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Fantasy Textures and ideas for Harry

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
Question for the HiveMind (see what I did there? *grin*). Is it standard/better to do textures for the Unicorn at them same time you do the main Harry? Or are Unicorn textures a separate entity? (Beard/Horn/Tail).
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
So I was working on my textures/skins for the sets that I started, and then got distracted, and then got REALLY distracted, so, um, yeah...I did a thing. Having problems getting the bumps and specs to do right, still have lots of issues on that. But, here is a sneak peek at a D
Dragon Steed.jpg
ragon Steed.
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
Horse Tongue.jpg I have made the sad discovery that you can't make harry's tongue split. I wanted to give him a split tongue for the dragon steed, and did a transmap, but it only does one side, and of course leaves the inside showing. :( I thought I was being so clever!
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
I have also after much work discovered you can't use a trans to turn the unicorn tail into armor plates. But, the Dragon Steed is progressing, despite the setbacks. Tail Plates.jpg Dragon Steed Full.jpg
 

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
I wonder if you transmaped the hair part of the tail off and put a displacement at the bottom of the tail you couldn't get a scaly effect? (The tongue most likely would need a morph but I don't know about that kind of stuff). But I do like the colour of your Dragon Steed :)
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
I guessed that for the tongue, and the teeth that I worked on which I didn't photo, since they didn't work at all. As for what you just said about the tail....um, yeah, no clue what you just said. lol Thank you for the compliment!
 

Gadget Girl

Extraordinary
Contributing Artist
I was trying to think about ways to do the tongue without a morph, but I think Rae's right you can't. You could probably make it better with clever use of backfiring polygons, but the problem is that you'd always be able to see inside on the edges. What program do you mostly use? Poser or DS?
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
I use DS, I have Poser 5, but never learned how to use it. I just started using DAZ last November, so I'm kinda new there, too. I do have Blender and Hexagon, and have made a tree stump in Hexagon (Started using Hexagon for the Open Render Contest 2016, so not great there, either!) But, I think I could tackle the modeling, but I'm clueless about rigging. But, I might need to do the tail to get what I want, and maybe a "mane" (Think plate scales). So, I guess I'll have to get back to learning stuff, instead of happily playing with textures! Reverse polygons, I've heard of, but only as a bad thing. lol
 

Gadget Girl

Extraordinary
Contributing Artist
The nice thing about these sorts of morphs, is I don't think you'd have to do any rigging, unless you wanted the two forks to move independent of each other. Although I could imagine maybe something odd happening at the point where the two points meet.
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
The tail piece I could see as being an unrigged model, I would just make it an add-on to the unicorn tail in place of the hair. But, I would want the tongue to be poseable, so it could be various stages of in or out, straight or bent, tips independent. (Yes, I have big dreams!) I know I could never approach Chris and Paul's skill levels, but maybe I could make something that doesn't completely suck! lol.
 

Gadget Girl

Extraordinary
Contributing Artist
I think the base rigging would work just fine if you're just altering Harry's existing tongue. Like I said, I could image some odd weight mapping stuff happening where you've 'pushed' the center in to make the fork, but most of the existing rigging would probably work.
 

Gadget Girl

Extraordinary
Contributing Artist
Okay, so I've been thinking about what the process would look like as a general overview since I'm not great in DS and I don't know Hexagon, and I realized the tongue is kind of tricky because in Harry's zero pose you can't see it. If you were say working on the ears, I would do something along the lines of this:

1. Export Harry out of DS in something like an .obj format (not sure what file type is best in Hexagon).
2. Load the exported file into Hexagon.
3. Create your morph, being sure not to add or delete any vertices.
4. Export your morphed version of Harry out of Hexagon into an .obj file.
5. Load the obj file into DS as a morph for Harry (not sure the details on how to do this in DS, I only know how to do it in Poser, but I'm sure others can help.)

Now here's the tricky part, you can't see the tongue, and since you have to keep the vertices identical for it to work as a morph, you need to find a way to get to the tongue. I can think of two ways to do this, I just don't know what would work better or be easier in Hexagon.

One way would be to follow the instructions above, and then hide everything but the tongue, so you could work on it.

Another way would be to export Harry out of DS as an .fbx file which does include some basic rigging information. You might then be able to open Harry's mouth in Hexagon and stick out his tongue to work on it, then zero the figure when you are done to export it.

Hope that gives you some idea of what a possible workflow would be. I know it's very basic, but I also know others here could probably help you figure out details in those programs.
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
Okay, I"m going to have to save this and read it over and over, as I've never done any of that! I do know how to export from DS, and I think you can do it as an .fbx, too. From there, it will be an experiment at a time! Thank you for taking the time to write this down, I really appreciate it, even if I don't have the knowledge at this time, I know that I will eventually.
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
Someone, somewhere, said that you could set up a folder as a "temporary" library so that you could gather content all together for projects. How do you do that in DAZ? I tried adding a new directory to the manager and it found stuff, but it didn't "load" stuff, it just showed empty folders.
 
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