Is it possible to render body parts of a character to put them together later on?
Hexxet
Posts: 4
Hello,
What I'm trying to do is render various body-parts of a character, let's say the torso, arms, head, legs of a genesis 8. The intention is to have various of those parts to later switch in a game for character customisation.
Now I'm running into trouble when rendering these parts. I have tried to make all but the desired part invisible, but this will render the backside/inside of the genesis 8 part that is visible if other parts are invisible as well.
So then I tried to use canvas, by putting two exact same genesis models in the same pose in a secene. The first genesis has only the body part to render visible, the other one hast everything else but that part visible. This approach would basically give me what I want, but sadly the rendered images seem to have a transparent/white/black outline, which is visible when putting the images pack together. (See attached images). If I render pngs the lines will be black, as tifs the lines are white. There is some transparancy inside the lines, bu even if you would set the background of the compelte image to some shade of skin colour you would still see those lines :C
Please note that for the purpose of a customizeable character I do intend to create a lot of these images and do not want to do post work on them.
Is there any way to achieve my desired result with DazStudio renders?
Thanks for any answers on this topic :)
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Comments
Your challenge is that there is no inside to render. It's hollow as you have found. The only thing I can think of is you render it out way past the anatomy part you want, then edit each render in Photoshop etc to your taste, truncating the extra long body part where you want. Maybe end it by compositing in other images, or 2d painting if you have that skill.
This is an answer to the single genesis visibility approach? I feared as much and no I do not posess this skill. Also it sounds like tedious work doing this for 500+ images.
What about the canvas approach. If the canvases would render exactly what they should (in my opinion), then all would be good :). Is there any way to get rid of those "outlines"?
You are better off rendering full body sprites with each change and swap out the sprite. Your workflow idea of merging in body parts if you don't know about alpha masking - never mind the blend issues is....well beyond a tedious work idea.
I'm a programmer. Putting various images together by using code should not be a problem for me.
But I'm no good with art, so I do not understand what you are speaking about (alpha masking or blend issues).
I'm currently doing research on whether what I want to do is possible or not.
Full body sprites are a last resort since this leads to a ton of images.
Let's take the head as an easy example: Let's say I want to customize my character's head with
5 hair styles 4 hair colours, 3 eye colours, 3 brow styles and 4 brow colours for 10 expressions.
This will result in 5x4x3x3x4x10 = 7200 images per pose. Let's assume we need that head for 10 body poses we end up with 72.000 full head sprites.
I hope you can see that this is not a favorable option due to render time and space issues.
Anyway for the head it seems to work out rather well: drawing eyes, hair and brows separately with canvases.
It's tricker with the body, since most of the body features influence each other like a character being thin or chubby etc.
but I'd like to try isolating various body aspects to allow more variety on my characters while keeping the number of images low.
And the current problem I am having is that rendering a canvas produces outlines that prohibit me from reassembling my figure as intended.
Is this outline the blending issue you are talking about?
I thought the whole idea of canvases was to render parts of a whole scene with respect to all items in it.
Are those lines a bug? Is there a way to turn those lines off, some render setting I can just switch on/off?
Or is it simply not possible because turning some genesis parts invisible leads to those lines?
I think it is part of the texture meeting the edge of the polygons, which shows as a line. Personally I would chop the character in different parts from a whole render, so not in program, but in post in your image editor. If you have a few poses you could template it and re-use. That should give a better result.
So I guess you can't put various images together using your programming skills?
The idea of rendering a bunch of body parts individually is absurd. Just render the whole body, then cut each part in something like Photoshop. Use Actions to streamline the whole process. There, reduced your render workload 5-fold.
would iray section planes work?
I render in other software with backface culling but DAZ studio doesn't have that
Thanks for the input Wendy. I tried out section planes now, but sadly they have the same problem --> the rendered image has lines where the section planes were.
As other have said, your best bet is to render the entire figure (or a portion which overlaps the target edges) and cut out the parts you need using an image editor. Then use those pieces in your programming. The reason you're seeing the lines is because by turning off sections, the render engine will attempt to smooth edges and blend with the background (or the alpha channel if there is no background). It can't be easily avoided without some amount of postwork.
Since you're a programmer, if you're intent is to have a 3D figure for customization, you may want to consider a game physics engine and use it in your software rather than rasterized renders.