Dear Creature Creators
Gordig
Posts: 10,600
If your creature uses a geograft, could you please try to make using your geografts less dependant on using your included materials? Without calling out any creators in particular, I've purchased a number of creature products that use geografts, only to find that I'm stuck with however the creator wanted them to look. This is a problem for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I render a lot of non-white people, which means a lot of these creatures are rendered virtually unusable for me. We can turn a Daz person into just about anything we want....as long as they're white. I understand why this is the case, and I'm not accusing anybody of any malice, but it's still very frustrating for me. Daz Centaurs can use any skin you want, even non-human skins, so this is clearly not an impossible request.
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Agreed. I understand a PAs creative vision, but they really need to start thinking outside the scope of their own use and think of the other uses that other users may need. I have passed on quite a few products that were way to linear in scope and i couldn't use them as i needed.
I'm in the same boat and while I know there are some effects and character creation workflows that mean certain creatures are limited in their flexibility, I always appreciate when artists make a note of that. I recently purchased a really cool creature that I thought might be customizable based on construction of similar figures I own and the fact that it's mostly humanlike, but after poking around it turns out that no part of it is usable independently without lots of manual retexturing or resculpting.
Faciliating kitbashing and customization isn't every artist's priority, but it's the main selling point for me and I'm always so happy when I find stuff that plays well together.
This is not something that is really possible.
The reason it worked with the centaur is because there was already an established horse figure that has textures, and a human figure that has textures.
For something like my lekkulian:
You may have more textures for the human body, but you wont have any other textures that match up the the tentacle geograft I made for it. It is a unique mesh, and it will only have the textures that are made for it. There is no way to match that to any other human character.
As RawArt says, this only really works when you can have a distinct "seam" between the geograft and the figure. Not necessarily a hard edge, but certainly a noticeable transisition from skin to fur/scales/etc.
In order to actually give a mutant character of mine the fleshy tail she's supposed to have, I had to spend ages in Photoshop trying to adjust the tail's original textures to as closely match the tone, shading, gloss, etc of the main skin textures as possible, then copy across the surface settings and swap in the modified textures. Even then, I usually have to hide the transistion where it can't be seen, put it under clothing or use a healing brush to smooth it out.
That's outside the scope of what can reasonably be automated through a script, and definitely out of the scope of what it's really possible to expect of an end user to make a product usable. (I can't link to the original tail, as it's on another store, but its attempt to address this problem was premade textures for several of the Daz core figures, which really did limit how much it could be used on figures that had even slightly different skin tones. If I hadn't specifically needed the tail for a pre-existing character, I wouldn't have been in a hurry to buy it).
Would there be a way to use a blending texture on a geoshell that blends textures across the geograft seam?
It's possible to blend textures over the seam using transparency masks - sometimes on an overlapping section of the geograft, sometimes on a geoshell, but even if the seam isn't stark, any difference in skin textures and parameters will still result the geograft not matching the figure it's attached to.
Fine if the two halves aren't expected to match (as with a centaur or mermaid), but not so good if they are.
There are geoshell solutions some products use, but it's at best a crude solution.
You will still only have a skin for the geograft elements provided by the creator, and there are setting elements that might not work well.
For example, if you are trying to blend, say, a second set of arms, the second arms will only be blue or green blending to the rest of the skin. And if the translucency or sss settings are different you're going to have a noticeable seam.
This is one reason to use morphs, but in the end a creator has to pick an approach that has the right benefits and tolerable drawbacks.
Oh, one time geoshell solutions work well is if the geograft has an opaque surface and can plausibly shift to a very different skin.
For example, mermaids and serpent body figures; you expect scales and such to be opaque and look totally different than the rest.
looks to me like we need more texture artists doing skins for these creatures
Even with a geoshell you are still limited to the textures that are made for the particular geografts
You have your answers, but whilst it may not actually be impossible, it boils down to cost - how much extra are you prepared to pay for that ease-of-use?
