Google found some more Casino de Montreal chips for me and I've used them as a basis for Casino Douteux...

These are the only values I've found images of (except for a $2.50 which I'll be doing a version of as Ilike the colours). The colours were mostly picked from images with GIMPs eyedropper thingy. I've attached a screenshot of thumbnails of the reference photos for comparison.

Question (for Casino-goers): Would the different value chips for a specific casino at a specific point in time all have the same label design (as I've done for the Casino Douteux - except the 50¢ one),or would you see a mix of different ones, like in the reference photos?

I think I also need a bump map since the central label is distinctly depressed (not much, but it's obvious),and the 50 cent chip has six four-leaf clovers embossed around it

Hey!

I've been taking a stab at building a 'retro' robot of sorts for Daz Studio that is sort of a homage to 50's sci-fi, although it's more of a true robot than a man in a robot suit.  I'm actually fairly far along already, with a few motors and assocated gearing placed internally on the arms and hip joints I've designed so far.

Anyways, one of the things I'm focusing on is having working gears that rotate with the joint movement.  4/1 ratio on the gears to keep the math simple, so 'pairing up' the morphs to move in unison, with 4 revolutions to 1, shouldn't be that hard to do, from what I've read.  I've personally never attempted to pair two morphs before, but the instructions I've read seem to indicate it's not all that hard, as people do similar with car steering wheels vs front wheels, etc.

So my question is related to how I'm putting together the robot.  Right now, I'm just parenting the various limbs/parts manually using a tree structure, as opposed to building a single figure.  Using the Joint Editor, it's pretty easy to 'zero in' the pivot points, and it's working quite well.  Of course, this means that we aren't talking a single figure, rather an assortment of parts in a 'tree' structure, but I don't want the parts to deform as they move, I want them to be fully rigid.  It's pretty easy to rename x/y/z controls to appropriately descriptive titles, and to 'lock' parameters that normally shouldn't be adjusted once the limbs have been placed.  It's also pretty easy to 'limit' the range of motion for the parameters, so that you don't have elbows embedding inside of shoulders and such.

Most of the time the gearing won't be fully visible, so it should be fairly easy to hide the parts that aren't visible to keep unnecessary raytracing to a minimum.  I'm thinking that people might want to use semi-transparent materials occasionally as the limb shell material, which would make the gearing visible, plus I'm planning on including a few removable access panels into the design.  This would be useful for say animation purposes.

I also want to encourage disassembly to a degree, say if someone wants to work with an arm separated from the rest of the robot, on a separate workbench in a repair/maintenance type of scene, or maybe if someone wanted to show a robot assembly line or something.

Wiring may prove to be a bit of a challenge, but I'm not that far along yet. Thinking along the lines of Molex connectors for the joints, with separate male/female connectors when disassembled, or maybe a kludge along those lines.  The wiring will be mostly fixed to the shell, and passing through the fairly rigid pivot point to get to the central power source and such.  As I noted, the joint interactions will be the challenging part to work out wiring wise.

I suppose I could create a 'Landmate' style implementation of this idea in the future, for those that are familiar with the Landmate concept from Appleseed, but one thing at a time...

Anyways, kack to my question:

Are there significant downsides to the 'tree' approach with multiple parts as opposed to a siingle model that I may be missing?  Most figures I've seen are based on a single .obj in most cases, with various morphs applied, but I'm not seeing any particular upside to that in this particular instance.  Fitting clothing to said robot, if someone wanted to do that, would be one downside I can think of, but as a metal automaton I don't see people dressing him up a lot.  Scaling translating to sub-tree items on the heirarchy tree could be another, for those that want to tweak things, but as the parts need to stay 'rounded' for rotation purposes, individual x/y/z scaling might be problematic in any case.

On the flipside, modding for example a limb part in say Hexagon, in order to stretch an arm length without deforming the pivot point, might be easier if the parts are separated already.  Also, I want to make it easier to swap out say an elbow for a weapons attachment, or feet for treads, or to allow people to design their own attachments to use with this robot.  Moddability is something that I want to encourage with this robot.

Thoughts?  Suggestions?

I... acutally... LIKE this bundle.

The core character? Solid as a rock.

The secondary characters? Diverse enough that with the three of them you can do a lot. They're entirely different characters not just different takes on the same theme. Outstanding.

The hair is good and solid. The Samurai cut is a bit of a strange choice I'll admit but still has a military feel I guess. The military cut is perfection.

