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So, as for why the massive set this time, well, I've been looking at a lot of stuff and going through my inventory. Not sure how to begin this without getting sidetracked by stuff that I am not going into, so here it is. My apologies if your figure was not included here, I don't have the budget of a small nation, I Have no interest in Iray-only stuff, and it is likely that some promos missed the mark so badly that I was completely unaware that this was your intended realm of nationalities of the product. Starting with Generation 6, there is...
Left is Des Zaniyah that I have some mixed feelings about the shape of the face, however, the mats are very well done, including good palm treatment for a mid-tone figure. Overall very nice to work with for G2F. Next over is FWSA Wachiwi (shape 1) in the black dress, another one that I'm not completely sold on the shape however the attempt is very very close,...
Closer than I think Fred and Sabby give themselves credit for. Oh, and again the mats are incredible. Next over, is FWSA Aiyana in what I think would have been a perfect outfit for her, if Autofit would let it.
I don't know if the extra bones in generation 7 and generation 8 makes it 'Impossible' to port stuff back to G2F (odd that you can go the other way with stuff), or if I am simply lacking funds and unaware of a conversion product that makes Autofit work that way. Some say that a fix, can be to put the G8F outfit on an invisible figure and posed the same as the older G2F figure, however that is a stupid amount of work to do if you think about it. Either you are Photoshopping all the spots that don't line up perfectly on both figures in every single render/frame after the fact, Or you found a shape dial on the newer figure that matches the older one, and and and... If you have purchased a Generation 8 shaped like FWSA Wachiwi (I want the Buy-now link to that), then why the hell does that figure not already have FWSA Wachiwi mats, making it pointless to be doing the duplicate pose on the duplicate shaped figures in the first place, lol. Sadly I tried, I have not found a shaping combo or gen8 figure like Wachiwi for generation 8, so it simply is a no-go. Oh, and rightmost in that render is Wachiwi (shape 2) in her outfit and stuff (I sort of like that one a tad more than shape1, sort of, as a preference). Why are none of the G2F figures smiling or being Happy, well, Gen6 lacks the ability to smile without looking psychotic or having the teeth and gums poke through the chin, lol. Thankfully Generation 7 addressed the Expression thing a tad, and Posing is marginally easier than on generation 6 with what I have for pose presets, especially the zero hand presets (or lack thereof).
Now, I may have a zero hand preset somewhere in the Content library that does not show up in that Posing tab, however, that would be just as tedious to get to as selecting the hand in the scene tab, selecting all child bones, then zeroing out all the rotations dials in the parameters tab for that hand. Its a few dozen clicks and a lot of scrolling just to do either. Maybe someday I'll find a product that shows up in the pose tab, for now, I don't have one for gen6 (and the only one I have for gen8 is partly broken). Ok, this is getting longer than I expected, G3F and G8F stuff I guess will be in later posts (some things get better, other things get more "interesting").
G3F, the birth of UDIM and new pose bones in the face for expressions that some pose dial sets ignore. Some notes in passing about working with generation 7 that I have experienced.
The three on the left in the AHOC cheerleader outfits are my sorry pathetic attempts at a Mayan, Inca, and I'm not sure what the one on the right is exactly. I will simply say that they are the way they are because I decided to avoid the implant look and they are in contrast to four others that are six feet tall if not taller. None of them would have been possible at all if it wasn't For Paloma in the "Steveism by Paul and Kyle" (Sorry, I think Gamers Nexus discontinued the shirt, oops) dress...
FWSA Paloma is a rather light toned figure, so the palms of the hands are only ok up to a point that I may have gone beyond with my 3 experimentations on the left. P3D Dewi in the Wachiwi outfit, (sies in dismay), this is a figure that is incredibly cute as is, the mats are near perfect aside from the normal G3F/G8F glued together at the waist mesh oddities (I'll get to that), and the shape almost looks a bit more Mediterranean than 'indigenous'. Words, ugh. One word is often confused with a single political-nation, and the other is a tad more Pacific Islanders rather than the continents to the east of.
So yeah, possibly a tad more Mediterranean in shape than 'indigenous'.
, in any case. OK, first up, that gen6 dress on gen7 could work using the hidden figure trick (with the dress on Olympia 6 or "Cassia for Olympia"), or by making a new outfit from scratch (JCMs and all) with the mesh of the Gen6 one, I chose to just toss it on to show what happens to JCMs and stuff.
I should not have googled that,
The ruffles in front of the armpits, on the back of the armpits, and the center parts of the skirt of the dress kind of get mangled with no gradients at all to smooth things out (new JCMs need to be made after autofit, essentially making a new outfit in the process).
To the right of Dewi is Wachiwi again (with FW Eve ears, forgot about that, lol), and then my incomplete attempt of kit-bash-dialing Dewi into more of a Wachiwi shape. As you can see, I failed and gave up, lol. I gave up while working on the nose I think (that was many cups of coffee ago).
This generation had some 'improvements' that I'm not too sure are 'improvements' in the end. One being the heavy use of the AoA subsurface scatter shader in combination with "HD" morphs that is slower than a glacier to compute subsurface scatter. Products that may or may not have 3DL mats and you have to guess if the maps will be useable at all if 3DL is not listed at the store (and that has a part 2, 3, and 4. some other time.). And a host of projection morph shape fit difficulties that haven't been resolved on many things, I've just noticed it less often on newer stuff. Yep, fun times. Gen 8...
Gen8, welcome to the world of shades of gray and green mats, as we somehow along the way went from shades of color to gray, lol. Not all is lost, it's just very stark at best in this cold harsh wilderness of light and dark only maps that do not warm up to mid-tones all that well without washed out or glowing palms. Some have managed to do better than others, however, the selection of mid-tone maps is pathetic at best, especially if it needs a red tint.
AS Sewa left, FWSA Khloe middle, and Des Brisen right. All are very nice and I have fussed with using those mats with kit-bashed dials the past few months with varying degrees of not knowing what I'm doing with shaping dials, lol. As for my meager simple requirements of easy to set up 3delight mats, ears that are not baked into the head shape preventing them from breaking hair, and having all the maps including "critical equipment", the three of them are exactly what I like. I will admit, I'm not sure if Sewa is pushing the 'light' skin maps to the limit of having the palms to dark, I just don't know. Sweet fingernail patrons by the way Silver. Khol and Brisen are ok being a tad paler. If only the praises could continue with gen8 as we leave warmer latitudes in the past for colder climates and shades of gray, and glowing...
This project Just reminded me exactly why I tossed Alaska in the trash bin and forgot about her. It looks like there is a darker set of diffuse maps (labeled TR) in the folder for her that the presets do not load. It just wasn't worth my time swapping out all the maps manually for the darker ones, as not 'All' of the maps are there. That isn't a giant maxi pad, it is missing maps that simply do not exist for her. As happy as I have seen some locals, I don't think I have ever seen them 'glow' quite like that, lol. It's kind of sad, as I remember the PA making really good stuff (Zo, Autumn, and Madeline to name a few), this was probably a one-off brainfart of a mistake with the presets. Giving the darker mat a try in the diffuse channel with this revisit of her, here is the results (cringe).
Left to right, is Alaska with TR mats in the diffuse channel instead of the stock not so native American maps (that was a mistake after seeing the render), then Nuka with her Iray only mats that don’t work in anything other than Iray (I tried to fix it for over a week months ago, and failed), then the only gen8 that is good, Uki. About the only debatable thing with Uki is the shade of the palms. Given the state of available maps to work with, pale ghost or really dark, I still, think Hinkypunk did an incredible job with the character, even so much as to have her actually looking like several B&W photos from the 1900s.
Yeah, damn close. I could nitpick Uki and Wachiwi to the ends of spacetime and back, the truth is they are a hell of a lot closer than anything else I've seen so far. As for Alaska, Nuka, and a few others not shown, the problems run deeper than just a shader setting. As longwinded as this is getting, I'll need to show photoshop brightness curves and renders to show just why it is near impossible to take a set of maps that are pale ghost or really dark and turn them into a mid-tone figure without breaking finer details or having palms of hands that just don't look normal. I have purchased a pale ghost PA resource kit (that has a no give away clause for understandable reasons), and I'm sure I also purchased an African skin set as well, just to try some shader stuff with. That will be another post, as there is a lot to them sets that make them near useless to mear mortals, lol. I really do respect TwiztedMetal and Marcius for all they do and can't really hold their feet to the fire over not having good mid-tone maps to work with. On to the last thing, is genesis glued together at the waist, or did some re-meshing tool mess up the lines around the waist.
