Meh... so uninspired right now.... - New Light Problem
Stryder87
Posts: 899
Almost done my newest scene... pose, environment etc. Lighting is ok, the shadows on the face are about right, but I hate the waxy hands and I can't figure out how to fix that. I've selected the surface and gone in and dropped glossiness down from 60% to 20%, changed the colour to a little more red and a couple other things I can't remember right now, but nothing seems to make a difference. I've tried changing the lighting some, but then I lose the facial shadows I wanted, and it didn't really help anyway.
I'm stalled because I can't go any further, but don't know how to fix this, so.... I'm here to whine and just generally complain. I can't complain to my friends because I get the usual blank look, or "What's DAZ?" or the one I hate most "That's like playing Dress-Up, right?"... so you folks get to hear me because you at least know what I'm talking about. haha
Blah....
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You should post an image of the "waxy" hands to show those who might try to help you. It could be gloss or it could be SSS.
Well, NDelphi is right without image, difficult to assist. But, I've had those day's your describing, where some creations just doesn't work the way I envision. Hang in there, it get's better
Yeah, a screenshot would help. When I get home from work I'll post one. I'm just feeling all whiny right now... haha
Help will be appreciated though, as I've seen other bemoan the waxy skin issue, but I couldn't find anything that really addressed it other than changing lighting.
While A screenshot of course would help, I get the point in which you just need to vent... Yeah, I get Blahs from time to time, and if I get stumped too bad, I tend to set it aside for a bit, then come back to it later... I had a room in my house at one point called "The Hall of Half Finished Projects" where things went when I got stumped... Then every so often, I'd go through it, and find other things to work on... with Daz, when I get stumped, I tend to organize my content Library, or work on totally unrelated things... like last night, I was bored with actual work, so I finally got arount to importing a bunch of .obj freebies that were in another format, and needed the textures to be re-worked (they came with Translucanty files, but needed Opacity).. just some thoughts.
Are you rendering with 3Delight or Iray?
If it's Iray I've heard some say (I have yet to experiment with this) that SSS settings can result in waxy looking skin. I've also had that happen with too much Translucency I believe. If you are using Iray try turning both of those off and see what happens. If that does resolve the issue, you can experment with bringing them back up gradually.
If you are using M/V5 or BF/BM, you might want to look for the translucency maps for Phillip and Bree. They REALLY help cut down on the waxiness while leaving translucency where you want it (IE: fingers and ears)
Greetings,
I need to create a 'Graveyard' folder for 3D projects which I got halfway into, then realized that I don't have the skill to finish them off, ran out of free time, or that I lost inspiration, or that just looked awful. I think it'd account for 75% of the scene files on my computer. O_O¡
I also itched to help, to see screenshots, to talk about reducing SSS, and fixing the 'waxy', but that's not the point. There's something frustrating that's keeping your image from getting to the level you want it to be at, and the inability to get past it is sapping your creativity like a short-to-ground sucks the power from a circuit.
I know your pain. It'll get better.
-- Morgan
when muses fail, render a ring wraith :D
I don't use Iray yet... from what I've read, there's a lot of stuff to learn and it's too much for me right now. I'd actually like to figure out Reality/Lux as i bought those.
Anyway, I'm using 3Delight with G2F (this character is the Sumoko FWF Sumiko for Mei Lin). Funny thing, when I checked which UV it was using, it says V5, not Mei Lin, or V6 or any of the ones I would have expected. When I changed it to Mei Lin (and the other G2F girls), the finger edges (from the middle knuckle to the tips) went pitch black. I thought maybe it was shadows, but nope. Something with the map. So I put it back to V5 and went on from there.
I'll take some screenies and post them after work so you can see what I'm referring to.
Loved the battle with them in the final The Hobbit movie.
You know, for such a powerful wizard, Gandalf sure was a weird fighter. He should have been shooting gobs of magic fire from his staff and stuff, not using swords. That's for mere mortals.
Based on this info from the Sumiko product page:
"This product uses the Victoria 5 UV Maps"
I'd say sticking with the V5 UVs is the right thing to do. I've noticed that with a lot of characters, though the upper product description info tells you it requires a certain other character, often times the detail listing below will also say it uses the UV from yet another character. Seems like the "requires" part is mainly in reference to the shape(s) you need to support the product, only sometimes do the UVs match the required shapes.
For example, this one: http://www.daz3d.com/liu-yan-hd-for-victoria-6-and-mei-lin-6 I've been dying to get, but mainly for the textures (as they look absolutely beautiful) and not the shape. But since I have Mei Lin and don't have V6 I haven't picked it up yet since I won't be able to use the textures without the V6 UV map. Frustrating.