The clothing is also spot on and the only complaints I could have are ones of personal taste. Not too hip on Mass Effect/Halo armor asthetic , but again that's a matter of taste not a complaint about workmanship. The bouncer suit is a strange choice IMHO as the rest of the pack seems rather military, it isn't entirely out of theme (tough guy) and I can see a dozen or so practical uses for a big-guy suit so no complaints here.

The poses are... poses. I tend to glaze over those. There are so many that they tend to blur into eachother over time (no offense to our pose gurus!) but they fit thematically.

As a whole... this is the best Pro bundle I've seen in a good long time and a gold standard of what bundles should look like: Everything is clearly made to top standard with nothing that looks lazy, very well set around a core central theme rather than just tossing together what seems like a random set of outfits, and with a diverse set of characters that completely avoid looking... samey.

A+++

Yeah and I did get excited when I spotted the uniform on https://www.daz3d.com/griff-hd-for-dain-8 until I realised it's the old https://www.daz3d.com/military-dress-uniform-for-genesis-3-male-s-and-genesis-2-male-s which I already have 

Easily converted to Genesis 8 Male so all it means is you don't have to buy something new! ;)

I haven't even looked at the bonus items.  The clothes and characters sold me immediately. A polynesian character??? A flight suit that actually looks like something in practical use today?  The Bouncer suit WITH wired earpiece and matching poses??   Oh yes, this one is going in the cart..

There's a reason I was gushing over the secondary characters. ;)

And I really didn't notice the earpiece... noice.

Ollie is the only male with somewhat normal proportions.

What.

@LaPartita   I laughed out loud!  Glad you made it into the contest in time. 

There's about an hour and a half before Daz Midnight (1pm Central, my time.)  Deadline strictly enforced, to be fair to those who entered on time.

Hi, thanks for this contribution. If I understand correctly, the first script would be extremely useful with the way that the Diffeomorphic plugin works, which sometimes results in many identical materials with the same same, e.g. material.001, .002, etc...

That's great! The original idea of the script was to just combine material slots, remove the unused ones, and rename some annoying long ones, but you are right. You should be able to enter the names of the material slots with the .002 on them and instruct the script what you would like them to be named instead. Save and run the script anytime you need these changed.

Will you put this somewhere like GitHub? I have some scripts I use to re-texture objects imported via Alembic; we could grow this into a suite of useful Daz-To-Blender tools...

I was originally thinking Github but I wasn't sure anyone would bother going there, downloading or copying the scripts, and trying them so I put it right in the forum to make it as easy as possible.

Having a central place for these little helpful little scripts and fixes would be great, maybe with a link back to the Daz forums for discussion and updates.

It's not just the icons that are missing (central !), the files themselves are missing (! at lower left). Either the fles have been moved or their content directory s no longer selected as a current content directory. What s the path to the actual files on disc, and what are your content directories?

They are still in the folders where DIM installed them. The odd thing is that a couple of them are recognised but the rest aren't (in this example). The screenshots are not big enough to show all my presets but there are many more where it shows a couple but not the rest of the files in the folder.

It's not just the icons that are missing (central !), the files themselves are missing (! at lower left). Either the fles have been moved or their content directory s no longer selected as a current content directory. What s the path to the actual files on disc, and what are your content directories?

compared to my small and humble setup with a 2080 Ti in it.

LOL, is that setup in your very modest and humble four bedroom, five bathroom Central Park penthouse too?   ;)

I haven't read this whole discussion, but has anyone mentioned the workaround we talked about in another thread?: do not adjust surface settings while in Iray preview mode, that will revert even a humble 2080ti to CPU.

what's the best way to fix Nix's nipples.  They seem a bit too flat and large.

Maybe substance painter?

If it's just the texture, you could edit it with Photoshop or any other image editor that can use layers like GIMP. The nipple texture is in the central part of the torso map, there's no need to worry about seams. You also have to edit the SSS, bump, and normal maps too.

I've not used Substance Painter, but I have edited textures similarly with GIMP.

i live on the south coast of Australia the central point where the fires are....it is not as bad as the media are making it out to be, sure there are fires....but! ...not even close to the danger level it has been portrayed as :) ...we have these kind of fires every single year!!! :)

A Ryzen 7 3700x with my already purchased not-so-long-ago gtx 1070ti. I plan to add DDR4 ram frm 16go to maybe 32. I know that, of course, the graphics card is central to this and that to make a real leap I'd need to get something more powerful than the 1070ti, but knowing that I am already using that same card on my current intel i72600K with 32go of DDR3, am I likely to still feel a really noticeable improvement in rendering speed with this new configuration?