I keep seeing gen7 and gen8 figures with what almost looks like a double chin tummy that gradually gets wider as normal from the groin up, then suddenly is narrower again with a bit of what looks like a repeat of the texture map going up the front of the figure. At the point, the lines jump back closer together, the mesh on geniuses lacks the mesh lines going the way I would need them to in order to fix that with a simple base mesh morph. I had tried to make a set of morphs to address that on gen7, and I found it near impossible to do without completely redoing where the line is on either end of the vertical boundary (the crease over the length of one polygon jumps to the side three mesh lines). It is probably easier to fix with 'Secret' PA tools with an HD morph, with all the faceplant-time impacts that HD has with any shader in use on the figure (I really don't want any more face-plant time HD morphs, to be honest). Mere mortals will simply have to do with the double chin looking tummy until someone at daz decides to fix Genesis's base mesh. I tried to make this short, I give up, lol.
As for the mid-tone thing, there may be a way, it's going to be a lot of work, and mere mortals will be ripping out their hair trying to keep up after spending a lot of money for the PA resorces to 'Almost' do it. All I can do is show you the settings I used in gimp to blend the maps, and I don't have all the stuff to make a complete shader set, as the 'PA resorces' don't include everything for the surface tab (you need to make your own spec/bump/SSS/velvet/etc maps, somehow
).
ugh, after spending a day fussing with stuff and making screen caps of the settings, I just noticed that I'm fussing with gen7 maps instead of gen8 ones. So my results may not be as good as I was hoping for, none the less I do have G3F to show the results on if they look really bad on G8F. I'm also not expecting Pro quality from this as I have never tried making the spec and SSS maps from a Photo ref Diffuse map. I'm not really worried about the bump and spec anyway, as it's the colors I'm interested in here. Before getting too far, finding a way to save a templet/script of what was done to the map in whatever Photo editor you are using, so it can be duplicated for all the others are going to be critical, or you will end up with mismatching seams at the edges of the surface zones.
Immediately after I loaded the arms up to mix them and set one to 75%, there was a green tint to the forearms.
The best way to fix that I think, is to use the curve thing, so you can adjust the color of only bright, mid, or dark areas of the map. Using extra dots on the zero-line to prevent the one dot from messing up the other areas.
I spent over a day, just fussing with them red/green/blue curves with the two maps, just to get this far.
Then as I was duplicating the steps to create the other 4 maps, I noticed this was a gen7 map set. I remember something about some settings being interchangeable between gen7 and gen8, I'm not too sure if map boundaries and zone edges will be close enough for gen7 maps, yet... 3 color tint revisions later.
I guess Base Female gen7 maps do work on gen8, and I'm not totally sold on the color and shade just yet. Eyes, Mouth, Lashes, and bump maps borrowed from (Fred Winkler Art, Hinkypunk, Sabby) Myrina for Gia 8 (random pick), no spec maps yet, and the above-made maps in the Diffuse and SSS channels. Spec maps (shrugs), I'll need to try some edge detection ideas or something, TBD. As for Bump/normal maps, I think there was something somewhere for extracting them from 'Photos' that could possibly in theory work maybe for this, tho I'm sure PA's have better methods in their toolboxes to make bump/normal maps.
("Fusion Candle" planet moving thrusters, SFIA Brute Force Meme)
If one product can't do it, throw more money and time at it. As for the running tally of what I have into this so far, it's steep. Nucka is about 19usd, Myrina (for at least the bump maps) is also about 19usd, and the two Skinvent Details Merchant Resource kits are about 30usd each.
That sums up to about, countless months of ripping out my hair trying to make it work, and 98usd in products.
All that, for something that there is just no way, I can just share a link to an easy to use finished product, if someone asks where they can buy her.
No amount of begging me for the maps can change what is not within my power to decide regarding sharing what I just created. Granted I may have an unfair advantage of being able to just hold my hand up to my monitor for a sanity check of the maps, I really doubt that alone prevents other PAs from making similar skin-tones.
ok, the last one for today. decided to temper the green a tad on the lighter mat and darken it, so I could more easily work with the redder spots on the darker maps. The left curve is on the light maps, the right curve is on the darker maps, and at 50% mix.
a tad less red, and I'm still not totally sure on the overall skin-tone. it is what it is I guess, these are so close to the other that there near similar on TN panels, so it's probably nitpicking at this point, lol.
(edit)
Why I think using the dark map to color and tint the light map is a better method than just tinting a light map only, has to do with not making the palms of the hands and feet overly dark or excessively pigmented (palms tend to not have as much 'Melanin' as other areas of the body). Something my example definitely needs some work on after looking at this post a day later, however for an example of the process, I feel it is quite good.
That and I think some may have lost track of where visible light is on the 'absorption' curves. And I know full well how difficult the nature of sRGB photo editing tools can be with setting a curve that matches wavelength nm spectrum curves. red orange yellow and purple good, blue and green bad, oh, and yellow can only be in sRGB if green is added to red, but green is bad, lol.
and why are some sets putting the topcoat/diffuse at under 10% strength and subsurface scatter (deep flesh) at 125% strength, when with the exception of blue, skin and Melanin has a far greater impact on skin color 
. And don't forget, Photo reference maps, by the very nature of being a photo of a living person, already has subsurface scatter baked into it, adding more only makes translucent wax figurines.
Thinking about all of this with my first cup of coffee. I recall there being some change in how light or surfaces were tinted with Iray. I don't think that would have any bearing in how stuff looks in 3delight, as the change was in Iray, not the 3delight interface. And beside me getting better with lighting and surface tab settings, I have not noticed any abrupt change in the color of stuff in renders. I am curious if there is something about how Iray works, that requires maps that are just utter garbage for anything other than Iray. Ugh, day old coffee isn't cutting it, lol. I need to make a fresh pot of coffee, and try some renders, if My graphics card has enough memory for Iray
.
Coffee, I shall return with renders or screencaps of error messages, lol.
Not sure why you wouldn't try aweSurface...it's free if you don't want to get the commercial kit. Renders roughly 4 times faster than IRay on CPU with just about the same level of realism, just saying
And you don't need to dumb down your scenes to try to fit them onto a GPU. And you can use motion blur. And you can have microdisplacement with SubD level 1. And the list goes on
many hours later. ye is completely correct Sven (including the graphics memory thing, I had to give up my facepalm choir, lol), I completely forgot about the aweShader when I was fumbling around looking for stuff. I should go find the free one to see what settings and values can be saved with a DUF Material Preset for sharing with others, just so their not forced to get the pro version on top of whatever product is needed for the maps to use the Material Preset. I did read through the awe PDF over a month ago, then life happened. Unlike some that tend to complain for the sake of complaining, I am actually looking for more than just a shader, and I do put my money where my mouth is.
That's kind of why the Isaac Arthur meems are a bit funny in regard to this, I've spent far more effort and resources trying to get something post-gen6, than most would consider reasonable. To sum up the former triple-post, gen6 has some pose and expression limitations that have been addressed post gen6, and newer outfits and stuff tend to not work on gen6 all that well. It would be better to migrate the gen6 figure to something newer, However, it is not my product to do that with, nor do I have the knowledge and tools to do that and have it work well. That is also well past the precipice of violating many EUA/TOS things. On a less dark thought side, I also need to revisit the LaMH thing, as I think my difficulties with that may have been win10 mouse-pointer sub-code based rather than a fluke bad scene save. I have since loaded up the individual components and they appear to work fine, so I'm not sure why that particular scene went awry. That would be a good project to give the aweShader a good looking at (and maybe on some cool Klingon ships that are floating around here as well).
Today's test. Not all of the outfits had the colors I was looking for, and I had used the AElflaeds(I give up on spelling that) shader on them in the former scenes. So I used the only other shader set that works in Iray that I knew where it was due to it being most reascent in my lack of memory. I managed to somehow miss some surface zones on the outfits in the process, oops. Ok, Wachiwi (gen6) far right is on her no-SSS 3DL shaders, the rest have their Iray mat presets as is from the product (excluding some of the older hair styles that don't have Iray mats).
I guess Alaska (left) could be ok in Iray if you keep the lights low, Nuka is at least a hint reddish rather than that cold formaldehyde color, and Uki looks ok. I'm not exactly sold on the translucent wax candle appearance of a few of the figures.
yeah, I really don't know what to make of the wax look, biological organic looking it absolutely is not.
This may be making me over sensitive to the presence of subsurface like how lens flares have been used to death in film and TV to the point I start to complain if I see it at all when it shouldn't be noticeable, lol.
At least Wachiwi does not look like a wax candle, lol. Something positive, lol. I will guess that is why so many figures have the low/mid/high subsurface setting things, however, I doubt that will fix the lack of 'indigenous' color on some of the figures. I'm not sure aweShader can help some things, tho at this point I would love to give it a try, Something somewhere is completely wrong with this whole Iray thing, where people don't look like people (outside of the two extremes of pale or dark presets).