I've never tried it on geografts, but would this work? https://www.daz3d.com/fantasy-skins-for-genesis-8
This argument doesn't hold water, because there are other geograft figures that don't have the same limitations. Take, for example, the snake tail from Dark Fantasy Add-Ons:
It's certainly not as if there were a wealth of human-sized snake textures to draw on to make this product work. Those textures were all made for this product, and they work with any G3 character. True, the transition looks cleaner on some characters than others, but the bottom line is that it was designed to be usable with any character, any skin.
That's fine for the Lekkulians, but what about something like Octiana? She's the same sort of half-human/half-creature as a centaur, mermaid, naga, etc., with a clear visual delineation between the two halves. You designed the geograft to be flat across the waist, then created a smoother transition on the character texture. That's not invalid as an approach, but you didn't HAVE to do it that way. Look back at the snake tail: the mesh of the tail goes above the actual geograft, so that the scales overlap with the human skin in different patterns. Other products, like the G2 and G3 mermaid tails, used the same approach along with an opacity gradient, to smooth the transition out even further.
This allows one to use any character they want with the mertails, which is actually a selling point for two of them. As it is, if I wanted to use any texture on Octiana other than the ones you included, the tentacles would leave a sharp line across her waist. I didn't buy Octiana for the character morph or the texture; I bought her because I wanted to use the tentacles, and the way you designed the product unnecessarily restricts how I can use them. You could have made her tentacles more general-use, but you chose to make her a more unified character, which seems to be your general approach to creature design. Now, it is your prerogative, both as an artist and a businessman, to make these choices. Personally, I wish you would make different choices, and that's what this thread is about. But don't try to tell me that they're not choices, because they are.
I maybe could have been more clear in my original post that this was exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, but I would have thought the centaur reference would have been a hint at it.
WOULD it cost more, though? Let's go back to Octiana: you're not just buying the octopus tentacle geograft, but also a human torso/head morph with accompanying textures. Would it have been MORE work to create a set of octopus tentacles that could work with any character skin than it was to make Octiana the way she is? Or would it just be DIFFERENT work? Compare the above mermaid examples with the G8 Aguja/Alascanus mermaid sets. The G8 mermaids are full characters, with separate human and "mermaid" skin textures, not just for the human part, but for the mertail itself and several of the other geografts. That's a lot of extra texturing work that wouldn't have to happen if the geografts had transparency around them rather than skin texture.
Gordig, the examples you point to bolster what I was saying; when the geograft is fundamentally an opaque, different surface (serpent or fish scales, fur), the effect works because you expect a radically different look and the new surface doesn't have to mesh with translucency and SSS.
RawArt's example, and similar things, rely on a consistent material between geograft and skin, where the SSS translucent skin of the geograft looks the same as the rest of the skin. Those examples _won't_ work particularly well.
I know, that’s exactly what I was saying. I fully acknowledge that it won’t work for everything.
Ah, ok.
I actually used something like this with my Bocular Man, using a 'face mask' to help blend existing skins with the eyeless horror. (specifically to cover up the normal eye materials, which would really give away what the morph was doing)
Yes. It takes more work to make a product work with more products.
I'm sorry but that transition from skin to snake looks terrible, as an example of a good transition, it is pitifal.
A geograft CANNOT have a transparent edge. The edge of a geograft is always a hard line that has to line up with the mesh that it is attacehd to.
As such it cannot blend from base figure to graft smoothly unless textures are made specifically for it.
There is no decent character maker that would accept a hard line edge as a natural organic look.
If you wanted to pop a different skin on the human part of my Octiana, you would get that same ugly cut like you have on the snake you have shown. So if that is the look you like, then go for it. But for a natural blending. That cannot be done with geografts.
One could argue that the use of geoshells atop a grafted area can maybe work out some limited blending, but that would be a significant amount of extra work and would really limit the design possibilities for the character if it had to rely on that.
comes back to other people creating third party textures for various creatures
Someone more skilled than I could use a merchant resource and Zbrush polypaint, Blender, Substance paint, Blacksmith 3D whatever and paint your own scales hides etc maybe try and sell it at Renderosity
I actually could do it for my own use but face too many obstacles trying to obey all the rules and produce a quality product to sell
Can't you just use the clone tool in Photoshop afterwards to remove seams? Or create your own texture by making a seamless tile with your preferred texture? Or just take the whole texture into Photoshop and paint whatever you like and replace the original textures? This is a creative artistic hobby or business and it seems like people just want everything out of the box when it's so much more rewarding (and professional if you are doing this as a business) to put your own creative spin on things...