For a quasi-eliptical orbit, let's say you begin with the sun:

With the sun in the center of the scene, insert a target helper

• Drag Mercury out to where you want it to orbit and parent it to the target helper
• with Mercury parented, move the target helper slightly away from center
• Add a new target helper and parent Mercury's target helper to that
• Repeat these step for each planet you want to add, giving each planet's main (center) target helper a bit of rotation to spread them out in orbit
• Begin having them orbit the sun by selecting all of the central target helpers and rotating them together at the last keyframe
• Deselect the furthest planet's target and rotate a little more and repeat for each planet's target, so that Mercury (or the closest planet to the Sun) orbits a little faster than the next, but quite a bit faster than the last.

While not true-to-science, it still should look pretty cool, and have a slight off-center to each orbit. Using the target helpers, you can exaggerate the wobble if you wish

Use these same steps to set up any moons you want orbiting their planets

TIP: Never use glow channel for the actual surface of a planet. It's just wrong. The sun... definitely. Then set the sun to not recieve or cast shadows and place a bulb light in the center - make it really bright for a vast distance. Maybe start with 330 brightness and adjust from there.

This will give a fair representation of how it actually works, but sometimes we don't truly want how things really are, which is when we start enhancing things. But try setting the Sun's bulb light to do everything on its own and see what happens. Depending on the scale of things, I'd also give the bulb some soft shadow and find a place to render where a moon is casting a shadow onto its planet to adjust the radius of the soft shadow. The soft shadows should be set small enough to still allow a moon to cast a shadow on its planet, but large enough so it's not casting onto any other planets.

Good luck with your experiment! 

The Jocelyn Hair from the Teen Josie 8 bundles has always been strongly reminiscent to me of Serana from the Skyrim "Dawnguard" DLC. Not identical (Serana has four braids and a slightly different styling), but well within my capacity to morph and edit, so as she was by far my favourite of the various companion characters of the game (being central to the add-on's plotline helped her be a lot more developed than anyone else), so I've decided it was time to redo an old Source Filmmaker render of mine.

It's been a fairly lengthy process, because it's taken a lot of asset editing in Blender and Photoshop to recreate the character on G8F, but I'd like to believe the end result is reasonably faithful to the original character appearance, while also being a considerable step-up from the quality of the original game model. (The original game textures... aren't exactly great, particularly as they're not helped by some bad normal maps that shipped with the game making a lot of characters appear to have pixellated noses. In this case, I decided to use a modified version of Tasha 8's vampire materials).

The scene gets busy with bounding boxes, so a lot of that stuff is set to Not show in 3d view. I work that way because it can really bog down OpenGL if I don't, but did some here so that you could see the main points more clearly. I know this doesn't get posted here, it's in the Entry thread, but I didn't want to get into details in there.

I make little accent light rigs for all of my prominent characters, monsters, villains, etc., and that's what those little dots of spot lights are all about. Some are just fill lights, some help to deal with dynamic hair under a linear workflow (Gamma Correction = 2.2) and the others are just rim lights to help outline the characters and get them to pop.

The cluster of white bounding boxes seen on the left are surface-replicated plants and trees onto some cliff terrain. I ended up not getting much of that in the final shot, but I need to feel that balance in the scene as I got everything together - which really made a difference. If I rendered without that stuff, it throws off the whole thing. I really love Carrara's terrain and plant modelers. Tweak away at sliders and/or import images and meshes - all of which can be made quickly in Carrara, and then, terrain and plants can also be converted into vertex mesh objects and further tweaked that way too - and both systems include special shader setups to help get really nice looking shaders even if we don't have any texture maps to use - but get even more versatile if we do (have maps). And then to have the ability to easily duplicate, replicate and/or surface-replicate them in an instant and have them render so smoothly... getting Carrara nearly ten years ago was a 3d art dream come true for me! 

So once I get a nice 3d backdrop going on with plants and terrains like this, I turn off their view in 3D View, but they still render, even in Spot renders. It helps to remove clutter from my central focus and gives OpenGL much less to think about. Ryzen does care - it just renders them! So for this screenshot, I had to turn some of it back on so you could see it (noted by "Replicated Trees" in the screenie). Just in front of all of that we can see a small clump of terrain with actual individual Carrara plants all over it. By default it doesn't show the leaves in working view. This one is about six or seven main plants (including two dead ones, a few in poor health) and then I just duplicate them individually and plant them onto the terrain, scaling and rotating them as I go. This makes for a much more specific look and feel than random replication for more up-close, specific needs. Sometimes, like this time I do it just because I want to - no actual specific need was required.

