A question about making HD morphs in DS

[Me195]

I've been wanting to make some HD morphs for Dawn and Dusk. I searched for some tutorials on the subject, and my results were clogged with old forum posts in other forums saying that you can't make HD morphs unless you are a vendor. Is that still true? If it is still true then is it possible to make HD version of a model in a third party program, subdivide the DS version model , use the shrink wrapping utility in the DAZ3D store to shrinkwrap the model to it's HD counterpart, and export the newly shrinkwrapped version as a morph? Third question, is that second question the longest question you have ever seen?

 

[kobaltkween]

The HD Morph plugin is currently only offered only to Daz3D PA's under specific license conditions.

Thanks for the very useful information. I'm teaching myself to make textures at the moment, and I'm aiming for a figure agnostic workflow. I was considering eventually working with Genesis figures, but not if I couldn't make HD figures. There's no point in competing in a race where everyone else gets jetpacks.

Me195 - If you go the displacement route, remember that you might need 16-bit maps for artifact-free results. Regular 8-bit ones often have stair-stepping issues.

 

[Me195]

The HD Morph plugin is currently only offered only to Daz3D PA's under specific license conditions.
I am not sure what exact shrink wrapping utility you are talking about but I suspect your talking about something like SimTenero Shape Reprojector?
My guess would be that any similar plugin within DS would create morphs to the base shape and not to the Sub-D shape which would mean the projected morph would become a standard definition morph anyway, losing any HD details with the projection. If the plugin allowed direct transfer of morphs to a HD figure I suspect it would be likely to have licensing issues within itself. If you are talking about shrink wrapping a mesh and then exporting the reshaped Sub D mesh you still would not be able to load the new morph back into DS as HD without the HD morph importer.
What type of HD figure morph were you aiming for? Perhaps Displacement or a Normal Map may be an option?

Thank you for the quick and informative response. Sorry about that. I used a slang term for something that has a shape to target geometry function. I'm not sure what the correct term for it is, but SimTenero Shape Reprojector is what I was thinking of. Drat, I was hoping to skirt around the need for the HD Morph plugin. The HD morphs I was thinking of are more along the lines of creature creation type morphs. Although I think you are correct. A lot of what I want to do can be done with Displacement and or Normal Maps. I think my uphill battle with using Displacement and Normal Maps in superfly has blinded me to their usefulness or at least temporarily made me forget how great they are. Thank you for steering me in the right direction.

 

[Me195]

Me195 - If you go the displacement route, remember that you might need 16-bit maps for artifact-free results. Regular 8-bit ones often have stair-stepping issues.

Thank you. I think you just solved another major problem I've been having.

 

[kobaltkween]

Each figure has its own pro's and cons, as does the chosen partner you choose to broker with. The nature of the market means you are competing with creators and figures that may have some advantages regardless of what path you choose for yourself. It's about finding what works for you and what you are most comfortable with. At the end of the day most products compete across marketplaces and figure ranges no matter which you may of chosen to invest in.

Generally character development workflows are fairly figure specific in my own experience and most developers look at adding broader level support for other figures as an after thought. This is because each figure has its own particulars, such as unique UV's for example, and you will need to choose which UV set you are going to begin working with when creating base textures. Offering broad support to items such as hair is often easier as they often just need a separate refit preset files for each figure, which won't overly bloat the product file size or create loads of extra work for yourself. IMO UV swapping is the best way for users to use textures from other figure ranges, but it may be interesting to experiment yourself and find what you prefer as the best method of reaching a broad level of support. Maybe pick a figure which you feel transfers best across the range you want to support and start from their. Of course if you have your own favourite figure definitely start with that one.

Actually, I've been researching the field of texturing and professional material work for decades now. With a pretty strong focus on skin specifically and humans in general.

From what I've read by professional texture artists, from 2000 to now, texturing figures is pretty much the same from figure to figure. Sure, if your modeler wasn't good at his job and made horrible UVs, there's a problem. But basically speaking, you throw a figure at a professional texture artist (and their set of tools and references), and they have a set of textures within at most 8 hours work. That isn't to say that's my goal in terms of building a full character package (far from it- those are have more features and have to be packed up for the general public), but it shouldn't take more than a day or two for me to have the basis for a character on _any decent figure_ once I get where I want to be. That might take years of practice and investment in some new tools, but that's fine. I'm already doing other things I'm currently good at.