Even though I wholeheartedly agree with this and don't hesitate to edit my own textures, but many people really do want things to work out of the box.
The problem appears to be that they likely do not know or are not confident in their image editing skills. Having to edit things themselves may take time away from whatever their project is. This is also factoring in any learning curves. Though, this is minor compared to having to model, rig, and texture everything yourself. But still, I can see why this could be an inconvenience.
I wish people would appreciate that all PAs are passionate creators who generally talk to one another, and whose job is doing this stuff.
If all PAs do X or don't do Y, there's generally going to be a very good reason.
It might be more productive to ask WHY this is the case, rather than assuming PAs all managed to miss something obvious.
I wish creating extra textures for our favorite creatures would be a thing. But it seems like the problem, at least for me, is uncertainty about whether or not people actually want these types of user-made freebies. From what I've seen, people in this hobby are tight-lipped about everything.
Freebies would be unlikely because of the usage conditions of most merchant skin resources
The geograft may be a hard line, but I've already given five examples of geografts that extend the mesh beyond the geograft itself to cover up the transition, three of which use transparency, so it's patently false to say that it CAN'T be done. I agree that the transition on the snake tail is not especially well done, but personally, I would still take that over the straight line I'd get across Octiana's waist if I used a different texture. It's a rather inelegant transition, but it is at least A transition. Look at the centaurs, or the three mermaid examples I posted, and you have much smoother transitions, because they were designed that way. Even if they're not as smooth as the transition on Octiana (and they may or may not be, I haven't looked closely enough at any of them to say), they're still better for the way I work and the kind of art I create.
Thank you for finally admitting that these are choices, even if you didn't mean to. Let me say it again: I understand that you have reasons for designing your characters the way you do, and I'm not saying that those reasons are invalid. You COULD design characters that are more inclusive, but you are certainly within your rights not to. You've got your aesthetic, your workflow, and your customer base, and I'm not demanding that you upend them all for me. I have made my case for wider applicability in creature design, and you are clearly not receptive to my arguments, so that's all there is to it. Saying "[that] would really limit the design possibilities for the character if it had to rely on that] points to a mismatch of priorities: I want products that allow me to use any character I want - in other words, I'm more interested in components than characters - whereas you would rather design entire characters. You design your characters in ways that not only don't facilitate off-label usage but are often outright hostile to it. Are they bad products because of this? No, but they're bad products FOR ME.
You say "just" do that as if it's a trivial matter, as if image editing, and texturing in particular, isn't a separate skillset and workflow from working in DS. Also, it would require that I do this for EVERY character skin I want to use for EVERY geograft, when the whole point of this thread is that none of that would be necessary if PAs designed geografts with general character use in mind. This render features three centaurs each with different horse textures and human textures, and while I could have edited those three separate textures - or simply sidestepped the issue by sticking to one texture or covering up the transition with clothing - the way the product was made gave me the freedom not to worry about that. One of them is wearing a shirt that covers the transition, but that was a style choice for that particular character, not out of necessity.
Setting aside how trifling it is to sneer at people for "wanting everything out of the box" on a site that sells pre-made content, editing textures is not the only way to put a creative spin on things. It's not how I express my creativity, and it's not something I'm good at or enjoy doing. It's not about wanting things to work perfectly out of the box, it's about wanting products that put fewer restrictions on exactly how I can use them.
Again and again, it all comes down to choices. It doesn't matter how much or little work would be required to make geografts that work with any character skin, if creators don't first decide that that is what they want to do. It doesn't matter whether or not the general type of geograft I'm asking for would cost more than a character-based geograft, or how much more; I can't choose to buy one over the other if only one exists. Oso pointed out that he designed Bocular Man to be able to use any skin, and I'd honestly never looked closely enough at that product to notice it. Now that I know that, I'm a lot more likely to buy it, and I'm more likely to buy his products in general because he cared enough to include that detail.
