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A question for merchants

RAMWolff

RAMWolff

Wolff Playing with Beez!
Contributing Artist
Not abandoned, I use it like a work tool to get things done and export to Poser when needed. I gave up mostly because I wanna make a little cash to supplement my meager income. Genesis 8 is overly saturated with content anything I've made has brought literally trickles in, like I think I've made all of about $20.00 on Gino for Genesis 8 Male. I'm not into the politics and policies of DAZ3D and they are really really pushy about promo's, not my forte' and I know it's what can make or break sales but they expect you too jump through fire hoops while doing summersaults and I just don't have that sort of talent. The old adage of "you have to spend money to make money" is nice if you have it to hire someone to make promo's for you but I have no extra money for that so it's me and a couple of beta testers and that's it.

So along came La'Femme and L'Homme and they really are quite appealing to me. I'll jump back to Dusk when 2.0 hits but that won't be for a long while yet so L'Homme it is. I like supporting male figures as they get little to no love. SO MAYBE I'll do a little better. I have just completed a Pose and Expressions pack for L'Homme. You don't get many expressions for him, you achieve this by using the face chips to get it all done, took me a minute to figure it all out so I have 10 everyday expressions and 40 poses with mirrors for him. Just gotta get the promo's done and I'm about there but waiting on some info from the 'Rosity forums.

The question I posted there, I guess I can post here too. I need a way to have the renders give me a reflection on the floor that I can export in PNG and drop into a pre rendered scene since loading more than 2 or 3 copies of L'Homme crashes Poser so I guess I gotta do it one by one but I want the finished main promo to look polished and like it's a room full of the figure in various poses. I think what I'm sort of asking for is like a shadow catcher but instead of shadows I want reflections. I know I can duplicate the PNG and flip it and position it and erase to fade it out but it's allot of work that I'm hoping to get done at rendering time.
 
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parkdalegardener

Adventurous
Can't you just load the figure into your scene multiple times each with a different pose and just do a single render of the entire crowd? Flock of birds made from one, herd of cows all from a single Bessy? You seem to be overly complicating things unless you are trying to put all 80 poses and 10 expressions into a single overly busy scene that takes more RAM than an IBM supercomputer..

I can easily give you an answer to your "translucent" skin as well. In the Material Room add a new Root Node: PhysicalSurface

There are three inputs on it named ScatterDist. These are the SSS (Subsurface Scatter) for each of the RGB channels. They are in Millimeters even if you have your poser set to inches in preferences. If you want a Caucasian you allow scatter in the red channel, Dragons the green channel or Cameron's Avatar people you allow some blue scatter. If you want to add a little waxy scatter to your purple people eater take the RGB value from your colour picker and use those ratios to add your purple skin "translucence". These values can also be modulated via greyscale image files. This allow for vein maps and the like. One thing to watch for is a bug that may not have been fixed yet. I haven't checked. Do Not give same the non-zero value to more than one input. It will give an incorrect scatter result. 1,1,0 for instance will fail.

Another thing. iRay vs Superfly. You do not need different maps or "shaders" I paint all my textures in Adobe's Substance Painter. It's native render engine is iRay. I take the maps from there and plug them directly into Superfly. No changes. If the environments in both softwares is the same you cannot tell which render engine result is which as I repeatedly demonstrated years ago. A properly constructed PBR material should render exactly the same in whatever PBR render engine used. That means that if your Gino maps are correct there should be no need to change them from the DS version.

Sorry if this refers to stuff other folk in this thread haven't seen on Rendo.
 
RAMWolff

RAMWolff

Wolff Playing with Beez!
Contributing Artist
WOW, thanks for the info for the skin shader issue I was having. Yea, I'm a fan of the Physical Surface root node. I got the skin figured out but I'll take these useful notes you provided and save them to a text file!

I wish I had the income and patience to learn Substance Painter. I had a perpetual license at one point, never had the time to sit down and learn it and then they went to subs and then Adobe snatched the whole shebang up and yea, no time or income at this point to pursue that right now. I know they are the industry standard but decided to give 3DCoat a shot since I've had a license with that one forever and, again, never had much time to learn it but with it on board and with more time due to Covid and working from home I've sort of figured out things better in there! Just wish there was a good video tutorial that would take me from start to finish creating skin for a character. There was ONE on GumRoad or RenderHub (Cant' remember) but it looked like the artist was using more than one program. He told me he would be back in touch to confirm which programs he used and to what extent and he never got back to me, even a reminder email.. nada so no sale from me! *sigh*
 
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parkdalegardener

Adventurous
I don't write tutorials anymore but this should help.
 