Breadcrumbs, for self. (awe commercial shader thread)
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/280441/awe-shading-kit-for-daz-studio-and-3delight-commercial/p2
(edit) ok, I may have missed something skimming through that thread, I was under the impression the awe shader was something that I set stuff up in the surface tab, and just render as normal in DS. That thread has gone way out of my league with chats about scripted/RIB exports to essentially a 3delight render-farm outside of DS.
ok, I'm going to click a few things in DS, and either awe will work in DS, or it is not a shader I can use at my 'novice' level in 3D land.
(edit) sorry, I fell asleep on the KB while looking into that. And there is a very important addition/edit I made to the costume skin map post further back (up a few posts, with the color spectrum graph), if you are genuinely honest about doing PBR (I just want it to look good and not take bloody ages to render).
Well, this past two weeks have been busy, with lots of distractions into rathole or grief and ripping out my hair. Not all was bad, and I guess there is an underlying theme to this post that I'm not sure is even allowed by the TOS on this forum, however, it is important and needs to be said. So I will try to at least 'describe' what I know I can't show examples of.
First off, I discovered a few figures that I didn't have to do renders of in the former posts, one has promise, and the other I simply overlooked for a simple reason. In all, I am afraid I would need to make new maps from scratch to make some things work, and that is a lot of grief that is not something I would want to associate with the AWE shader, as no shader can fix bad or missing maps. Oh, and I also ran into a minor mistake that also would only make AWE look bad if I hadn't attempted to address it before getting into the AWE conversion. First, let's get the NA out of the way.
I was not aware of the intended nationality after my mind was mostly set and oblivious to the other hints on the product page after seeing the cover promo image in the store...
(blame Grammarly, I'm done arguing the spelling of that species name with the spellcheck) "Krasnaya Belka" was lots of fun to play with (yes, three products for this one. The base Rodent, the red 'square' morph, and the pose dials pack.).
Uh, well, that out of the way, the tattoo designs look cool for tribal stuff, it's just a bit of a letdown that a particular set of maps is missing from the set from the looks of what's included. The 3delight presets is a major bonus, and from a cartoonized impression of, the shape is not as bad as some others I've seen floating around. If she had the missing set of maps, I would be willing to at least get that for someone else that I suspect has Iray-only inverted-color-space maps.
I think when this product came out, I clicked the link, scrolled to the bottom of the page, didn't see 3DL listed, and closed the tab and never looked back. After taking a second look, this time taking time to look at the promos and read the description, I think QX did a fantastic job (if for Iray only). I'm not sure I want to pay full figure price for only a set of shaping dials (that look perfect by the way), however, this is just as tempting as the former figure's tattoo maps. I have been burnt more than enough times now, by getting something I think will be ok if I just drop the maps into (anything else) shader, only to discover that somehow red was transplanted to Cyan and blue became magenta and green is the dominant hue somehow, resulting in maps that are utterly useless outside of Iray. Depending on how much grief I want to put myself through, I may just get the both of them on the 3rd, if only to verify some suspicions and at least throw some coffee/tea funds the PA's direction for the effort of trying. If nothing else, it will be better than trying to get G8F outfits working on generation6 figures.
Ah, yeah, that went well, lol. As for why AWE didn't happen yet, let's just say I ran into a mistake, it wasn't something that rendered the product broken or unusable, it was just a mistake. And I also added to the mistake as well looking at my former experiments with the figure. I discovered when I looked for the product page, that I had the wrong mats on the figure (wrong color tinting and strength values in the surface tab). I think what happened was I tossed a simple shader for posing and setting up the scene and simply forgot to apply her proper shaders back then, and when I attempted to correct that mistake I discover her shaders/mats, didn't exactly look like the promos.
After some simple adjustments, I think I got it closer to the promos.
so, left is the CTRL+click (Ignore maps) settings, the middle is my mistake of using someone else's settings on her maps (she still looks good there), and right is the adjusted shader settings. The figure is Niesha for G8F by AS. Dress is Spring fun outfit, with Amazing Morphing Pumps.
This was one of two Elves I had randomly selected to try the AWE shader with, and after addressing that one simple 'mistake' I was sidetracked by life and other things. This is getting long-winded in the Grammarly window, so I'll end there. Part 2 will be pending, as I need to locate some maps (All of the maps, not just a basic incomplete set) that does not have pitch-midnight on a "Particular area of the chest" resulting in no velvet/gloss there at all, for a particular project I ended up trying. Oh, the rodent red square
I just need to figure out how to make Windows10 stop randomly selecting everything in the scene tab when clicking triangles to expand trees, or highlight half the desktop when it decides to spontaneously move the pointer to random locations on the screen when I left-click something.
I don't dislike Iray, I just foresee potential difficulties with Iray-only products someday (speculation warning). Seeing as AMD has not had a history of strong graphics products in the reascent past, and they have been losing development talent, does not bode well to shall I say, strong optimism about their future products being viable for high-performance 3D rendering, they are still an affordable option. Also, Nvidia and AMD have been losing GPU design talent to a new potential player in the GPU market that has been very vocal about making GPUs, Intel. That makes at least two players competing with Nvidia for market share, and it's a safe bet Nvidia will be the only vendor with Iray support. That combined with a simple fact that only the 32GB Tesla V100 from Nvidia, can load up the Atlantis Cityship model (for example) and render it in Iray, does NOT give Iray, a strong viability in many CGI houses outside of places with a render farm budget larger than most modest sized nations GDPs. Unless Nvidia lets the 8GB+ AMD cards and whatever Intel's 'Xe' will be, have Iray compatible rendering, I just don't see it as a "Safe bet" to base many products on that you don't want in the trash bin and useless, should anything ever happen to Iray in the future. I'm not saying that Iray will disappear tomorrow, just that you really are limiting yourself by only offering products for that render engine exclusively that doesn't work in anything else.
I still need to finish part 2 of the above, I have simply allowed myself to be distracted by silly things like "Plank Energy", and a fella that has been going through and replacing his Text-To-Speach ship history vids with human voice ones. I can totally appreciate the woes of "And then things got worse" myself, so I know that can't be just a single nationality thing, lol. So, why the rushed post, well, I looked at the clock on this PC and realized I had dragged my feet for over a week now on part 2, and my brother brought something to my attention that had me a tad interested and worried at the same time. Well over a year ago I had gotten an OdroidXU4 for making a mini HTPC/Juke-box out of, for playing Youtube vids and listening to music on. The "GN R7 build" has sort of stolen it's 1080p TN-crap, however, that OdroidXU4 is still going and I still use it for listening to music on while working on 3D stuff. I don't even know how many years it's been running 24/7 after getting it's cooler to be happily doing its thing on the desk. There is a new player in town, and sort of not.
Just so you know the limits. 32bit Cortex-A57 with 4GB of memory, I have seen this claim before launch many times, then the 4GB model never happened, because marketing was slapped in the face with 32bit limitations and dragged kicking and screaming to reality. IRQ/DMA/GPU-Frame-Buffer/etc eats up memory allocations from the top 4GB address down (on 32bit systems), so even if they added the 4GB memory chips the OS will never see all of it (between 3 to 3.5 GB maybe, depending how much memory is in the GPU). So 4GB on something like a cute 32bit OdroidXU4 will never happen as the chips will be wasted, and cost matters on these things. Speaking of, you get What for that hundred bucks? just the PCB? no PSU, no case to put it in, no microSD for the OS? Speaking of OS, you will be stuck with whatever OS (and flavor of) Nvidia wants you to have cuz of the IO/chipset controller and drivers for that IO section, assuming you can even get "NVIDIA JetPack SDK". You're better off saving 40 bucks and getting the OdroidXU4, and having funds to spare for a PSU/sd-boot-card/case/etc, or the Raspberry if you want a weekend tinker electronic project board.
To start, If you are working for a major corporation looking for a 'Maxwell' SM/CUDA powered SBC development kit to make and design products to sell that are powered by the Cortex-A57 JetsonNano, then go ahead and talk to Nvidia and your management, the rest of this is not for you. You already know what your getting into and have the weight of a major corporation behind you to force Nvidia's help desk to head to your needs. If like me you are interested in a micro-PC that is easy to work with for doing homemade projects or to use as a Jukebox-PC, then let's talk and consider this hundred dollar Dev kit (it's not an end product, it's a limited quantity/time development kit). I have looked at many Single-Board-Computers over the years before getting a Raspberry Pi2 and then an OdroidXU4. The Raspberry is far easier to work with for robotic/costume add-on PIO controlled stuff with a wonderful helpful community. The Odroid, however, is a hell of a lot better for basic network IO and CPU power (provided a good cooler) if you don't intend to use the PIO pins for electronic projects. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. So what's new, this (announcer screaming) "Four Giga-Bytes!" (intensifying strobing lights) Nvidia JetsonNano thing.