Hmmmm... I just checked my product library and couldn't find anything related to V5 other than an outfit. So I searched the store for her and I don't actually own Victoria 5 or the Victoria 5 Elite Tectures pack. Man, could this mean I've been using a 'gimped' girl all this time?!?! Say it isn't so!!! Not my Sumiko!!!!
V5 is a character for Genesis 1. I think if you have a relatively modern version of Studio you get V5 by default. The fact that you have the V5 UV available to you is all you really need to care about, and you do, so you're good there.
V5 is so ubiquitous and has such support that I use it for nearly all of my characters, male and female, unless I specifically want the look of a given male skin.
You know, if I'm not careful I may walk away from this conversation finally actually understanding what UVs are and how they can be interchanged! Scary.....
Heh.
A UV map is nothing more than 'which of these pixels get pointed where?' And the layout varies a little bit (or a lot) depending on how the UV is set up, so it requires different pictures to place properly.
Imagine the UV map of a sphere. You COULD do it as the left and right sides as circles in an image. Or you could do it as the top and bottom hemispheres. Or you could do some funky projection.
So if you were going to make a picture of a globe to put on the sphere, you'd have to put things in different places, depending on how the map is set up.
The maps for skins are much the same.
*brain 'splodes*
Wouldn't using V4 'skin' on a male character result in some really weird skin 'hanging' issues in the chest area (distorted skin)?
Well, keep in mind the skin isn't literally skin, it's an image projection. There is a distortion, but it's right on the surface. And yeah, it can be bad up close. But I think it's worse if you use M4 (or 5) on a female figure, because pixels get stretched out.
Greetings,
Note: This is super-approximate, handwavy, and based on my somewhat rudimentary knowledge of this field. I did do 3D programming for a few years at the end of the 90's, but it was mostly embedded software development, so I'm not perhaps the best person to lay this all out. But I felt like it, so take it with a grain of salt. Or maybe a lick. ;)
A texture is a rectangle. It's got a top (let's say 0) and a left (let's say 0) and a bottom/right, let's say (100/100, which makes a square, but we'll ignore that). Each line of pixels across is identified as 'V', and each pixel across that line is identified by 'U'. So you can point to any pixel on the texture by saying, 'V pixels down, and U pixels over'.
Now, if you have a rectangle (geometry, not the same rectangle as above) you're going to draw on the screen, you can say that the upper left corner of the rectangle is a U, V of 0,0, and the lower right corner is U, V of 100,100. So even if the rectangle being drawn on the screen is only 50 pixels wide, and 25 pixels high, you can figure out what pixel in the texture rectangle every one of them is going to be by some simple math. (In that case, divide U by 2, and V by 4.)
That mapping (this geometry rectangle goes from 0,0 to 100,100 of the texture) is its U,V map. This is because a geometry object (actually the points that make up its corners) on the screen has X, Y, and Z coordinates. So you need another space for the 'coordinates' into the texture, so they use U, V. So the midpoint of the the on-screen rectangle translates to 50, 50 in the texture map, via the simple math I described above. So for each of the four corners, they have (X, Y, Z, U, V).
Now, if you make the on-screen (geometry) rectangle 200 by 100, you're going to see every pixel from the texture map used more than once, because they have to be doubled to fill in the space across the line. That's called texture stretching. It doesn't look good. So you can look at that and think to yourself, 'self, what if I create a DIFFERENT U,V map for the case where it's rectangular, instead of square, so I can use a different texture which won't be as stretched?' So you create another texture, which is 200x100 in size, and another UV map which says that the upper left is still (0,0) but the lower right is (200,100). Now you can tell that rectangle, 'Use this UV: 100x100' when you're using the square version, but if you're using the 2x1 size rectangle, you switch UVs to the 200x100 version.
Now...when you create a very muscled character, the pieces (polygons) that make it up aren't quite the same as the polygons that make up a 'normal human' character. So you have to tweak the UV set so that there isn't weird texture stretching over the muscles and texture bunching where the 'mesh' has been compressed. That's why you have a UV set per character. But in the 90% case, most folks don't notice texture stretching, so almost all the 3rd party character creators don't worry about it. Besides, most of them are building 'normal human' characters, so there's going to be minimal amounts of strech/bunch.
So that's how you end up with a whole bunch of UV sets, to avoid stretching and bunching on those specific characters, and a few 'generic' UV sets that are used for almost every other character. There's actually NO HARM in having another UV set, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth that folks give here, as long as it's only used for textures where it's actually important that they don't stretch/bunch on that character. Since the general understanding among PAs is that they'll build their characters against the base texture set (G3F, G2F or V5, Genesis Base) then there's really no drawback at all.
