Looks Better in Poser than Daz?
I really need help to lock this constant issue I have down.
Over all I feel some renders look just better in Poser. I find many materials don't look as good in Daz as they do in Poser. Materials often look plasticy and unnatural. Yet Poser is suposed to have less features than Daz so this baffles me somewhat.
You will see that the sword hilt has the lights etc and things looking more natural.
Over all, I will say that I do prefer Daz but I really want figure out how I get things looking the way I want to.
Mainly I am having a lot of trouble with my character's breast plate (Justice Chest Armor) in terms of shape and material.
It's designed for V4 but I am using it here on Genesis.
I don't wish to use Poser any more but the breast plate is perfect on the character when i add it to the V4 model in poser.
In Daz, using Genesis (with V5) the breast plate doesn't apply the way I would like it to at all and it's making her breast too dominant, shaped and look saggy.
I also don't like how the material renders but I guess I can see to that in Photoshop.
Does anybody have any recommendadions on how I can get the breat plate to look like it does on Poser? Do I need to buy more breast morphs? as I can get her boobe to me any smaller in the Genesis controls?
Here is Poser render with defaults lights and below is the Daz render with Dragonlslayer lights.
Comments
The shape, if I understand you, is the main issue? The problem is that AutoFit "reverses" the V4 shape out of the clothing to get something that fits the base, neuter, shape then auto-generates the female morph when you dial that in. Those two automatic modifications often add up to a poor fit, especially on something rigid like armour. I suspect the best options would be either to parent a copy of the breast plate to Genesis, hiding the more flexible portions and just keeping the solid plates, so that it wasn't changed or to create a custom morph to match your female shape in a modeller and load it with Morph Loader pro over the top of the auto-generated morph.
I wouldn't know where to start with doing my own morphs but I will try the parenting instead of the fitting it to Genesis, if I am understanding you correctly?!
I would this help I wonder: http://www.daz3d.com/clothing-breast-fixes-for-genesis-2-female
Though I don't have Genesis 2 yet!
http://www.daz3d.com/clothing-cleavage-modifier is a similar product for Genesis 2.
Why don't you just use Justice on your V4 in Daz Studio. V4 loads just fine into DS, Justice will fit perfectly, There are dozens of exceptional V4 skin textures out there, and depending on your DS lights sets, it'll render nicely without any distortion.
Now if you wanted to use Justice on a male character or some hybrid, then autofitting to Genesis would make sense, but if your going to use the clothing on a female, it's easier to just use original V4. Costs less too!
Less features or not, if a garment is made for poser and doesn't have a DS version, its going to look better in Poser until someone does the conversion.
Frequently this is because the material setup is a bit (or very) different in Poser and D|S — if you just load the Poser version in D|S it might not look good, but if you then apply D|S materials it'll look a lot better. The main problem here is that some things just don't have D|S materials, and in others the D|S materials might not be easy to find (especially in older items that don't yet have Smart Content set up for them). Does that Justice set include D|S materials, or is it Poser only?
Lighting is also a major problem — basic Poser lights can be loaded in to D|S, but they don't work quite the same. Non-basic Poser lights either don't work at all in D|S or work in a completely different way. Your two pics have different light setups, which can make a huge difference in what a material looks like, even if it is properly set up for D|S.
There's a good reason for this... As others have said, if it didn't come with DS Mat presets then that's half the problem, the other half of the problem is that the default shader for DS, is, guess what... PLASTIC.
I whipped up the following render in about 20 minutes, did some brute force calculations and wholesale setting changes and came up with this for the Justice outfit. If I put about 2 hours into it I could have it looking fantastic not just good. I didn't make any effort to fix the posing issues, so you'll have to forgive me the pokethrough/collisions that I was too lazy to fix. ;)
The point is that either in Poser or DAZ Studio you really are better of knowing what is happening and not just using things "as they come."
The following is a rough checklist of things I go through on each item, even those that come with DS Mat settings as often I disagree with the vendor on how things should look, but this is most specifically about Poser items in DS.
Here are the things you should check on the surfaces tab:
Specular Maps - They don't get applied by default by Poser MAT or MC6 presets when applied in DS.
Ambient Maps - Again, they don't get applied by default (although these are pretty rare)by Poser MAT or MC6 presets when applied in DS.
Specular Settings - Color, Glossiness and Strength all need to be adjusted. I tend to use "common sense" here. If something is primarily green, I use a near-white-green as the color. Glossiness controls the "size" or "sharpness" of the specular response. Higher values have smaller appearance. Strength controls the intensity of specular response. Think of specular strength like the "distance" from the light source. 100% would be practically touching the light, while 0% would be so far away the light doesn't even shine on it.
Ambient Settings - Often stuff comes in with 0,0,0 ambient at 100% value. Change the strength to zero unless it's supposed to "glow black". Typically, you only need ambient when you WANT a glow... like I use an ambient color of 255,255,255 and a strength of 100% on the candle flames to make sure they're nice and bright. CAVEAT: Some vendors use ambient colors to adjust the color of the surface.
Bump / Displacement - Remember, Poser uses a completely different methodology than DAZ Studio. You need to look at the map to understand it. If the map appears to be grayscale with a good balance of black and white highlights, the map is probably omnidirectional. If the map is mostly black with white highlights, it's unidirectional. For omnidirectional maps, you'll need to set both the minimum and maximum bump/displacement values. Remember these are measured in centimeters. Often a value of 1.00 is too much if the strength is set to 100%. For unidirectional maps, flatten the minimum value to 0, and only focus on the maximum value.
Default Shader Lighting Model - As I said earlier, everything comes in as plastic when you apply a Poser MAT or MC6 preset. You will want to make good use of the Skin, Metallic and Matte presets as well. Note that the Skin preset tends to add a tinge of pink to the surface. Counter-act this (if desired) by shifting the diffuse color towards blue.
Hope that helps.
adamr001, I will apply all what you said on my next pass! Thanks man, that really makes me feel good know I can get it looking that good as you have there. Still very new to Daz. I may come back to you on how to understand collisions as on this complex character, I have to do two or three renders depending on the fixes I need to make, trouser spill into the leg armor, shoulder armor pops through cloak etc.
Please see below the redone renders before I read and apply your recommendations.
I will check and bear this in mind in future. I have only been using Daz for about 9 months but this info will inform my decisions from now on.
Ok so here is how got on after Richard Haseltine's suggestion of just parenting the breastplate which I also applied to the belt as that was also a mess and I am very happy with the results as her chest was bothering me for ages.
Below is the first pass. below that the final figure after multiple passes (while hiding somethings to avoid collissions) and on the bottom is the intended use which is still a work in progress.
Hey that's much better! Nicely done.
Thanks man!
I will refer back to your post when I do another render of the character.
You don't have to go into it now but do you think it's possible to fix things like trousers and leg armor and cloak in Daz or should i just keep doing the multiple renders?
Here is what it's all for:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/27570/
Absolutely fixable. You have a couple of routes available to you. You can go with smoothing or dforms. I prefer dforms. You can also manipulate the opacity section of the surfaces... So for instance, you might hide the portion of the trousers by setting the shin material to opacity 0%. That'll hide most of the problem, then you can put a dform on the pants, move it over to the knee area of each pantleg and shrink them so they are properly hidden.
Here's a good video on using DForms in DS4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoGqfV8E7Co
Coolness! I will have a go at that when I revisit this next week. Thanks again! :)