Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I have to say, now that I'm seriously poking at it... Substance Painter is frikkin amazing.
I actually have a hope of making decent textures with it.
Combination of procedural and painted layers, I now have a 'fleshling' texture for Genesis, Genesis Bubblehead and Tentaclehead. Will make other skins. It's loads of fun. ;)
And the third... tentaclehead
In case people think my stuff is weird, part of it is that I'm really into Lovecraft and Ligotti, and artists like Peter Gric
And other surreal stuff
Oh, and Wayne Barlowe. Love his work
So. Yeah. ;)
Hmm. I'm not... totally happy with this, at least not yet. Maybe it needs some surface layer with the plates/metal showing underneath. I'll have to think about it.
Right now it just looks like somewhat slapped a simple tiling pattern on it, even though it's actually more complicated.
One of the great things about Substance Painter is the ability to create lots of layers of intelligently tiling stuff, and being able to suck in tiles from other sources... like FilterForge!
Gives me a huge potential library of effects and patterns.
Those are beautiful! Highly disturbing but beautiful! I love the colors in the bird man one, they are breathtaking. I'm still going to have to watch lots of silly happy stuff to wash those weird images out of my head though. lol
Oh wow! That came out cool!
Does Substance Painter let you paint textures straight on models? Like I'm looking for a program that will let me paint textures straight onto the models - but I'm looking for something either free or at least fairly inexpensive. I have trouble getting seems to match up with flat textures in Photoshop. But if I could paint straight onto the model then I wouldn't have that issue.
Yes, but... it won't paint across tiles, so you can't directly paint on soemthing like a Genesis figure. As long as the model you want to paint has all of its surfaces on the same basic UV square, without overlap, then it will work. Being able to paint across tiles was supposed to be in SP2 but it's had half-a-dozen updates so far without the feature appearing so I wouldn't be sanguine.
Ah, I see. That's probably not going to work for me then. Thank you for the information Richard, I appreciate it. :)
I've had some decent results painting up to a seam, selecting the next zone and meshing it a bit, with mask painting, but it's definitely the biggest gap in the program.
That said, what I've done is create multiple fill layers (which can take procedural or tiled textures and cover a surface) and then paint masks to reveal one/other/etc, and it's working out pretty well.
Oddly, while Carrara isn't as good as SP2 for painting, it DOES have cross-tile painting. Just that the fidelity of the painting doesn't seem to be as good. Hm.
I think Mudbox (subscription only) will handle multiple tiles, as will Mari (there's an Indie version on Steam, but I'm not sure if that quite has enough tiles to handle a Daz human). 3D Coat will certainly work, but that's a bit pricier.
I might just try pulling stuff into Carrara to smudge/touch up the seams. Hrm. Something to keep in mind.
3D Coat looks very attractive, but the Amateur resolution limitation of 2048 is just... a bit lower than I'd like. Mmph. If it was 4096...
There's also Blender, which handles painting across UV's a little better these days.
I can't use Blender, alas. Makes me brain scream.
I briefly debated going Genesis 3 for this stuff. More potential immediate audience?
But then I thought of allllllllllllllllllll the stuff I'd have to buy to be happy using it.
Meh.
Thing I learned about Substance Painter:
It's really a good idea to export an object with material zones unified as much as possible. Helps cut down on seams to worry about and makes it easier to deal with the output.
Ok, honestly, I was trying to do something less horror-themed. More 'aquatic thing with a squid tentacle head' or something. It sort of... evolved back toward horror...
Hi Will, great thread. First off, your renders are nice, and the level of surface detail contrasts really well with the bakground so the figures really pop. Up close the sense of volume of the figures pretty striking. Secondly, surreal art is close kin to horror, and the line between the 2 is pretty damn blurry.
I have to say too, watching you modeling, geografting, texturing, morphing and posing reminds me of the steep, steep learning curve involved in becoming competent. I'm only now getting into seriously learning about the modeling, UV mapping, texturing, and rigging.
I've got boxes of sketchbooks - some going back 15 years - that are filled with concepts I've been itching do something with. 3d seems like the domain to do it in.
Thanks for sharing a bit of your process and the progress. I'll keep an eye on this thread!
I only started seriously doing this stuff about 2, 3 years ago. Though I had done a bunch of hobby level stuff in the late 90s (which was painfully limited).
Yeah, the difficulty is that a lot of this stuff is poorly documented, if it's documented at all. ;)
Ok, adapted the previous skin to Michael 5 base (humanoids): http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Pebblesquidman-Contemplating-662534312
Linked, since if folks found the rest disturbing, well...
Any suggestions on cheerier skins to try? :)
I think I will take a page from another surrealist I love, Gil Bruvel. His work has more whimsy.
And as per that, here's a more fanciful, 'happy' version of the bubblehead. Pretty happy with it, and also finally figured out what I needed to tweak with the tentaclehead so that the tentacle segments are selectable (there was an option I had just overlooked).
The soap bubble is from WTP3, the body uses Mech4D's PBS v2, 'anodized aluminum,' I think.
Trying to streamline the process of using some of this stuff with existing textures.
So far, the process is:
Apply Tentaclehead geograft.
Apply provided shader (right-click, keep maps), be sure to copy base color into translucency color if it's not already there.
Select the Tentaclehead object. Apply provided tentaclehead undercoat. This should be roughly the same color as the rest of the body, tweak if necessary.
Select the Genesis figure, Create Geometry Shell. Apply Tentaclehead Geoshell Shader to it.
Going to TRY to set this up with 3DL, too. Fingers crossed. ;)
Now, if you want some funky shader or shader settings of your own, you can certainly do that and adjust as necessary. The process should be mostly the same.
I will also have some complete whole body textures so you don't have to mess with geoshells, but they aren't very pretty. ;)
Love the last render. Weird.
I didn't realize something cool... so I have 'regular people' material presets for some of the weird stuff, and apparently that means the materials will work on both Genesis and Genesis 2 (even if the geografts are more particular).
Cool!
That's beautiful!
Wow! I really like that! That's so cool - reminds me of something you'd see in MirrorMask or Labyrinth.
Yeah, I heartily recommend you do some image searches for Gil Bruvel. It's wondrous.
Note that a fair number have naked women (sort of), so... mind where you are. ;)
Working on bagging up some of this stuff so I can actually release some of it.
I think something I might work on after Tentacle and Bubble heads is a simple one -- bump/normal texture for horses.
It's one of those basic things that makes me go 'wuuh?' ... that there are no such textures, anywhere, for Daz Horse 2! Sheesh
Also, I realized that I had needlessly created a tiling pattern for some of the fleshling texture, which was obvious on some larger experiments. I fixed that and propogated it out. (Which took some doing -- I have fleshling materials for Genesis, Tentaclehead, Daz Dragon 3, Daz Horse 2, Octolegs, Four Arms, and Cobra Tail... hee)
And on that note, I think I'll split off the random other stuff (like fleshling dragon) into a separate package, Fleshling Extras, to keep things sensible.