If you use a UV set which is not appropriate for the texture set you're using (e.g. using the 200x100 UV set with the 100x100 texture) would result in some parts of the image reaching into pixels that don't exist in the texture map (e.g. a U,V of 126, 76 would be line 76 of the 100x100 texture, but 126(!) pixels over!). That's pretty bad, but most engines will just return zeros for the case when it's beyond the texture limits, which will come out black. However because most textures have multiple 'parts' on the same image (because the UV will limit where they look, normally) using the wrong UV set can end up with pieces of finger textures on the arm, or similar weirdnesses.
I hope this super-handwavy, over-generalized explanation helps in some way. :) I'm not going to talk about the tricks you use when an image is shrunk or outsized compared to the texture map (mip mapping) because I don't think it's as necessary, or the crazy stuff like ptex...because I don't entirely understand it. I just felt like writing up my understanding of how the whole thing works, and am open to being vastly corrected, as long as you take the idea that it's a beginner-ish introduction into account.
-- Morgan
Could this be why I'm getting the black finger edges when I put the Mei Lin 6 UV on Sumiko, who is designed for V5 (see attached screenshot)?
Here are the screenshots of the issues I'm talking about... from the plastic hands to trying to change the lighting from plastic to skin for the UV:
Not just plastic/waxy hands, but weird face tones too... I wonder if it's all just related to lighting. Maybe I need to change it, even though I was looking for a darker scene. Dunno...
Greetings,
The black fingers is definitely due to a UV map overflow. When you apply a texture, if you pull up the Surfaces tab, and look at the Skin, you'll see a UV set; if you use a different one than the default, it'll be problematic. Now different surfaces can have different UV sets, but usually that'll look a little weird at the edges between surfaces. I use that for the eyes though, all the time, as there's a pair of Giselle's eyes that I really love. (I use it on a G2F character, using a V4 skin...it's kinda all over the place.) But eyes are already separate, so it doesn't look disjunct.
The skin in those is definitely a little too shiny; it feels weird, like there's a headlamp being used, but at a low power so the shadows on the face aren't getting washed out.
That's definitely not 'normal', but if you're using 3Delight, I'm less sure what's normal or not. :( For the fun of it I'm throwing a Sumiko render together, using one of the older light sets, to see if I see similar problems.
-- Morgan
[Edit: What are your render settings, and what are you using for lighting? Uber environment, AoA Ambient, etc...?]
[Edit2: Here's my quick render; the hands seem okay, although the orange-ish light of sunset is pretty overwhelming. Embedded image is scaled down; click attachment for full size.]
Here are my Render settings:
Render Settings:
Ray trace: 6
Pixel Samples: X=12, Y=12
Shadow Samples: 24
Gain: 1
Shading Rate: 0.20
The lights are three Distant Lights that loaded in with the Parkside Heath set. I added one Spotlight to shine strictly on her face (narrowed the beam). One Distant Light is shining down at about 50 degrees and slightly to the left, looking towards Sumiko's face. The other two are shining in from the left and the right. The spotlight is straight at her face only from the front. No Uber, Ambient... nothing. See attached for light settings.
Hmmm... thinking I should just add an uber light and see what happens.
So I ran into a new problem when I removed all the existing lights and put in a couple different ones. Nothing would render. I left it for 12 hours and not a single square rendered, no errors, nothing. I set it to Progressive On and tried an IPR render in the Aux Viewport and got a single pass over the terrain, but not the character, and then it stopped. I left it for 2 hours but it never did any more. Since it had rendered before with the three Distant Lights I posted the settings for above, I figured it had something to do with the lights. I had changed the three Distant Lights out for an area light and a distant light, but I couldn't remember what packs I had grabbed them out of, as the descriptions are terribly vague.
I did a few test renders with some basic stuff first (the character from the scene with some clothes and a pose (no extra lights), then another with scenery (still not extra lights), then added the AoA Ambient, then adding the AoA Distant) to make sure it wasn't Daz that was broken, but everything was fine, so I went back to the scene and removed the two lights that were causing issues and replaced them with the AoA Advanced Ambient and AoA Advanced Distant. It now works again, but I want to figure out what those two lights were that seemed to kill Daz's ability to render so I can submit a possible bug. Or, more likely, figure out where I screwed up. The one light I tracked down to be the UberEnvironment2 (Ambient) light from the Genesis Starter Essentials Package. However, I can't figure out what the Distant light is as it's simply called DistantLight in the Scene list. How does one track it back to where it came from???? I'd like to find out and do some simple tests to see if it's actually broken.