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
Are you still playing with strand based hair? If so, would live to see the styles you have come up with.
Happy Holidays
Both @TigerAnne and @Fishtales encouraged me to modify and use Heart of Winter for this year's holiday card. I suspect this is not quite what they had in mind!
As much as I love the cabin, it didn't have quite the homey feel I wanted. I kept the terrain, reworked the figure to become Santa, and modified the pose of the deer. I was hoping the HW Reindeer would be released in time, but that wasn't the case. I also wrote my own saying for the inside of the card, (no copyright infringement that way,) and I'd like to express the same sentiment to my fellow 3D artists here at Daz:
May the Treasures
of the Season,
Peace, Joy & Love,
Be With You Always!
Happy Holidays!
-L'Adair
Ohmygosh, that's just lovely!
I love that scene, it's so peaceful. Beautifully done. :)
@Worlds_Edge, I haven't had time to work with SBH for quite a while. Stuff IRL has been quite demanding these past few months. I will get back to it, though, and when I do, I'll share what I've discovered; Either in this thread or the Kitchen.
Thank you, @WinterMoon. (Cool new name, btw.)
Thank you, @Novica.
I actually loved that deer because it gives it a very vintage look. Matches the Santa perfectly.
I was originally going to publish this review in the Dain 8 thread, but now that people are moving away from their disappointment in the bundle, I don't want drag the conversation back that direction.
Review of the Dain 8 Pro Bundle, (and by extension, the Starter Bundle,) listed by my personal opinion on quality and usability.
I'll post some images of the Bouncer Outfit in the next comment.
Image of the Bouncer Outfit using one of the Bouncer poses, emphasizing the lack of proper JCMs in the crotch/groin area.
Image showing the "solid" mesh of the Bouncer outfit pants.
Also, these pants explode when attempting to use dForce because of the solid mesh at the waist and bottom of the pant legs. I was able use dForce after I used the Geometry Editor to hide that mesh and the dForce Weight Map Node to limit influence at the waist and feet. Results are mixed. The very bottom of the pant legs have issues, but the groin looks a lot better. dForce isn't getting rid of the crease in the back, though.
Here's an example of one of the weight maps I used trying to make these pants dForce:
The pant's fly is particularly problematic. With the amount of influence in this image, it did not move naturally. This will take some more tinkering, but if I can't get the legs to work correctly, it would just be a waste of time.
This bums me out. I really like Daniel's look in the promos.
Sure, the product seems a little rushed (only two promo pictures, reportedly no eye options, etc) but at the end of the day I buy characters for the morph and for the skin. As long as those two aspects are good, I'm good. But to read that the navel is misaligned... major bummer.
Here are some images of the clothing. There is a front and back view of each with G8M on the left and Dain 8 on the right of each image. Listed in the same order as the Review, above.
First Future Soldier:
Followed by the Flight Suit:
Next is the Mercenary Outfit:
And finally, the Bouncer Outfit. (The base outfit is a dark gray. I didn't buy the textures, so I used LIE to color the suit and pants objects to a lighter blue color, in hopes that would allow the issues to stand out better.)
And here's a "bonus" image of the Bouncer Outfit with the top hidden, showing the issue with crease between the buttocks.
Thanks for the review L'Adair, I wasn't able to buy the bundle when it came out or I would have done so because of the two free bundles and other freebies. Though in hindsight I'm thinking it may be a good idea I couldn't do so *sigh* Still plan to buy Dain when I am gettign the chance, and as I am interested in the headset I may buy the mercenary outfit too as the gloves and glasses can also be useful, I think :)
Not to belabor the point, but regarding the Dain 8 Mercenary Outfit Vest, something is seriously messed up with the way the polygons are defined. Some users had noted that the geometry editor could not select the smiley button on the front. This is true in polygon or edge mode, but it does work in vertex mode. Somehow the wrong vertices are used to define the facets, but I believe the UV mapping uses vertices to fit the bitmaps, so they fall into place. That is why the mask you supplied to hide the button works.