Just like the 4GB "Cubox-i 4x4" that never was, Yep
AndroidAuthority does have more info than Nvidia's product page, and some notes that differ from what Nvidia lists.
"That should mean it should be at least twice as fast a the Raspberry Pi" 
rrrr, first gen Pi1 900MHz Arm A7 maybe, the Pi2 and Pi3 have the same 4-core ARM CPU at 1.2GHz (Pi2) and then 1.4GHz (Pi3) as the JetsonNano. So maybe not quite twice as fast. 
A57/A53 (Raspberry Pi2&3 and JetsonNano) is only 4 cores at about 1.4GHz up to 1.5GHz max, vs the 32bit A15 (OdroidXU4) is 8 cores up to 2GHz, and I have no clue if all the IO on JetsonNano is via a single USB2.0 FrontsideBus trace Like Raspberry Pi1 Pi2 and Pi3, or not as is the case with the OdroidXU4 with "Dedicated Links". The FSB is the Achilles heel of the Raspberry's, not the CPU core. If you need them Maxwell SM units and you have a software development team to make the needed plugins to let it work with your apps, I guess the JetsonNano may do, Maxwell is not Pascal or Turing, it's a three-generation-old Watt-hog GPU at this point 
. Raspberry and Odroid are stuck in CPU only graphics mostly with a locked-down Cellphone GPU so eh, 6 half dozen the other. As tempted as I am by the hundred dollars DevKit, I'll pass. I am not a major corporation, don't have a software dev team to make things work, and lack time in my life for another project.
P.S. before I had purchased the Odroid XU4, I had read about this mythical 4GB Cubox-i thing. There are lots of sites that talk about the Cubox-i 4x4 with 4GB, however the instant you whip out the cash and ask where is the buy now button, they timidly back off and want to sell you a 2GB variant that is slower clocking than what Odroid is offering.
You will notice something missing on that order page, it's the 4GB Cubox that so many sites talk about, it's not real, and for understandable reasons mentioned above. So I went with the 2GB 2GHz Odroid instead of the 1GHz 2GB Cubox, it was a simple decision that I do not regret.
Speaking of projects, this past week I spent a few days fussing with skin map options, scraped the idea, started over, and didn't get anything close to finished, yet, lol. I have a fresh cup of coffee, and intend to get something together shortly, including something for the cool infinity symbol Fisty made.
Ok, been dragging my feet for too long on this, and I still don't know what to make of the results of all the testing. I do feel that it is a rathole that could result with me running tests till the end of time without ever actually fixing the original difficulty I have had with a set of mixed maps. So I'll post what I have, and move on to one of the other, "Five!", projects in the works. So let's start out with some basic experiments with a toroid split into two surface zones, and then split in half as two separate objects with the mesh in exactly the same place as it was when it was a single object.
And to not leave any rock not flipped over, the lower row of toroids is Sub-D'ed and the upper row is base mesh. Left to right is single object single surface, the middle is single object two surface zones and right are two separate objects.
And the results are very interesting, to say the least. The result on the far right is what I often see when gen maps are not exactly the same shade as the torso map at the zone boundary.
However, the genitalia prosthetic is not two separate objects entirely and applying the same exact 128-gray to G8F and the genitalia reveals that some voodoo is going on to make them appear to be the same mesh to the various surface curvature smoothing things.
So I have no clue what is going on with the maps. That out of the way, on to the not so normal program of fumbling onto interesting stuff that some times works out, some times. I had stumbled across a promo for FWSA Meifen that sort of reminded me of FW Eve for some odd reason, so I set out to kitbash a G8F version of Eve.
Due to a few reasons, I felt that making a new set of maps would be easier than working with what Meifen came with and set out to work on that by starting with a simple 50/50 mix of maps. The eyes were a bit confusing to work with until I realized I could combine them into a single map for the different parts of the eye.
I then got to the genitalia map, and that's when things started to unravel a tad. at some angles, it looked ok at others the map needed to be a tad brighter.
At this point, I had already started fussing with ear dials to find something close to what Eve had. I made the mistake of not having anything of Eve actually in front of me till that point and noticed just how much Meifen does not look like eve. Having waited till this point to bring up Eve in the test chamber as a reference as I start looking for shaping dials to kitbash, was, ... a mistake.
Welp, I never sorted out the gen map issue, and Now I have no clue who it was that Meifen reminded me of as it clearly was not Eve, lol. Left to right is FW Eve, then Fwsa-Zdg Meifen kit-bash (WIP), G3F1W, then a shape-dial mix of Taia and Samira with Taia mats. Fwsa Meifen definitely has features I like, she just isn't what I first had in mind and will take this another direction in time. As mentioned I have 5 other projects in various stages of getting done, so dwelling on genitalia maps that some have said are a pain to make, is not something I want to waste the rest of eternity fusing with. Maybe if I had an arm, leg, and first born child to spare each month to rent a nice 3D image editor like blacksmith3d or "Substance Painter" my results may have been different, for now, I'll just work on other things on my lists and be happy Meifen isn't a complete loss. (oh, look, cute Elf)
Now, there is a remote possibility that a small difference like sRGB of 64 vs sRGB of 63 (out of 8bit "0 to 255") on one of the two maps, a difference of a single bit difference in value that would be undetectable in renders after adding in gloss, velvet, subsurface etc, is somehow hypothetically in theory (did I add enough conditionals in that?) in some obscure mathematical realm of non-Asymptotically-flat spacetime, is exaggerated to larger differences in value when brightened into the mid-tone values, somehow, maybe. (confused a tad, don't worry, I flunked Quantum maths myself, lol) I can't rule it out, as one map is 1k and the other is 4k, so simply resizing one map may also add variations, maybe. I hope that explains why I feel this is a rathole that I do not have the time for, and TOS will not let me just post a direct image of what is actually going on, so I have to dance around it and describe what it is not, lol. I did chat briefly with a few PA's about this, and I am in agreement that I should be doing this in a 3D editor (blacksmith3d or "Substance Painter") instead of a 2D image editor (GIMP, etc), that at the least would make life a tad easier, even tho Gen maps are still a pain to get to match up. Oh, and I'm guilty of not having looked at the store page to see if there has been an update to the map sets, since a few years ago when I first purchased them. There may or may not be a few updates to them.
Ugh, long day fussing with remaking something from scratch, for a fun render that I didn't expect to need ready so soon, lol. (head-desk) ugh, not yet, I have some notes about stuff to post first. Overall the dress is nice and various'difficulties' are rooted in forcing it to do something D-force isn't all that good at (like draping over pointy ears), lol.
A cup of coffee and some sleep later I noticed I had the sun in the wrong spot for the skydome to match the closer stuff (ships), lol. All better now. At least I'm not getting confused with what franchise is what, lol.
When that dress dropped in the store, I was in the middle of 5 other projects, and thus two more things dropped in my lap, lol.
It is possible to get hair distent strays to behave, it is just a PITA with any method I'm aware of. D-former origami, weight map brushing each time you use each hairstyle, or simply exporting the thing to move the mesh and make a fit-morph for each hairstyle, it just sucks any way you look at it.
D-formers can do it, but you'll need to do that each time you use any hairstyle for each figure that has a hat with hair. The idea of not sucking in the skullcap and moving more distant strands more than ones closer to the scalp is very tricky at best, and because a D-former field is not a half circle, has problematic areas that you can only hide with camera angles and choosing where it sucks stuff into the head. In the past I would simply just use one D-former for each strand, however, that would easily result with a few dozen to maybe a hundred D-formers depending on how bad the hair is. It's not impossible, it's just a lot of work, for a single use on a single item, just like using the Weight map brush (somehow) to do the same thing.
My problem with using the weight map brush, comes from my experience when rigging bones. The thing your clicking is the dots, However, the brush will only activate to let you click dots, if you're hovering it over a face on a mesh. You're bound to run into dots that you just can't get the brush to work on, because it's on the edge of a mesh or out in the far edge of space without a mesh-face to easily hover the brush over next to that dot, lol. Making Hexagon an easier option for making a Hat fit morph, lol.
At least with Hexagon, you can select the mesh and move it exactly how you need it to fit a particular hat. And as with all the former steps, you can save the resulting shaping dial, one way or another, to have that morph available any time you have a hat on that individual hair item. This is getting long-winded, and I haven't gotten to the sleeve that has its own quirks that I've noticed with so many other outfits and stuff. lol. Oh, and saving a morph, is another book as well.
