use to create their effects (edge wear being a good example, but there are all kinds of great effects that make use of these maps). The normal map is a little different as this is used to bake normals from a high poly version of your model to a low poly final version (if that is in your workflow: it's not required, but is very often used in game asset creation). The ID map is also different, and it allows you to have different substance materials all on one map (see below).
Another thing to note is that if your model has multiple material (surface) zones SP will export a set of maps for every one when you have finished texturing. You are very unlikely to want this, unless the zones have different stacked UV shell layouts (in which case you will need it). If your model's UV shells are all fitted into the one base UV square then you only want one material zone on the model you are importing. It's very common for DAZ or Poser products to have many material zones: I'm looking at a piece of armour right now that has 7, which is not unusual. You don't want 7 sets of texture maps! In fact this armour has 7 material zones but they all use the same single set of maps. If the model was imported to SP with all those zones you would have to combine the exported textures into one set using an image editor, which would be very tedious.
This is where baking ID maps comes in. Briefly, in your modelling program, you assign a different solid colour (any colours) to each different vertex group (face groups in DAZ Studio) that represents a separate material zone (there is an easy way to do this in Blender, and also Maya, etc., but I don't know about Hexagon). SP will bake an ID map from this information and you can select these groups in ID view so that they can each have completely different materials on them (e.g. one wood, one paint, another metal), yet still export to a single set of maps. They essentially work as a kind of mask or filter. If you want to split the surfaces for use in Studio (which you probably will want to do), I would create them in Studio using the Geometry Editor—you can easily select them by face group and create surface from selected.
@Diomede thank you for the simple cylinder in Hexagon, I really appreciate all the work you've put in on this. Tomorrow, when I have the house to myself (except for the cat and she sleeps for hours!) and I have peace and quiet, I'm going to work my way through this process.
@Hiro Protagonist -thank you very much for that additional information. Admit I was wondering what was going on. Great tips. Encourage anyone and everyone to offer more insights.
I said I would return to the simple DForce cape example with more detail. Here is a start. There is very little new information. Rather, it just combines some of the information from the cape outline with some of the information in the cylinder example - and goes into more detail on the steps within Hexagon. Here, I will just show one way to model the cape within Hexagon. Its is not the best way to model the cape, and not the best cape as it will have no thickness, for example, but shold help with the mesh. I will show a UVMap of the cape because I am doing it differently than the cylinder, but I won't show the shading domains because the steps are identical.
In this next series of posts, the more detailed steps of modeling the cape and using it as a DForce object are presented. The first series of posts concentrate on the specific steps of modeling and uvmapping the cape using the Studio/Hexagon bridge. Feel free to use any software that you feel comfortable with. There is often more than one way to model anything. I do not use the fastest way to do this in Hexagon. It is just one way, and hopefully relatively easy to explain.
- Start in Studio and load the base Genesis 8 Male (G8M).
- Select and delete the eyelashes.
- Set the resolution level to Base, and reduce SubD smoothing to 0.
- Use the bridge by using the FILE menu, Send to Hexagon.
- In Hexaon,you should see your G8M "mannequin." If not, select it in the scene menu on the righthand side. I happen to like the 3-camera view, but use what you like. The options for camera views are at the bottom of the Hexagon default interface. I like to put the perspective view in the righthand window and the Left and Front views in the windows on the left. Again, set it up the way you like. And, feel free to change the camera view layout during your workflow as convenient.