If you try to select any polygons on the vest, seemingly random polygons are actually highlighted (if you are viewing the whole vest, you will see what I mean, if you can see them at all, sometimes they are hidden behind other parts). That makes it virtually impossible to select the polygons you actually want to work on, if so desired (like to hide them, or to define a new surface), as evidenced by the trouble selecting the button. Converting a vertex selection to polygon or edge selection accomplishes nothing, it just selects whatever polygons it wants to. Interesting note, if you adjust any of the fitting morphs, you can actually see which polygons are selected while moving the slider. There is obviously a technical problem that can't be addressed by casual users.
Thank you for this detailed review! Note to self: Bouncer Outfit does not go on wishlist! I really like the Flight Suit and the Mercernary Outfit, even if they got mediochre grades.
Oh, and if you look at the promo picture of Manu, you can see that the navel is in the wrong place even there, if you know about it. That's probably what the hazy effect is supposed to detract from.
Thank you for the detailed review.
It feels like the entire Dain 8 release was slapped together in a hurry. As far as I can tell, everything except the named figure was created by Disruptive Publishers, though I'm only guessing on the pose packs. (I believe a more seasoned PA would know to include poses optimized for the named figure, if said figure is part of the product title.) I think Daz had enough products to create the pro/starter bundles without the Disruptive Publishers products, but then they would not have the products to provide the additional Fantasy bundle.
You'll really like Dain 8. And if you are familiar with the settings for dForce Hair, you're going to love the included Chest Hair. (It's not listed on the product page, so think of it as a bonus.) There are Density presets, but if you're comfortable tinkering with the settings, you can make the hair longer or shorter, clumpy or not, frizzie or not, and so on. People need to tinker more with the SBH Editor, (myself included,) to become more familiar with what the settings do, as most of the settings for dForce Hair correlate to the settings in the editor.
Dain does have really big traps, but if you aren't a fan of those, the Genesis 8 Male Body Morphs includes a Trap Size morph. The minimum value is -25% but if you modify the Parameter, Dain looks very nice with that set to -86%, imo.
Here's a render with the Traps dialed down and a lot of tweaks to the chest hair:
Smoke Break
I've been tinkering with SBH again, this time to add some length to an existing hair for one of the homeless men in my last render:
Hospitality
The man on the right is Percy with some Ollie dialed in and he's wearing the bald-on-top version of Redz' Vintage Male Hair. Even so, I had to use the Geometry Editor to select and hide hair that was poking through the Fedora hat prop. I used CC Beard Boss to create the bushy beard, but even messy, the hair was too perfect. (The beard has Visibility in the Viewport disabled to make it easier to move around the scene.)
To add length to the back of the hair, I turned to the SBH Editor. I made a copy of the cutout opacity map for the skull cap and used that as the template to create a density map that stayed inside the "boundaries" of the original hair. With a lot of trial and error, I got a Style with thick, clumped hair that fell to his left and filled the slight void in the back between Percy's head and the hat, (which is parented to the head.)
I created a number of viewport draws, some with matching renders, to show just how bad the hair really is, yet how well it did the job I needed it to. The point is, you don't have to be great with the SBH Editor to use it to enhance your vision. And it's a great way to get comfortable with the Editor.
Homeless man without SBH
Homeless man with SBH
Viewport showing all the hair. The white hair is the new surface I created with the Geometry Editor.
Viewport showing just the Vintage Male Hair with the new surface hidden via the Geometry Editor Tool Settings.
Viewport showing the SBH "extensions" and the Vintage Male hair with the new surface hidden from the character's left side
The render of the viewport draw from the character's left side showing the difference between the style lines and the actual hair.
Viewport draw looking at the front of the character.
The render of the viewport draw of the character's front.
Viewport draw of the right side of the character.
The render of the viewport draw of the right side of the character.
Viewport draw of the back of the character.
The render of the viewport draw of the back of the character.
I left the skull cap of the vintage hair visible for the viewport draws, but I decided the renders showed the final hair better without it visible.
Images link to their full-size versions, and open in a new window. As you can see from the renders, my strand hair is far from perfect, intersecting the clothing in places and doesn't blend well with the base hair. But once the Fedora is visible and from the distance of the camera for the final scene, those imperfections don't show up.
A new tool in my toolbox is Mesh Grabber. I've gotten pretty darn good with dForms, but the Mesh Grabber is faster and more intuitive for most situations. I love this tool but it can be slow and combersome if you need to make changes to a large number of polys/vertices at one time; a limitation I attribute to the code running Daz Studio, currently in version 4.12.