I never bothered to look at the bones on the dress as it followed the pose of the figure well enough for draping. Fisty did add a bone for moving the sleeve around to get it out of the arm cover/arm. This in itself can be a book on its own given the multitude of options Fisty suggested in the other thread on the dress, I am simply going to note one oddity. I still need to 'rotate' that bone a tad for the arm to be perfect, however, like so many other wearables, the bone rotates causes the rest of the sleeve to move in odd ways. I decided to translate it to avoid the lower part of the sleeve going into the skirt of the dress, this time. With other things, the transits cause the item to do loop-d-loops, it's weird how DS does that at times, lol. At least fisty put the bones there to let you adjust it, just keep in mind the behavior of the bone is at the whim of DS after draping the sleeve (check all of the sleeves after adjusting, before moving on, lol).
Oh, and this is just half of the two prrojects that dropped in my lap, lol.
a) Allegorithmic _still_ have a rent-to-own or one-time payment to get a perpetual licence. So they aren't like "everyone else" - yet.
b) As much as I have historically loved Allegorithmic on the whole (still have MapZone!) and Substance Painter in particular, it's not yet 100% tuned for DAZ figures: it does not paint across UV tiles. UDIM support has been in the works - for a good while already...
Blacksmith was originally created for DAZ/Poser figures, but - but Substance Painter pwns it in many ways actually. At least it's true for those Blacksmith versions that I have. Maybe the 7+ versions have other improvements outside that strip hair tool, no idea.
Cool info I didn't know, the people I chatted with, use the apps, I can't afford the compound monthly fees. yeah, some of that was sarcastic funny. I am aware that one of them applications is made by someone that is not out to make it impossible for you to earn a living. It is also obvious to me that many of the applications for 3D artists are a WIP, even stuff that is no longer maintained, case and point.
On the topic of texture maps stuff, I had seen something on the Gamers Nexus Discord this morning that I find deeply disturbing. Eons ago I had been asked to use a Grain-merge in GIMP on a set of tiled texture maps to make the tiles not so obvious with a Gaussian noise overlay, because grain-merge had been removed or broken in the latest version of PhotoShop at the time. I can totally understand needing to keep older versions of software around for functions that your job requires you to use to earn a living. With the latest spin of PhotoShop shenanigans, that may be a questionable thing to do.
I'm not sure if removing someone's ability to earn a living is the intent, however, the news about Adobe is deeply disturbing to me.
P.S. for that move in the wrong direction glitch in Hexagon, the workaround is kind of simple. Make sure the side your highlighting to move, has the arrows pointing away from the green symmetry thing, and the highlighted mesh should move in the direction you're moving the XYZ arrow thing.
"You never finish a mix; you just hand it in", as sound engineers say.
note to self, that nvidia chat about Workstations vs Mac vs Gaming PC...
Sorry for the delay, there has just been so much that I haven't had a chance to finish one thought for a post before other stuff called for my attention. Originally I was thinking of wanting to talk about inferred heat radiators on ships vs the energy levels needed to travel at interstellar speeds, and then Computex2019 and E3 distracted me. I'll poke a little fun at Teamgroup as I do like one of there products that they used to make, just not the new JJ-RGB-LensFlare stuff. lol.
As for new stuff, I am really impressed with the preliminary hypothetical numbers AMD provided for zen2, and if I had the money, I would be on the phone saying is that dual socket 128 core EPYC2 here already, lol. As for AM4 motherboards, I am less than impressed with some design choices. They 'finally' decided to go with a proper VRM for AM4 after two generations of lackluster boards, however, that chipset cooler is a joke at best in my opinion.
At least the ASUS cross-hero-godlike-MSRP board had a VRM so efficient, it really didn't need a heatsink for the 2700X CPU. It was the lower end boards with fewer phases and more watt density per phase that needed the coolers, but that would cost money, so they got nothing and the Cross Hero got the 40mm fan bolt-on kit meme. lol. Fast forward to today, and things haven't changed, just the location of the "fan on a finless lump of metal" meme, lol.
A lot of people think I'm not using my head, or am ignorant when it comes to motherboard makers 'wanting' to use a fan. I honestly just think it was poor decisions in the marketing department. I think they had a 'look' they wanted and were unwilling to use a proper heatsink even if it meant a fan would be required to maintain there desired 'look'.
I think some of the new coolers resemble a WW2 air raid siren more than a proper squirrel cage fan cooler, others resemble that cross-hero 40mm fan-kit meme, with a fan, bolted to a flat bit of metal with a couple of speed bumps. I have however at least seen one Gigabyte solution that looks promising, it has cooling fins, What a novel idea. If only the 'Pro' was as 'Pro' looking in the cooling department.
Ignoring that there are 30 and 20 watt single slot AGP cards that get by with no fan, There are a few unknowns at this time. We do not know exactly how much power the x570 chipset chip consumes (and thus dissipates as heat), and we do not know just how bad the fab process is with it's supposed TJmax concerns. There are rumors that the chip may be from 11 to 15 watts under some circumstances, that many single-SteamLibrary-drive gamers may never experience, unless you also have many more drives for your 3D content libraries (And even that is debatable according to some, PCIe 4.0 M.2 RAID vs SATA RAID). however, that is still less thermal power than many older graphics cards with no fan, that have heatsinks smaller than the volume taken up by the motherboard chipset fashion accessories. There is also the unknown of what the chipset max operating temperature really is, the fab process may be so much of a failure that it can not survive temperatures above 70c (158F), a TJmax I have not seen since the K6-2 era for other chips. And in that case, without a lot of cooling fins for maximum surface area, the tiny fan has no hope of keeping the chip cool enough to not die inside most Tempered Glass computer cases with seriously lacking airflow.
I am merely looking at these x570 motherboards and asking a simple question regarding solid design principles. Why are they adding a potential point of failure, the fans, without exhausting the ability to cram as much surface area into the heatsink as possible first? the ATI7000 is a 23-watt chip, and its no-fan heatsink is only 10x40x40mm in size, a fraction of the 15x60x80mm area motherboard makers have to work with. I am NOT impressed. so long as decisions like this continue, I can not justify getting an x570 board with such a poor cooler design. I would rather get an X470 board and do without PCIe 4.0 for future devices than fund such wretched marketing decisions. I am not interested in a product with a fan unless the thing its cooling has a significant amount of effective cooling fins, to at least give the fan an easier time cooling the chip. It doesn't matter if you have one board that is ok that is above the budget range of most people, when the rest of your lineup is junk. Junk is junk, and I am not a refuse disposal service.
a fan on a block of metal without fins, is like selling a house in Alaska with an industrial heating system to make up for the complete lack of insulation in the walls. While it can be effective, it is also a complete waste of energy, a source of unnecessary noise, and far more expensive to construct and maintain than more 'elegant' solutions (like having insulated walls, or having fins on the heatsink).
one other thing, just because thermal dynamics works one way over at the CPU VRM, does not imply that thermal dynamics will work completely differently a few centimeters over from there. It's still hotter metal dissipating heat into warm air. And the air coming off the Graphics card heatsink will never be hotter than the GPU die (95c max at the die), just like the air coming off the stock AMD or Intel CPU cooler will never be hotter than the CPU die (again, about 90c max at the die). A heatsink is not a heat-pump, a heatsink is just a thermal dissipator. And in both cases, the net benefit of more airflow outweighs the slightly warmer air temperature flowing across the adjacent components. Otherwise, downdraft stock CPU coolers would be majorly detrimental to VRMs and the finless blocks would never work on the CPU VRMs.
As for the rest, I think I coverd it well enough in a few posts way back. like "Where are the REAL HEATSINKS", etc. Going off of that note to self about Nvidia's 'workstation' for 'creators' chat, I think x570 boards look like a complete write-off for production work for amateur 3D artists and people on a budget, at this point in time. Unless something changes or there are some boards that didn't get coverage at Computex and E3.
Sorry for the silence the past few weeks, it has been an incredibly busy and rough time. I'm actually typing this as a hornet is holding the coffee pot corner of the kitchen hostage, so not even coffee is working today, lol.
there are a great many that I support that I owe an apology to for my absence with the latest wave of mind-twisting incredible mixed with complete incompetence launch of zen2 and x570 chipset coolers. Drachinifel had entertained an idea I had jokingly asked about, I am thankful for that, and a much more serious question I had as well. Fisty has a few new sets of nice boots that I am guilty of not showcasing here yet. The crew over at GN is in desperate need of making a withdrawal from the Patreon sleep-bank, as many reviewers do after the triple-product launch (I am ignoring my stance on RTX, as it honestly hasn't changed drastically with Super for non-gaming stuff). And on that thought, Zen2. X570 chipset bling is another fail topic independent of the drastic CPU improvement.
