Layers vs. Shaders
Hey folks...
I am working on a superhero webcomic, and the star has a costume based largely on a costume I made for her in City of Heroes years ago. This includes a cape with stars and stripes on it (she is a patriotic character). I am using the Supercape for Genesis on the character (she is G2F but it works OK on her). Now, the cape comes with its own textures, but I don't want to use those... I wanted to make my own.
I ended up doing OK with the cape's design, but right now only the colors are done, i.e. it is flat/textureless. Now I want to make it have a clothy texture. What I would like to do is apply some shaders or something to it, but if you apply shaders, the design of the diffuse color gets over-written. I also tried painting down my own textures in the jpg file but, to be honest, i kind of suck at making textures. Most shaders do way better than I could ever do by hand.
I was able to get kind of close by using the super shaders. If I apply a cloth shader, I can switch the diffuse color channel to include the stars and stripes, but the shader's scale is too big. When I use the 20x or 40x multiplier, of course, this tiles the texture and the stars and stripes get tiled too. Same thing happens if I add a layer with LIE (tiling).
What is the easiest way to go about doing it so that I get a cloth texture? Should I just keep fighting with the texture file, or is there some way to use LIE so that one layer is tiled and the other is not?
To see what I am talking about in terms of the cape design, I have the images of the diffuse channel file and the result in the renderer (non-tiled).
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Comments
You are laboring under a misconception...you can't have a texture without a shader. You basically have 3 choices for shaders (these are the most common ones), the default Studio shader, the omnifreaker UberSurface and AoA's SSS shader.
The shader you are using, the default surface doesn't have the features you need...independent tiling of the diffuse map and the bump/displacement maps. But, there's a lot you CAN do with the default shader to make it more 'cloth' like. The first thing is to tone down the specular strength and glossiness...cloth, unless it is satin isn't that shiny. The next is to use the 'Skin' setting, under Lighting Models...set the sheen color to a dark-medium/medium grey and the scatter color to some shade of blue, light than the blue of the cape, but not anything like sky blue.
If that still isn't enough, there are a couple of ways to go about what you want...one would be to roll your own shader in ShaderMixer...that's quite a bit of work.
Another is to grab this...
http://www.daz3d.com/tiler-shader-for-daz-studio
There's also an UberSurface 2, which is a full layered shader...but it doesn't have independent bump channels.
All of that is assuming Studio and 3Delight rendering.
By talking about textures "separately" from shaders, I meant textures built into the jpg that I use for the diffuse color.... vs. doing something like double-clicking and applying a super-shader or something along those lines.
I have the tiler shader but have not used it much. I will have to dip into it and see what I can do with it.
The image file is just part...and having 'texture' 'baked' in to the image itself isn't really the way to go about things...never going to get the size right, unless it's something like denim, and even then you can't really have something like that star pattern in there, too. I probably shouldn't say never...but it wouldn't be very easy and you'd need to start out with rather high resolution image files and be very careful when assembling it in an image editor, especially when matching the bump/displacement maps.
Your best bet, with the tiler is to use the plain diffuse image and then use the separate tiling functions to bump up the repeats of the bump/displacement enough to make it look like it's woven from thread and not cable...
Thanks for the help. I will try messing with the tiler shader tomorrow and see where I get.
So I tried the tiler shader trick you suggested and it worked great! Using the flat stars-and-blue cape color map, I was able to DL a simple normal map for fabric, and then used that one map for both normal and bump, and after playing around and using the independent tiling, I came up with something that was not too terrible.
Now I have some work to do on the "plastic stars" glued to her shoulders, but at least the cape fabric is out of the way.
Thanks!