For example, in the image below with the centaur, I used an outfit for G8F that included a dForce cape. I needed the cape to bend up parallel with the horse back before I could run the simulation. Selecting 2/3 of the cape and trying to bend it up using Mesh Grabber took foorever for the viewport to update with each movement of the mouse. I actually used Hexagon to create the bend morph for the cape.
I used Mesh Grabber for everything else: creating a Fit to Centaur morph for the belted waist of the dress, and numerous tweaks of the outfit as I went along. It's perfect for such smaller changes. I also used it to create several morphs for the "collar" including one that allowed me to move the rigid pieces up, so they were out of the way during the dForce simulation, moving down into place by the end of the animation.
But what I really want to talk about is how I used the Mesh Grabber to create churned sand under the centaur. Here's the finished image:
Predator
First, I should mention I was using the beta, which is no longer working. The released version of the Rotations addon is in the Daz queue, and should be available soon. It is a "must have" as far as I'm concerned, and considering the amount of work the PA put into it, I'm fine with it being a paid addon.
Okay, down to business. The set I used is the Arch Cove from TangoAlpha. This is a large set, with a huge terrain, (and uses UltraScattered instances for the "small" rocks.) All the images below link to their full-size counterparts and will open in a new window.
Here is a Viewport Draw, Wireframe, of the final two objects I created as seen from the render camera. Notice just how dense the polygons are.
And here is the same view with the terrain visible again. Both my sand props and the terrain are shown in their Base resolution.
And finally, here is a closeup, also at Base resolution, where you can actually see how much smaller the polys are on my props.
Part of my process for large scenes like this is to develope the characters for a scene separately, then later merge them with each other and the set. In this case, I took advantage of that and exported an OBJ of the centaur, and used that object to help me determine the camera shot and where I needed the sand to look churned from the centaur's hooves.
At that point, I hid everything except the centaur OBJ. I then selected the terrain and created a duplicate, which I made visible.
I then spent an entire day discovering how not to create a high-poly version of the terrain for the area where I needed the churned sand. I deleted my efforts, saved the file, and went to bed.
Day two: I once again created a duplicate of the terrain, selected it and using the Geometry Editor tool, I highlighted only the polygons of the relatively small area I needed. I verified those polys covered enough area by viewing the scene through the camera, created a Selection Set, then inverted the selected polys, (Ctrl+/), saved the scene, and then deleted the selected polys I wouldn't need, (Right-click menu Edit > Deleted Selected Polygons…) Note: For me, Daz Studio is most likely to crash when I'm working with the Geometry Editor tool, especially when I delete large numbers of polygons. Creating a Selection Set and saving the scene immediately before deleting those polys means I can pick up where I left off if DS crashes.
Hiding everything but my modified terrain, I converted it to SubD, with 1 level, exported to OBJ and then imported the now higher-density prop. I repeated this process several times, creating a different OBJ each time, in case I needed to go backwards at some point. In the end, I used the next to the last OBJ to create my prop, exported it, and then applied SubD with 1 level. That smoothed out the object, removing the sharp points my efforts with the Mesh Grabber created. Because I was happy with it, I exported this SubD version, imported it back in, and that became my prop. The visual result is the same, but this way, the computer didn't need to calculate the SubD during the render.
Keep in mind, the overall process to the final prop took me two days. There was a lot of trial and error, and I started over more than once. I could have started with a high poly plane, but chose to start with "a few" polys of the terrain because my unmodified OBJ followed the PAs terrain exactly. After that, it was a lot of pulling, pushing, and rotating, all in very small amounts, thanks to setting the Gain to a low amount. The tool has a number of Falloff Types, but the one I used most often was "Rand".
Here are two image showing Rand in action, one with the Gain at 100% and the other with Gain at 10%.
Because I had the posed centaur OBJ, I was also able to create depressions specifically for the hooves on the ground, in the correct places. For that, I used the Constant Falloff, selected the polygons I needed using the Geometry Editor tool, and switched back to the Mesh Grabber to push the polygons straight down.
During the process, I realized the prop was going to be very, very high poly. I did two things to offset that. First, I used the materials to make the sand more granular. I copied the original sand materials of the terrain for the OBJ, but used the albedo map for Wet Sand from Mec4Ds vol 2 PBS as a bump map, and plugged the normal map for the same shader into the Normal Map parameter. Using the Image Editor, I increased the tiling of both maps by two. I set Bump Map to 3.0 and Normal Map to 1.0; Second, I used the Geometry Editor to select polygons that were underneath the original terrain and deleted them.