There are so many good articles on the CPU, I apologize in advance if I can't list all of them, and forget to link some as well. That wasp is still holing my coffee pot hostage. So, to start with, provided a solid enough VRM on an x370 or x470 board, the 16 core zen2 looks to be very promising if the 12 core is anything to go by. It really has me drooling over what the 64 core EPYC2 will be able to do, especially in the proposed supercomputers out there.
Despite all that chin dropping 3delight potential, there are a lot of x370 and x470 boards I simply would not risk running a 16 core Ryzen 3950x on with 24/7 3delight renders. (this is only a can the VRM do it list, it is not a bios ready list)
It just seems that every single platform launch since Opteron, socket939, every single motherboard has had some major fail somewhere since. x370 and x470 it was the VRMs...
on x570 they addressed the lackluster VRMs, and introduce the most egregious design decisions I have ever seen since the Apollo1 plugs-out test (maybe Chernobyl and Challenger come close, however x570 tops them when it comes to totally neglecting basic reality). Motherboard makers are insistent that there is just no way at all to cool a chip that burns less than 20 watts, without a high RPM fan bolted to the thing...
forget all of them early 20+watt AGP cards that had no OTP or thermal throttling at all, it's clearly not a matter of making a small enough heatsink that has enough surface area, as der8auer clearly demonstrated a few ways in this vid.
If it was a cooler design problem, then they must have gotten the award for conjuring up every single way NOT to design a heatsink and combining them all into a single product.
I honestly don't think you could make a worse cooler if you tried. kind of a shame with that example, as the rest of the MSI 'carbon', looks ok. This is just a case of the manufacturer wanting to keep the RGB plastic bling so badly, they would rather bolt a potential point of failure to the thing (the 40mm fan), than use a "REAL HEATSINK(tm)". Yes, Gigabyte has a single 700+USD x570 board without a chipset fan, and there is one other board that costs way more with a full motherboard water block (rad, res, pump, tubing, coolant, required and not included). I just don't think most people will spend more on a motherboard then the rest of the computer combined, and that kind of makes those two boards a non-option for render boxes.
The result is that x570 is DOA to me, recording studios, and anyone that wants reliability and has a clue. It's a shame that x570 chipset coolers have made zen2 not look as good as it could have been for new render boxes.
P.S. Oh, that alien, yes, I borrowed it from TheCDK, as that raised eyebrow was exactly my expression when I had seen those things, lol. Thanks, Scott Manley for introducing me to CDK, cool tunes.
well, it's been a few days longer than I wanted it to be between posts, it's just been the usual hectic heatwave mayhem the past few days. Perfect weather to help ponder some coolers. I have an update regarding ASUS coolers that I completely missed the first two BZ vids I had seen, then on further digging last Friday (26th) I discovered an article that Google just hadn't shown me the former month of digging. There is also another prime example of exactly what all the fan sunk into Plastic RGB portrays.
With everything that is going on, I am surprised that ASUS did not want any of the normal reviewers that would look under the plastic covers to have pics of the board to report on, it's almost like ASUS is deliberately trying to make people think their chipset coolers suck just as bad as some others around, and that was before the news about the other promos that really just doesn't make Asus look good. To be frank, I would rather there be more than 2 internal USB2.0 plugs for my five internal devices to plug into, than another "USB3.3 v1.3c" plug (whatever that is I'm sure I have nothing that plugs into that, lol). It the least I feel obligated to point out that my meme about a lot of tiny 40mm fans and not a single heatsink in sight, was a tad harsh, despite what Asus wants to be aware of apparently. At least 3 of there boards do have more than just a fan slapped on a lump of Plastic RGB with no exhaust path for the air the fan sucks in.
That, in all honesty, would have done far better I think to sell Asus boards than the stack of lies promo slides Asus backed up. It's at least something, more than what others have. I don't want to self indulge too much, tho I do have a feeling the only reason the pics of the C8H chipset fin stack ended up at HWzone was partly due to me and a few others going off like a frog in a sock over them not having anything for the fan to cool, and pore 'DJ' not being allowed to correct the ongoing misconception Asus perpetuated about there boards at CES. So we were left to just think things were a tad different under the plastic RGB bling covers.
yeah, stark contrast I guess. and I think it was Tellos or ZeDestructor on GN that summed it up best, "these chipset coolers are deliberately designed to suck".
so, in other news, I had fussed a tad more with a geometry-based test chamber instead of the older tiled texture map one, it's still a WIP.
And I've been fussing some with the cool shoes. L to R. Hp Uki (Karyssa8 ears and Sherry hair ) with Sweet Summer outfit (costume ZGD textures) and Morphing Pumps. Fw Wachiwi (Fw Eve ears) with Ghawazee dress and shoes (Costume textures). Middle, G3F1W (from many pages back) with Samantha Hair, costume Fisty shirt with costume textures, D-force modified Mucho Flow Skirt with costume textures, and Treadz. "QX Chooli" & Nuka shape-mix (with Teen Josie8 "ears2", Des Grace skin mats dropped onto G8F, and Scarlett hair) with Sweet Summer outfit (costume textures) and AM Boots. and far-right, P3D Dewi (G3F1W ears and Scarlett hair) with costume Fisty shirt with costume textures, Rocker Skirt, and Keyhole Shoes.
some housekeeping notes, the J79 pic from the "anything can be a heatsink with enough airflow" meme came from the NY Heritage digital collections, for sarcastic commentary only. TitanicFreak on AHOC Discord coined the phrase.
Adorable kitty nom nom meme, was an adoption of a screencap from a GNSteve vid (Steve and crew do take good care of the cats, it's just an ongoing joke that the cats run the show and Steve is just a puppet in front of the camera saying what the cats script out for him). 
DES rrrrr, "DemonicaEvilius" 'S' Silver no more, Silver I guess is now Jessaii, so DEJ (Shrugs), still the same cool figures, just a new name.
And we're having a veritable autumn spell right now. 14C during the day. Great weather for rendering... but my migraines don't agree.
I can totally sympathize with migraines, both the stress kind, and from bad choices when I was young. I will not say that caffeine or nicotine withdrawal is any worse than what you're dealing with, only that I can sympathize. As for the stress thing, well, Because the Twitch change password thing is broken, and Two-Factor authentication does not work on a landline (cell phones do not work here), I had no choice other than leaving Twitch.
Twitches SMS only system is just as bad as Facebook, Twiter, and Yahoo Business. If they ever get a system that works with people that don't live in the inner city, then I will consider joining them again. Apparently, twitch was hacked some time ago, and they haven't been very public about it. I will not let others abuse my name, this is how it must be. At least Google and my bank, will call my landline and have a computer voice say the code to enter into the authentication webpage.
In other news, the past few days I stumbled onto something kind of cool. A few years back all I could find was a photo wrapped around essentially a cube, and it was a mess. the STL files lack UV mapping, however, the mesh is drastically better than the horrendous thing I found years back. Nice work "Scan the world" and Marchal Geoffrey. the statue on the right, has some anomalies that looks like the LIDAR data wasn't smoothed before exporting the STL, resulting in twisted quads from random bad XYZ lidar samples.
Makes for an interesting render patron even tho the geometry is a complete mess, lol.
Thanks, man.
Twitch, is that like a youtube for gamers? (please don't laugh, I'm a social media dinosaur)
yeah, Twitch is a bit confusing and the name sounds more like that bird site, tweet tweeter twitter, that text post site that some have fun on, lol. Twitch is like the youtube video site for live streaming games and other live stream stuff. OCTV, Buildzoid (AHOC), Linus Tech Tips Wanshow, Paul and Kyle's Awesome Hardwear, Sharkims (a friend), and others live stream on Twitch, it's a shame I had to go. Speaking of shilling, I think I've been spamming that "Steveism by Paul & Kyle" a bit too much...
I discovered that when just doing a quick spell check, lol. There appears to be far more Google image results of my 3D renders of FWSA Paloma wearing the altered Key dress, than of the authentic GN Steve shirt, oops. (sad the shirt is never in stock when I am looking for a link to it at the GN store, lol). I don't have any cool renders ready, so this will be a short post out of the dozen in progress things here. QX Chooli may have something far more useful for ALL figures and making PAs lives easier, than the lack of "get me started" 3DL presets. GypsyAngel (the PA) is in need of a computer among other things (I wanted to have a render ready before posting that), and the ongoing CPU / motherboard cooling mess continues, lol.