Let me bring this back around to why I originally made this thread, to hopefully make a better case for inclusivity than I apparently did the first time. My wife is black, and an artist/graphic designer herself. The only reason I rendered my first centaur was because I thought it would be fun to replicate a drawing she made of a black centaur, but centaurs have since become a big proportion of my renders, and that's due in large part to how flexible the Daz centaurs are. I don't render exclusively, or possibly even primarily, white people, so I place high value on products that make it easier to accomplish that. There are plenty of reasons PAs might overwhelmingly create white characters: they might simply find white people more appealing to make; they might feel more comfortable making them, or be better at making them; they might want to avoid stereotyping and/or misrepresenting other ethnicities, or even just avoid accusations that they have. I'm sure it goes without saying that white people also sell better on average, so there's an additional incentive. All of these are legitimate reasons, but the end result is less representation of non-white people, and I'm in favor of more representation. I'm not suggesting, for example, that RawArt release a black version of Octiana, because then we'd just have the same problem in the opposite direction. I'm encouraging creators to consider placing more value on diversity and versatility than many of them currently do.
From another perspective, consider the market. Creatures are inherently a niche, both from a consumer and creator standpoint, and the realities of the market (and of Daz's store in particular) mean that we generally only get one of any given type of creature per generation. PAs have made add-on textures, characters, accessories, etc. for Daz's centaurs, but nobody has released a competing centaur model for G3 or G8. Why would they? We almost certainly won't see a different half-octopus for G8F, and for all I know, RawArt isn't even planning to release a male counterpart. I doubt anybody's working on a mermaid set to compete with Aguja/Alascanus. We're generally stuck with whatever gets released first. So what does that mean for us as customers? Are we stuck with a product that limits our creative possibilities? Or one that encourages them? I don't feel "stuck" with the G8 centaurs, but I do with some of the other creatures I have.
Just to be clear...you did not give any examples of geografts that extend beyond the graft line.
It is impossible for a graft to do that.
Whatever you showed was not in fact a geograft.
But obviously this is not getting anywhere. I tried my best to explain, and thats all I can do.
This discussion is getting ugly, but I'd like to try and get a question in before Richard pays a visit. Could you explain again what the major advantages are of a geografted mesh over a conforming one? Conforming items with transparency maps like we used to use back in the day would solve everything Gordig is talking about.
A geograft can have a clean surface texture that doesn't move. I can paint a skin surface that flows naturally along the arm into the multiple lobster claws writhing at the end.
With a conforming item, there's going to be some sort of transition that you can't necessarily rely on. And if you are using collision, need to be careful with whatever body parts are inside the comforming bit so they don't poke the conformer in weird ways.
Geograft is going to make a much more natural item that looks like it's part of the figure. Conforming item might work for stuff that looks ... different. Like a big claw. Or a monster baby gnawing on someone's harm. Or whatever.
Then...what were they? Are you just quibbling over terminology? Because arguing about what is or is not a geograft does not at all address the fact that the thing that you keep saying is impossible has been done multiple times by different creators. If it's impossible to do with geografts, it's clearly not impossible to do with other methods that have - at least as far as I can tell - the same end result.
It really does sound like there is a potential niche market for budding texture artists to start doing texture add-ons for characters which are designed to include geografts. I mean, sure, they'd have to already have purchased the character before they start, but people have been selling texture add-ons for models ever since this hobby was available.
And once people were aware of what the actual porcess entails, nobody who undertood the difficulties would expect them to necessarily be producing textures that worked with *all* potential human textures. But at least an alternate version might be welcome.
Arki/Darwin's Mishap's merpeople make a good case in point. The tail is a geograft, and can be used with any figure of the correct gender and generation, but the textures, which do a splendid job of making the transition only come in two basic hues. There would probably be a copyright infraction if someone simply took the textures and recolored them and tried to sell it, but the texture layout is probably a usable resource which could be built from. And I suspect there are people who might like the idea of merfolk who have fishy skin all over, with no transition.
I think what it might take is for someone to start making a name for themself with such texture add-ons. Once the products are out there, it would be easier to see whether there actually is a market, or if we're just imagining one.
I know that I'd probably buy a fishy-skinned merperson which used Arki's mertail. Can't really say whether anyone else would though.