Once I merged the finished centaur, beasts and set together, I ended up moving the camera to get a better view of animals. This included moving the camera back and rotating. That left a section of pristine sand on the left, and I ended up creating a second prop. I learned a lot from the first effort, and the second OBJ took less than a day to create.
I could have created my sand props in Hexagon, but I believe this was both easier and faster, due in large part to the Rand falloff and and the Gain setting of the Mesh Grabber tool.
In a few years, the pandemic of 2020 will be history, a story to tell our children, our grandchildren, or perhaps, even our great-grandchildren. So many lives lost, but also, so many everyday heroes; from the frontlines to behind the scenes, people are stepping up to help each other—friend, family and strangers alike.
We have Xfinity cable, and for several weeks, they and their partners made premium channels and premium content free to watch. New release movies were also available to rent. We don't usually rent movies via cable, but we made exceptions for movies we had planned to see in the theatres: Onward, Birds of Prey, Call of the Wild, and Bloodshot.
Hubby has type 2 Diabetes and has visits with the doctor or physician's assistant regularly. The last visit was via TeleHealth. (Good thing I finally broke down and got a smart phone in February!) Medicare and the insurance made changes so those are covered, and he didn't need to leave the house, or sit in a waiting room full of people.
Daz stepped up, too, to make self-isolation a wee bit more bearable, with honorary PC Memberships, additional coupons for existing members, the Grimes Music Video content, (half of which was free,) and so on. So did Hivewire 3D with their Stay Home - Spread Hope Render Challenge, making a dozen products free, and asking entries to include at least three of the free items. A few days later, several of their vendors added even more items to the list of freebies. (I don't spend much time on Renderosity, so I'm unaware of what they may have done. Hopefully someone who knows will post a comment below.)
This is an inadequate thank you to the individuals, organizations, and businesses, who made changes to their lifestyle, business practices, and protocols to help us all slow the spread and save lives. Even the simple act of staying home is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
It's been too long since I shared an image in here. This is Hala, for Daisy 8. A bit more fantasy than I usually do, but it was fun.
I tried numerous hairs on the figure, but the only one I really liked, Stella Hair, hid her ears. So I used Mesh Grabber/Rotations to move it behind her ears and make the whole style a bit more wild. I also created an additional material zone to add in the silver/white streaks. The red on black hair color comes with the hair.
Full list of available Daz products is on the gallery page, which the title and image link to.
Sentry
Lovely dark fae, L'Adair!
Thank you, Darwin.
I've added a couple of links to my signature, one to my fledgling Instagram account, (which is almost entirely renders,) and a brand new Facebook page I created specifically to post my 3D artwork. I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook, but I have many friends IRL that never see my art because they don't hang out here on Daz3d.com. I'll be posting a few more images before I announce the page to IRL friends, but please feel free to stop in, look around, and perhaps leave a comment, and/or Follow.
I followed your FB page. Sadly I don't have Insta, yet.
Thank you, @WinterMoon!
You don't have to have an InstaGram account to view the site. Or a phone. You can poke around in there all you like from your PC/laptop. Of course, most images I upload there can be found here and, eventually, on the FB page.
Like the look of your FB and Insta, though I admittingly don't use either of them myself :) I tend to stalk your art here instead *grins shamelessly*
I'm mainly just a lurker here, but I do enjoy your renders quite a bit! :D
I too am grateful for the people and businesses stepping up to help make this a little more bearable. Thank you for posting this and reminding everyone. :)
By the way, I don't know how long you've had this in your signature (sorry I'm pretty oblivious sometimes lol), but it's much appreciated:
I just wanted to say thank you for all you do around the forum. You really go out of your way to help others so often, and it's really awesome! Thank you for all you do around here L'Adair!
Carola O, Thank you. As well as stalking, the occassional comment is much appreciated!
@Divamakeup, Thank you. It felt right to say something.
As for the blurb in my signature, well, it's been there over a year. But please don't feel bad. We have all developed "Signature Blindness" to one extent or another. How can we not, when we are bombarded with advertising on TV, websites, and even our phones!