Oh, forgot about them emotes added to the former post (can it play Minecraft-RT, and why is Shad having an aneurysm), lol.
can I type now Grammarly!? good, thank you, now what was that thought that got lost in the luminiferous eather, oh. Something I started typing Monday and got dragged out to Friday (depending on your time zone). Some minor housekeeping of sorts. The weekend was a tad busy, and I didn't get a chance to respond to a memo that GA is at least feeling well enough to send out a thanks (it's now almost a week later), I'm glad she is feeling better. Drach outdid himself with three Drydock episodes, and a thanks for considering the Q I had about the keeping of dry foods at sea on old ships of the line.
And I was about a few months late to noticing that Techgage had a vid up on the viewport LookDev performance of Blender 2.8beta.
I'm not sure if or how that can translate to the OpenGL viewport in Daz Studio, the data is interesting none the less. It looks like if you have ANYTHING less than a TitanXp for the secondary monitor card, the realtime render mode may just not be usable at all for most novices with more 'affordable' computers. The lack of FPS on the lower end 'Pro' cards in that Blender 2.8 'Active Viewport render thing chart' also doesn't look good at all for consumer 'affordable' cards like the GTX1050ti. (the Quadro P2000 isn't doing much beter at 4k with it's chin-dropping 7FPS)
I know first hand what it's like to try to work with less than 5FPS, that's why I simply do not use the mini-render window thing in Daz Studio, it would lock up the computer any time you attempted to adjust ANYTHING, that and desktop real estate is at a premium here. Speaking of Viewport and GUI stuff, can I PLEASE get some 3DL and Iray gliffs/icons on them surface setting icons in the smart tab, PLEASE!
I have NFC where the hell MDL and RSL are from, I'm sure Neither have ANYTHING to do with Daz Studio surface shaders. We have Iray, AoA, OmniUber, and Daz Default, there is no MDL and RSL in daz studio that I am aware of, they mean NOTHING to me. It is a royal PITA hunting down the proper Daz Studio surface settings in the content library. I feel that I have been "shilling" (/sarcasm) the EJ hair just enough to be justified in asking for that one small tiny amenity added to the preset thumbnails in the smart tab, Pleas, lol. I've been using the older hairstyles a lot, due to some odd thing with generation8 hair taking up to 10x longer to render, and I've yet to figure out why. Use a G3F hair, and the render will take about 15min or so, use a gen8 hair and it bumps up to over two hours with some hairstyles. Xelene Jocelyn and Coco hair are particularly bad for some reason, another "CPU capable of a minimum of half a TaraFLOPS required" item. It's just faster to force older hairstyles onto new figures than waiting on the newer hair to render.
Err, ok, bad example, not what I thought the hair was, lol. GA Eirian with (EJ Carla hair, for some reason, doesn't have the excessive render time issue, once you figure out what preset is for 3DL). I found playing with the makeup to be a lot simpler than some on else I had to 'lift' the makeup off one map to use it on another. With Eirian it was a simple task of dropping maps on top of the others to combine the eye shadow and face paint in Gimp and exporting that as a new Diffuse map.
Maybe someday I'll get around to the other experiment I had started inspired by a couple of Shadiversity "What medieval weapons" vids I had seen.
In any case, the makeup was a lot of fun to play with for Eirian. There are a few other GAs in the test chamber that I'm looking at, it's just been a tad hot during the day to be fussing with 3D backing myself out of this place, lol.
I also have a mixed thought about saying that I like GAs work this way. the 4 that I have are daz buyouts, so it is in a way only reimbursing Daz for the funds GA already got for the figure months ago before things went south, and it's more of a net positive of many products in Daz's catalog between popular items and others that don't do as well. My minor contention is, sometimes, I just want to send the PA some coffee funds as a token of thanks for the great work, and Daz buyouts tend to be a step removed from directly giving the PA five or so dollars for a beverage of choice, lol. Thankfully there is a middle ground that lets you support Daz3d and the PA, buy something that isn't a buyout along with other cool stuff.
GA does make some incredible stuff, and I'm happy to buy the stuff, GA also is in a difficult spot with her computer along with a small setback with life in general.
I forgot to add Choolie's fiber-mesh eyebrows to a render, so that will be all for now. Hopefully, today is a tad cooler than earlier this week, I am so far behind with so many things.
I also ordered a drive out of need, cuz I ran out of room on the single drive that was doing double duty in the GN R7 build. Having Dim dump install zips on the same drive that has the daz store library, eats up room fast. Nothing fancy, just a cheap 480GB drive to get the Daz Content library off the other drive. It will allow me to also test the AoA single thread snail-paced surface shader loads, as it takes about 2.25 minutes off the 7kRPM Rust disk for a single AoA surface zone (single CPU core pegged at 100% usage the entire time, so I suspect a SSD won't fix that). Oh, and yeah, I had to buy Shad's book, just because Shad of Shadiversity is cool people.
MDL should be Iray and other should be 3DL
Yeah, twitch, twitter, strange words for social networks :) With Twitch, I can sort of guess they meant "finger twitching", like you're a gamer, you use your fingers and they twitch if you are nervous... ummmm yeah.
Shad of Shadiversity seems to be a genuinely inspired and knowledgeable dude, and whenever I have time and no headache (ooh he is a fast talker, and loud!), it feels good to share his enthusiasm. Although he doesn't seem to have read the Witcher books carefully. I mean, he's looking for mistakes in that Netflix show in terms of medieval history, but it's not really the problem. Same as TES, the "Witcherverse" is "frozen Renaissance" rather than medieval anything; the universities are a dead giveaway. Magic = science in both these 'verses.
The problem with that Netflix show is that the casting is all off, including the Superman 'roid kid as Geralt (he wound up looking like a weird offspring of Kevin Sorbo's Herc and Adrian Paul's Duncan McLeod, though I'm pretty sure Paul is a better sword dancer (tm) even today). The dark-skinned dryads don't really bother me... unlike Yennefer's skin colour, theirs was never really described in the books. But then the show writers will need to spell it out that the water that female human children must drink to become dryads also increases their melanin content ;D
// and then there's another aspect I will PM you about //
What's the book like? Is it the same unrelenting stream of consciousness Shad speaks in, or is it a more conventional narrative?
DAZ could go much further with OpenGL but there isn't much point. It would be a whole new renderer. The same way EEVEE is not a quick version of Cycles.
...,besides nVidia already have a quick version of Iray, "Iray Interactive".
3Delight uses Renderman Shader Language.
Material Description Language is yet another attempt by nVidia to to what they do every night! Takeover the world!
Prixat, what they do every night! Takeover the world! lol. I got memes somewhere with that AMD vs Nvidia thing, lol.
RDNA is good, esp vs the mid-tier Nvidia cards, it's just not the Titan RTX killer some were hoping it would be (not that a GTX10 card would be worth keeping instead of paying 70% more for only 59FPS with that "Glorius" RayTracing game look, lol). I just think Nvidia's segmenting markets in a bad way for 3D rendering is all (the rest of the price shenanigans of late and intel's new iGPU aside). I was mostly thinking in terms of the defacto wireframe or texture shaded OpenGL viewport performance (on more affordable low-watt cards).
Fisty, MDL should be Iray and other should be 3DL, the problem is weeks later when I'm looking at the (not so) Smart tab, I can't remember what was what, and it's all down to 'them' not calling it what it is (3DL or Iray). Because of how the content library flakes out and fails to actually show the folder path when right-clicking and selecting Show Asset in Mapped Folder, it becomes literally impossible at times to back up one folder just to get the 3delight mat folder (without opening DIM to find that actual Full content library path for the thing). It quickly becomes a research task, rather than a quick for fun "that looks cool, let's try that one" thing.
Kettu, Shad having an aneurysm, (oops, wrong vid, sorry, this was the trailer Crimes Against Medieval Realism)...
was I think his only grief, and I had a similar thought when I had seen that dress (watched the vid again, I forgot about the fallic head armar, and the extras shoot me poses, lol). In about 30 seconds of google image searching, I found that 'Simplicity' 1930's dress that looks exactly like what she was wearing in the trialer, with a few pleats added across the chest. The 1825 and 1905 dress also had pleats on the chest and puffy shoulders, just different colors back then. It looks way more 19th-century Steampunk, than medieval knights in shining armor era. We both just about lost it over her outfit, the rest of the trailer was ok. lol. The armor and weapon stuff looked really good. I think shad was looking more at medieval accuracy than if it matched up with the books and game.