Carrara's Realistic Sky atmosphere system is incredible. This render is only using it for time-of-day for the color of the sky and the atospheric density for depth but I usually also use the clouds and fog as well. In this, I'm using Carrara's Volumetric Clouds for clouds as well as fog.

I originally had a lot more of the cliffs and plant life in the scene, but felt it took too much away from what the image is really about - a hero being a hero.

Anyway, sorry for the long babble. I get that way when I'm excited and I rarely get a chance to spend this much time on a still render - so I'm just really glad that I could add something to the foreverness of this special activity! :)   (always fun to look through all of the renders of pervious contests!!!)

Been working with large objects with very simple geometries. I have tried working in various modeling tools, with some success but the UV mapping frequently gets fragged going from modeler to Daz and back. So bought this tool and it's allowed me to fix in a few minutes what caused me hours of frustration and irritation - seems like a trapezohedron like shape shouldn't take so much work to make. 

This took me off guard though:

The prism I was working on has a size of 1000x1000x1 meters. I didn't see the mesh grabber controls get so strangely large until I scaled things up to that size. I would suggest this as a bug, since I expected the relative size of the mesh grabber controls to stay about the same no matter what scale of object I wanted to work with. I can still use it this way, but moving around at this scale (even zooming in and out) is very slow, so it does rather hinder trying to make the changes I wanted to make, although not completely.

Still far easier to use that deformers or trying to keep tabs on the primitives UV maps.

Looking to make a large arcology with a massive scale for a sci-fi story I'm working on, with the simple geometry I can get quite detailed without slowing my machine to a craw.

Looking for something along these lines eventually, although that's only a fifth of it. The tiiny white sliver is the Burj Khalifa for scale.

..well if you are not the Norwegian blogger with a similar nom de plume, how can it be early?

By the time stamp it is 20:10 in the mountain time zone, 21:10 in the Central Time Zone and 22:10 in the Eastern Time Zone.  In Hawai'i and Alaska it is 17:10.

Well of course now it's NOT working for me LOL. But the store just changed over an hour ago. Here ya go.

Place Florida, United States
Time:  2:25am Central Time
Number of 2.99 items in cart:  tested with 4, tested with 5. One new item in cart.  Edit: Tested without a new item and it made no difference. Not working. Still not working at 3:30am Central TIme Florida.
Status: Does not discount to 2.99   Stays at 9.95. 

the script log says 

21:42:38 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Adding Files...

21:42:38 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Adding "character" file: H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Genesis 8/Genesis 8 female/characters/VYK Raine.duf

21:43:27 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Executing Script

21:43:27 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Selecting Preset: H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Genesis 8/Genesis 8 female/characters/VYK Raine.duf

21:43:27 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Converting character from H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Genesis 8/Genesis 8 female/characters/VYK Raine.duf to H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Created/VYK Raine.duf

21:46:03 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): VYK Raine is of type Actor/Character

21:46:13 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Execution Complete.the error dialo

 

the error dialog is in the attachment

Ok, we are in the "Character Converter from Genesis 3 Male to Genesis 8 Male" thread, but I think you are running "Character Converter from Genesis 8 Female to Genesis 3 Female"?  Then your error makes more sense about Genesis 3 not loading.  Adapting the instructions from before:

• Open data/RiverSoft Art/Common/RSG8G3CharacterConversionConstants.dsa with a text editor.
• Change sNewFigurePreset to be where your Genesis 3 Basic Female is.  Currently, it equals 'People/%1 %2/', where %1 is replaced with "Genesis 3" and %2 is replaced with "Female" by the script.  Let's fully enumerate the path like so (if this is right): "H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/%1/%2"
• Try again

the script log says 

21:42:38 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Adding Files...

21:42:38 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Adding "character" file: H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Genesis 8/Genesis 8 female/characters/VYK Raine.duf

21:43:27 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Executing Script

21:43:27 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Selecting Preset: H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Genesis 8/Genesis 8 female/characters/VYK Raine.duf

21:43:27 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Converting character from H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Genesis 8/Genesis 8 female/characters/VYK Raine.duf to H:/3d/PoserFiles/Daz Studio/People/Created/VYK Raine.duf

21:46:03 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): VYK Raine is of type Actor/Character

21:46:13 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time): Execution Complete.the error dialo

the error dialog is in the attachment