Genesis/modern DS figures are unique in requiring a specific, proprietary _and_ inaccessible plugin to fully support them. No other figures in our community has this limitation, let alone one in the larger 3D world. The only disadvantage I have in competing with other artists making characters for literally every other type of figure out there is experience and tools, both of which I control. I do not, cannot, and will never control whether or not DAZ chooses to bless me with their tools. Someone being a more skilled and better known texture artist than I am is _completely_ different than them having access to creation tools that are deliberately withheld from me.

Right now, I don't see a benefit to placing myself at a unchangeable disadvantage compared to competitors. Maybe I will in the future. If other aspects of the situation change, I'll make a different decision. But "doesn't require a tool I'm never allowed to access" isn't exactly a stringent requirement.

 

[kobaltkween]

Thank you for the quick and informative response. Sorry about that. I used a slang term for something that has a shape to target geometry function. I'm not sure what the correct term for it is, but SimTenero Shape Reprojector is what I was thinking of. Drat, I was hoping to skirt around the need for the HD Morph plugin. The HD morphs I was thinking of are more along the lines of creature creation type morphs. Although I think you are correct. A lot of what I want to do can be done with Displacement and or Normal Maps. I think my uphill battle with using Displacement and Normal Maps in superfly has blinded me to their usefulness or at least temporarily made me forget how great they are. Thank you for steering me in the right direction.

The two major things to keep in mind with displacement are resources and adjustability.

I _love_ displacement maps. I generally use displacement rather than modeled details. So I can tell you they come with a cost. If you're rendering with your CPU, the resources they take up are an issue but generally work OK. If you're rendering with your GPU, which more and more people are, a single 16-bit 4096 x 4096 texture may bring everything to a halt.

I'm more wed to Blender now than Poser, and I _really_ like the advantages in Cycles in 2.79 over Poser's implentation. Which includes a micropoly displacement solution. So that's not what has me looking at more mesh solutions than I used to. It's the fact that GPU rendering is _so_ much faster, growing in popularity so quickly, and just doesn't have very much RAM compared to what we're used to. I think the number one complaint I've seen from people who have problems with Iray is running out of RAM. Even if video card RAM grows twice as fast as motherboard RAM did, it will take years before we can be as free with textures as we are/were with CPU rendering.

Keep in mind that to render, images have to be uncompressed. So there's not much you can do on your end except use fewer texture maps, make them fewer pixels, etc.

The other issue is that people often like to mix characters. While I'm pretty sure that there's a way to make input values into parameter dials in Poser, IIRC, trying to make a dial for displacement strength is a PITA. I have no clue how you might go about that in DS.

Neither of these issues should stop you from embracing the awesomeness that displacement maps can bring to your work. I just figure that the earlier you know about an issue, the more time you have to come up with a way around it.

Oh! And while I can't speak to normal maps and the PhysicalSurface node, Cycles shaders use normal maps like this: Map > NormalMap node: Color > All the normal inputs of your shader. It shouldn't be hard to set up.

 

[phdubrov]

hile I'm pretty sure that there's a way to make input values into parameter dials in Poser, IIRC, trying to make a dial for displacement strength is a PITA. I have no clue how you might go about that in DS.

Already there. On the per-surface basis, but DS has multisurface editor.

Even if video card RAM grows twice as fast as motherboard RAM did, it will take years before we can be as free with textures as we are/were with CPU rendering.

Or all developers of GPU/hybrid renderers take a leaf from Octane book and implement out-of-core textures (CPU RAM textures). It has a price, but GPU with OOC still faster than pure CPU.

 

[RAMWolff]

What I wouldn't give to have a similar tool for the HiveWire 3D family that DAZ offers it's PA's at DAZ3D

 

[kobaltkween]

Already there. On the per-surface basis, but DS has multisurface editor.

Or all developers of GPU/hybrid renderers take a leaf from Octane book and implement out-of-core textures (CPU RAM textures). It has a price, but GPU with OOC still faster than pure CPU.

We might be talking about different things, because I've never seen what I'm talking about in DS. This isn't a matter of the surfaces, which of course you can do in Poser easily. This is a matter of a single dial that controls the _morph_ in the figure properties (not surface properties), including the displacement strength. You can do this in Poser, IIRC, but it's a PITA to set up.