Oh, Don't worry about the dented box, the SSD and book are ok (dog sled puppies wanted to play fetch, lol). The Shad book just got here, and I am a very slow reader, especially for novels that are not technical documents or 'Audible' books, lol. The only novels I've read, was the Timothy Zahn Thrawn novels, I'm not that big into books. Sorry, it will be at least a month before I get through the first chapter if I ever get a chance to do more than admire the front cover, lol. There are some honest sounding reviews on Amazon for Shad's book, I just wanted to toss some coffee funds his way (next month I'll get it on Audible and listen to it).
Speaking of before coffee moments.
Never assume Google will only show CC0 stuff when you type that into an image search when just looking for ideas. I started fussing with some Celtic weaves and didn't realize the patron I was fussing with was behind a Paywall at some 'vector' site. Nice patron, I just can't be 'giving it away'. So I'm scrapping that non-Celtic patron and going to play with others that actually are carved in stone.
Also, for something else I did make an altered version of a patron on an artifact. While the photo is behind a paywall, I did need to change it from I think it was a 12x14 pixel count to a 16x16 patron to fit nicely into a 1k texture map with 8-pixel squares for the normal map I made. I dropped "w8ptIncaPtrn01_01002b64_1k.png" into the diffuse spot set to a white back color with "V02weev01001_1k.png" in the normal slot, left the rest as-is from the AElflaed-can-never-spell-that Linnen shader. On the middle one, I think it was gray of about 24 to 32 with "w8ptCYMwave01_01002b_1k.png" in the diffuse color, rest mostly linen with a colored-gloss/reflection. Right I think was just the normal map added with colored-gloss/reflection on AElf-rrr-shader-thing(that one points at the former link, lol). Them 3 maps I made in win98se MS Paint will eventually find there way over to the CC0 thread, when I get a chance (attached here for Dragging-My-Feet-protection, lol). Oh, and I remembered QX Chooli's fiber-mesh eyebrows (under 'hair' not 'anatomy' in the smart tab). ... *1, QX Chooli does NOT include Elf Ears, them are TeenJosie8 Ears2 on Chooli.
Left to right, I don't think FWSA Paloma needs an introduction at this point, oh, that Kylan Hair is on the long side of render times, however it isn't near as bad as some newer gen8 stuff. Left foreground is G3F2W (not to be confused with '1W' used in other renders) using Paloma's mats with Samantha Hair (headband is a kitbash of Yulia's Christmas hat, Necklace & Earring Collection, and ShowGirl headband), wearing the FD Leo-thing. The middle foreground is G3F2W with the height set to zero (upper and lower leg length proportion left as is), just to be a tad fair for QX (not everyone is ancient Inca short). And then on the right is QX Chooli without Eva8-shape (Scarlett Hair and EJ Yuno's swimsuit) with her maps dropped into the Daz Default 3DL shader, surprisingly the Iray only-maps actually look good despite my former experience with blue-green Iray-only figures. I am really impressed with the maps, and an oddity that makes the lack of a set of maps a bit moot. Why bother with "anatomical" maps, if you have a UV mapping that just uses the Torso map, Briliant QX (Or whoever made the UV thing)!
I have no clue IF others had used this UV thing, I simply never looked that far down on the surface tab before. Especially given that most figures that have costume UVs for other zones, still stuck with the 'Default' UV for the 'Equipment. I think the Generation6 'brick' was the last one to use the torso map UV for the equipment. For of-age figures, this absolutely is a major blessing for PAs like Sabby, Fred, GypsyAngel, EJ, Silver-rrrr Jessia(sp?), and many others. I don't know anything other than somehow this new UV exists somewhere in the QX Chooli install pack, I can only hope that others will be allowed to use this new UV (merch resource or whatever the PA lingo is for that stuff). I just noticed QX Chooli's eyebrows the other day when looking at hair in the smart tab, so I need to look at them a tad more, for just Chooli they appear to be ok (for other figure shapes... not knowings, so Zathras can not say. yet.).
(edit) I totally spaced that Chooli was supposed to be with Eva8 until I made this post and was looking for a store link, and Eva8 sort of never happened here. Looking at the 5.8" height of Eva8, I may have not given Chooli a fair chance. I think the closest I have to Eva8 is
Charlotte 8,
... you know what would be nice Grammarly, a thing to remove the text formatting when copying and pasting names. ugh.
I give up, here is the render, Char at 50% Chooli at 75%, chest adjusted a tad to remove the bunched up cloth under the breasts.
I need coffee.
Can it run "Minecraft-'RT' UFD tech edition" lol.
Yeah, AM3 VRMs sucked dirt, they were so bad, lol. Motherboard E-power mod for the win
And the whole point is that the Witcherverse according to the books (and Netflix are supposed to be adapting the books) is not medieval.
In one of the early stories (published in 1990), the one about Renfri (in which pan Sapkowski deconstructs the Snow-White fairytale, BTW), Renfri wore cambric panties. Back then, some folks who adhered to the "all sword'n'sorcery fantasy must be medieval fantasy" thing tried to shame Sapkowski into not knowing the history of female underwear. To which he explicitly replied that the Witcher-verse was not even meant to be "historically accurate". Panties are a thing.
So I'm totally fine with the dress. Pan does not describe clothing in detail often, but the details the text reveals, they do indicate you can't pigeonhole the Witcherverse fashions into a single period of this-world history.
In terms of dress... I wouldn't actually even mind a full-on "Witcher Noir" restyling (think this: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/eDLOG ). Well of course, this is based on the game, so Geralt has the Anakin scar and Triss wears a low neckline (both not correct in the book!canon), but vibe-wise, it really works for the books. I'd make sure to give Geralt a studded leather jacket, though :) It's a very important item in the books. The exact style of that jacket is not explicitly described either, outside of certain locations for the studs and lacing, so there is room for creativity.
The box does look badly battered :)
Ah I see. Okay, I can wait :) Amazon review people are not really much of an indication for me...
somewhat embarrassingly, I never got into witcher that much. I have a few friends that played the game, and I never knew there were books until shad had mentioned it in one of the vids on the show. I just know I have seen that dress somewhere in another TV show recently, Maybe the will smith steampunk one, or maybe wonder women, I just can't remember.
I was a tad worried about the dented box, till I remembered what was in it, then I decided it just wasn't worth the hassle. NAND-SSDs are fairly resilient (so long as they're not the naked M.2 kind), case and point, SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), MRO, MESSENGER, New Horizons, STEREO-A/STEREO-B, ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer), Parker, etc.
Yesterday was miserably warm, and the day before aside from Grammarly and Power outages (thunderstorm) acting up, so nothing got done, lol. Let's see if I can bake up something on the GA fingernails, and a really cool dress. Will the universe corporate today, lol.
a few days later than originally intended, due to life and failed hair experiment distractions. Where was I, oh, GA Namid.
Realy nice nail options, my filesystem screencaps just don't do justice to the maps, the promos show the patrons well enough.
I forgot there supposed to be gold-colored patrons, I just selected a random nail map in the surface tab and I thought that looked good like that. On the bright side, it would be super easy to set up any color you wanted for them nail patrons.
I did forget to fuss with the face makeup and lipstick options when making the above render, there is a nice set of included options as well.
I'll need to fuss with that a tad more in the future. I have a few others to look at as well, hopefully, sooner than later. I have a few changes to make to the scene first. As much as I appreciate the '#D' that Fisty made for me when I mentioned in passing that I liked a dance mix vid and was joking about recreating the studio that also apparently 'had' some other cool dance vids (no clue what they're saying). I am not involved with them, so that needs to be used sparingly and in good taste. after thinking about it some, I decided to attempt to create another emblem thing based on my name in 'Alteran'. It's only fitting considering I don't want this to be just about GypsiAngel despite her needing a new comp to continue making cool content.
Left is RS Salem (karyssa 8 ears) and right is (the artist formerly known as DES) DEJ Rosalind (mix of "ears elf long" and TJ8 ears1). cute elf ears aside, they include Iray&3delight settings preset maps and, "all there". it was about when placing the camera for rendering that scene I decided that wall text was a bit long, and decided to swap it out for just the initials, lol.
FWE Neiva is one that I made a mistake of ignorance about. Long ago I had looked at setting up some no-face-plant setup shaders for her, noticed there were a few maps not included, and tosed her in the use sparingly bin. I figured the appearance of full maps was just a trick of backing colors with SubSurface heavy OpenGL trickery in the viewport (they all look like glowing wax wads in the viewport when diffuse is not the dominant shader element). I never considered looking at UV mappings back then, apparently, she does use that alternate UVing for the equipment. If the torso maps are all ye needs for whatever stuff I don't fuss with, then she will be fine as is. I'm still posing and choreographing, so that will be all for the moment, more to come soon.
*Edit, I took a look in the install zip, and found that Neiva does indeed include the SB8 UV, so she is all there.