I sure miss Poser's Wave Deformer...
wancow
Posts: 2,708
One of the things DS doesn't have is a WAVE deformer... which is fantastic for animating flags and making water wavelets...
Does anyone know if it's possible for someone to script one in?
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I was wondering that, myself.
And... by the fact that no one has answered this question in over 8yrs, kind of gives me the answer to one of my question regarding DAZ Studio--evidently there is nothing available.
The other question I have is, why can't I get the wave deformer to work consistently in Poser??
I was able to get it to work on the guy and the lion, but not the ship. I can't figure out what am I doing wrong...
Another thing I miss is animateable textures, including transparancies & ambient glow channels, that were available since P4.
As superior as the 3Delight and IRAY render engines may be over Poser's Firefly, DAZ Studio unfortunately only has static surface available and we cannot animate any of it.
I did do some playing around and managed to export some figures from DAZ to Poser, where I could apply a wave deformer and reimport the deformed figure back to DAZ.
I got some effects to come through like I wanted, but animated any of this would be impossible!
There are add-ons to animate textures in DS:
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/texanimfords3
https://www.daz3d.com/animated-textures-script-pro-for-daz-studio-3-4
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/texture-animator-for-daz-studio-4/110787
(disclaimer: I never tried any of these, I don't do animations)
Thanks for providing links for the animimatable textures! That's at least half of what I'm needing, but it's still better than nothing!
Also, I found there are built-in deformers in DS that I can use to warp the full length of a figure or object, but nothing to make ripples or waves as of yet... so, with the animatable textures, perhaps it's more accurate to say ~55-65% of what I need. LOL!
I just recently happened across another thread that mentioned a product I already had in my library: Blur Crazy that I had picked up back when it was in a ridiculously priced sale. When I looked closer at it, I saw it had some intriguing features that prompted me to play around with it here for a bit. I'm glad I did!
My first go at it gave me some ripples effects that I liked very well. However, it was clear I would need scads and scads of props to fit about the cats.
Another shot at it, this time adapting some of the Blur Crazy transparencies directing into the cats' textures, especially needed to use GIMP to adjust the transparency maps for the Epic Wings' feathers! Definite LIKE!! these results, even though the effort is even more involved and convoluted than exporting my cats to Poser, warping them there, and reimporting to DAZ would be. Animations are absolutely out, but still frames look freaking fantastic!
(BTW, if you happed to notice one of my cats is missing, it's NOT because she's gone fully cloaked--it's because I really FUBARed Panthera's textures up so bad she was unrecoverable--I'm having to use Pardus as my model from here on out! )
Third try--this time blending both the piecemeal props and modified cat textures... looking for the proper values to set the opaque channels to make the best looking image--one for each and every blur prop PLUS the cats' material settings--serious pain in the kieterster! And it's almost like the cat is dressed in his own plate armor with all those bloody props! But very close to what I initially wanted, yet still just a bit off....
SO MUCH BETTER! It's a very subtle change from the one above, but this gives a very dynamic (for a bloody still frame) appearance for his activating cloaking effect. (ironically, the Epic Wings is a product that is 3DLight only, while the DAZ Big Cat & Blur Crazy are both IRAY--which is what my rendering was set for--I don't think I need to wrap any of the Blur Crazy props about the wings--they did very nicely on their own here!)
Unfortunately, any sequences before and beyond this moment in using these cats and their cloaking effects will need many more major changes of the transparency maps using GIMP. For now, I'm done!
Cheers!