Yeah, Octane's approach is better, but it's sort of a worst of both worlds/best of both worlds situation. It depends on your perspective whether the cost in speed is worth the extra resources. Which gets to the main focus of the people developing those renderers. I don't know of one development group that's focused on stills. They're all real-time/game or animation focused. Which means that they tend to find optimized texture management a better solution in general. I'm all for better optimization for stills, but I haven't found any recent renderers focused on them.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but wouldn't any character set you create for DS, for whichever figure, still be competing with other content creators who do have access to the HD plugin? For example if you create an elfin character for Dawn, content purchasers will still decide between your set and a potentially similar set created for the Genesis figure series regardless of whether that set is HD or not. You're also restricted from making HD morphs for any other figure/object within DS, as the plugin isn't really figure dependent in nature it's basically a Sub-D Morph importer. It's nothing new for businesses to make researched tech proprietary, especially when it gives their own contributors a competitive advantage over external 3rd party competitors.

First of all, only in theory. In actuality, I'd only be competing with content creators who have access to the HD plugin _and_ sell HD characters for the figure. Which will be affected by the community behind the figure. For instance, Hivewire3D strongly encourages all vendors make their products cross platform.

AFAIK, there are no HD characters (or props) for any mesh besides Genesis. So even if I've missed a few, they're not a significant enough portion of the market to be a consideration. To my knowledge, customers do not look for the "HD" feature outside of Genesis characters at this time.

Second of all, most people buy characters for a chosen figure. So Dawn elf figures aren't exactly competing against Genesis elf figures. If that were true, about 85 to 90% of new figure content would rot on brokerage hard drives, because it's just the same old stuff on a new figure rendered in a better renderer. Figures compete amongst each other in aggregate, but vendors making characters, clothes, etc. essentially only compete against each other within that figure's portion of the market.

So it's more a balance of a figure's portion of the market and the potential portion of that market one can make. Given the HD issue and not being a DAZ PA, I'd say that puts me somewhere at 0.01% of the Genesis market at full maximum market visibility _and_ appeal. But take a figure like Dawn, where I'm not restricted to DS only sales and there's no HD characters to compete with, the sky's the limit, percentage-wise. So even if Dawn has a much smaller market, my highest potential customer base is pretty much the whole Dawn market across Poser and DS, while my highest potential Genesis 8 sales are a tiny portion of DS-only sales.

Maybe at some point I'll decide that the sliver of DS-only Genesis sales that might go to a non-HD, character not marketed by DAZ would be a large enough market to be be worth it. The overall Genesis market is pretty large, and who knows what both I and the market will be doing in the future. But today, DAZ's wall around their creation tools is keeping me out.

I've seen absolutely no other instances of this practice within the field of 3D in the almost two decades I've been studying it. More to the point, I currently know of no other creative options for me in 3D that put me at so much of a disadvantage. If, tomorrow, I decided to become a Vue artist and make Vue content, I could choose to invest enough time and money (with enough time to save) to become on par with the top Vue content vendor. The same is true for Substance materials and game content. Or Blender content or plugins. Frankly, it's true of Poser content. It's true of Zbrush sculptures and Shapeways 3D prints. Even SecondLife's horrible licensing doesn't force me to drag my reputation in the mud by forcing me to make definitively inferior products. In every other field, I'm only limited by my own efforts and resources. DS is the only software and Genesis is the only figure where I _can never_ make the same quality content as top artists in the field, because DAZ won't give me access to high quality feature creation.

RAMWolff - It's not a tool for the figures specifically. It's simply access to the DS HD morph features. Which nobody else can grant anyone, and many people would buy if they could. That's not so much offering it to the PA's as keeping it from everyone else. It's cool for existing PAs, though. They really give the PA's they've built relationships with a strong market advantage.

 

[RAMWolff]

Bastards!

 

[Rae134]

well to be fair @Razor42 , Dusk and Dawn were free for a very long time, also its not like they get a new version you have to buy every 6-12 months. (The Genesis base is ok to try out for awhile but not that usefully without the paid add-ons like V7).

And I think @kobaltkween was originally getting at that the HD was only available to Daz PA's, which means even if I wanted to create for the Genesis line to be sold at somewhere like Rendo or here, I'd be at a disadvantage unless I sold at Daz, even if it helps sell their product (and I've heard that's not as easy as you'd think).

 

[RAMWolff]

I'm pretty sure if you want to support Dawn and Dusk in salable products for the store here I would THINK they might give you the figures and probably their base clothing or something. Doesn't hurt to ask.

If not I would agree there should be something set up for that. Like your first 5 products must be sold here exclusively at HiveWire 3D! If you forego making anything and break the digital agreement then a verified CC number would be saved on file in this case and your then charged for the figure packs.....