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Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Adventurous
RAMWolff said:
WOW, thanks for the info for the skin shader issue I was having. Yea, I'm a fan of the Physical Surface root node. I got the skin figured out but I'll take these useful notes you provided and save them to a text file!

I wish I had the income and patience to learn Substance Painter. I had a perpetual license at one point, never had the time to sit down and learn it and then they went to subs and then Adobe snatched the whole shebang up and yea, no time or income at this point to pursue that right now. I know they are the industry standard but decided to give 3DCoat a shot since I've had a license with that one forever and, again, never had much time to learn it but with it on board and with more time due to Covid and working from home I've sort of figured out things better in there! Just wish there was a good video tutorial that would take me from start to finish creating skin for a character. There was ONE on GumRoad or RenderHub (Cant' remember) but it looked like the artist was using more than one program. He told me he would be back in touch to confirm which programs he used and to what extent and he never got back to me, even a reminder email.. nada so no sale from me! *sigh*
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I texture in 3dcoat. If you need pointers just ask. I have some tricks to save memory when doing textures in 3dcoat.

I too use 3d coat with photoshop. Just like the old program deep paint 3d. They are very similar.

BTW I had a play with lhomme and I like him much better than La femme tbh.
 
RAMWolff

RAMWolff

Wolff Playing with Beez!
Contributing Artist
Yea, he's a handsome guy. His lips are a bit too full for me but I took care of that in ZBrush recreating the Gino morph. It's not exact as his counterpart for Genesis 8 but he looks like a brother from the same muther! lol

Thank you for the kind offer with tips and tricks for 3DCoat. I'll TRY to keep you in mind when I'm hitting a wall but with my old brain I'll probably forget who offered me help when the time comes. Just comes with age and having short term memory issues most of my life! LOL
 
Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Adventurous
RAMWolff said:
Yea, he's a handsome guy. His lips are a bit too full for me but I took care of that in ZBrush recreating the Gino morph. It's not exact as his counterpart for Genesis 8 but he looks like a brother from the same muther! lol

Thank you for the kind offer with tips and tricks for 3DCoat. I'll TRY to keep you in mind when I'm hitting a wall but with my old brain I'll probably forget who offered me help when the time comes. Just comes with age and having short term memory issues most of my life! LOL
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Most important is, how you load the figure in 3dcoat. That can save you a lot of frustration.

Regarding Lhomme, yes he is better shaped than La femme. Altho the textures are not that great and still has no real eye shape definition.
 
RAMWolff

RAMWolff

Wolff Playing with Beez!
Contributing Artist
Yea, I rarely mess with the pupil or any other eye area when morphing! The textures for Gino are pretty nice. I took a shortcut and used a mixture of my own bits and pieces (as I like to call them) and a merchant resource for his skin. I never leave the skin as is though, there are many refinements to the source so it's more of what I want him to look like. I recreated allot of what Genesis 8 Male version has like the elbow details, nipples, lips, brows, knees and other areas.
 
Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Aylaaenas_Evenwing

Adventurous
RAMWolff said:
Yea, I rarely mess with the pupil or any other eye area when morphing! The textures for Gino are pretty nice. I took a shortcut and used a mixture of my own bits and pieces (as I like to call them) and a merchant resource for his skin. I never leave the skin as is though, there are many refinements to the source so it's more of what I want him to look like. I recreated allot of what Genesis 8 Male version has like the elbow details, nipples, lips, brows, knees and other areas.
Click to expand...

A lot of people make big mistakes when it comes to bpr. In bpr, the upper surface ( skin) doesn't really matter. The flatter the diffuse/albedo map the better. Details should come from the underlying surfaces.
For instance an indented scar is pulled down by the fibers due to missing collagen. These fibers pull the skin inwards and leave a dent. ( with plastic surgery, they can fill them again, temporarily and aslo break the fibers (painful)). This is also a bit true for wrinkles, only no fibers that are pulling.

Real bpr textures can be painted too and look like real skin with the right materials and shaders.

With Lhomme there is plenty of specular on the map. I feel the maps are a bit rushed.

Nowadays I texture with the plain photographs, when the texture is done I diffuse them and then I subtract the highlights from the textures and use that for my specular or cavity maps.
 
Pendraia

Pendraia

Sage
Contributing Artist
CWRW said:
Exactly! Well said Ken.
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I agree with you and Ken in what you are saying. That said I'm only a hobbyist who was doing this while my full time job was teaching. I'm looking at retiring at the end of the year and if I was to be wanting to make an income from this I would be doing as you and Ken said. Set times of work each day just like any other job.
 
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