help with Coral 8.1

lumiasart

Hi everyone,
I'm using Coral 8.1 https://www.daz3d.com/coral-81 for a mermay artwork and I'm struggling with something. She comes with gills which I do not like and I saw on this forum that those aren't removable (can't hide them with opoacity either). So what I tried to do was, in photoshop merge her human skin with her mermaid skin to cover the gills. However when I try to apply it in daz the gills are still visible :( I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if my idea is just something that can't actaully work...

thanks!

Leana

The gils are not just texture but part of the geometry, so just changing the texture wouldn't remove them completely.

ShelLuser

I think the biggest issue to cope with here is that the gills are a separate surface of their own, with normal map and everything. I'd start there, this is part of her tail. Because of that I don't think that just copying her human texutre is going to do you much good here.

But second...  intruiging problem IMO so I did what I always do when I want to study a figure in more detail: I GoZ'd her over into ZBrush and sure enough: the "hiatus" which those gills are showing (the edges and such?) are part of the mesh itself, so I think you're going to need more to smoothen that out: you probably need to smoothen the mesh itself as well.

I'll show you what I mean... there... if you look closely you'll notice a bright(er) red surface: this is the human part of Coral, and you'll notice a darker reddish surface: that's her tail. Notice how the sharper edges of the gill all form around the darker reddish parts?

So I think (this is just my theory!) that next to changing the textures you're also going to need to smoothen out the tail mesh. Maybe a morph?

Hope this can help a bit.

 

(edit) So I tried to create a morph to try and smoothen this out... it looked somewhat good in ZBrush but when trying to actually save the morph in Studio it crashed the program. Still, I believe that a morph + retexture is your best way out of this.

(edit2) Houston, we have a problem. I didn't notice at first because I was too focussed on ZBrush but.. try to actually hide the "Coral 8.1 Tail" asset in Studio? There's not much of her left after that :(  On first impression I blamed Normal maps (ey, I never claimed to be a professional! ;)) but this runs way deeper: her bottom half is part of her tail and not some overlap as I first assumed. See my second attachment "gill_gaps"?

We need to edit the mesh, retexture parts of said mesh and then it should work.  Can't do much more for now but for whatever it's worth I'll look further into this upcoming week.

Richard Haseltine

An alternative, though tricky, would be to hide those portions of the tail and thena djust the AutoHide group for the tail so that the areas of skin removed to make way for the gills came back - but for that to work you would, ideally, want to rework the welds to lower down too. Or you might be able to add a graft on the graft to patch the gill area and then clone bits of the plain texture into that. A lot of work, either way.

lumiasart

ShelLuser said:

I think the biggest issue to cope with here is that the gills are a separate surface of their own, with normal map and everything. I'd start there, this is part of her tail. Because of that I don't think that just copying her human texutre is going to do you much good here.

But second...  intruiging problem IMO so I did what I always do when I want to study a figure in more detail: I GoZ'd her over into ZBrush and sure enough: the "hiatus" which those gills are showing (the edges and such?) are part of the mesh itself, so I think you're going to need more to smoothen that out: you probably need to smoothen the mesh itself as well.

I'll show you what I mean... there... if you look closely you'll notice a bright(er) red surface: this is the human part of Coral, and you'll notice a darker reddish surface: that's her tail. Notice how the sharper edges of the gill all form around the darker reddish parts?

So I think (this is just my theory!) that next to changing the textures you're also going to need to smoothen out the tail mesh. Maybe a morph?

Hope this can help a bit.

 

(edit) So I tried to create a morph to try and smoothen this out... it looked somewhat good in ZBrush but when trying to actually save the morph in Studio it crashed the program. Still, I believe that a morph + retexture is your best way out of this.

(edit2) Houston, we have a problem. I didn't notice at first because I was too focussed on ZBrush but.. try to actually hide the "Coral 8.1 Tail" asset in Studio? There's not much of her left after that :(  On first impression I blamed Normal maps (ey, I never claimed to be a professional! ;)) but this runs way deeper: her bottom half is part of her tail and not some overlap as I first assumed. See my second attachment "gill_gaps"?

We need to edit the mesh, retexture parts of said mesh and then it should work.  Can't do much more for now but for whatever it's worth I'll look further into this upcoming week.

thank you! I'll try it with blender (I'm still learning but I think I get what you mean) :)

lumiasart

Richard Haseltine said:

An alternative, though tricky, would be to hide those portions of the tail and thena djust the AutoHide group for the tail so that the areas of skin removed to make way for the gills came back - but for that to work you would, ideally, want to rework the welds to lower down too. Or you might be able to add a graft on the graft to patch the gill area and then clone bits of the plain texture into that. A lot of work, either way.

thanks Richard, I will have a look into that :)

crosswind

Actually it's easy to 'remove' the gills (I roughly did it in Blender), however, as this 'tail graft' is made with HD morphs, some details will be lost after load the 'fixed gills' back... As to the textures, yes, there'll be more work since the topology / UV on the graft have been altered... if still using the current texture map, either use Ps to retouch or Pt to repaint...

lumiasart

crosswind said:

Actually it's easy to 'remove' the gills (I roughly did it in Blender), however, as this 'tail graft' is made with HD morphs, some details will be lost after load the 'fixed gills' back... As to the textures, yes, there'll be more work since the topology / UV on the graft have been altered... if still using the current texture map, either use Ps to retouch or Pt to repaint...

thanks, I'm already repainting most of her in Photoshop (since I mostly use daz for models and some props and the actual work is done in ps) so I'll try that after blender.

lumiasart

thanks for your help everyone! the gills were surprisingly easy to remove in blender - just used the smooth brush :)
but now I have another problem... I had seen some ppl before complain that you can't import textures from daz back to blender and that's exactly what's happening to me. Note that I am not using the daz to blender bridge because it completely messes with my model's pose for some reason and I don't need any mre problems...
now when I import it's completely and, although very pretty and marble like, it's very much not what I need.

attached are pics from blender and daz with import/export settings :)

EDIT it also saved and mtl file and I read that it contains the textures and need to be in the same folder and daz will automatically import everything together but that didn't happen...

crosswind

1. You should've used A-pose to export Coral 8.1's tail graft only (unfit it first) from Daz to Blender to 'remove' the gills and import it back to Ds as a 'delta morph' on the tail. Now you only have a 'single mesh' of Coral 8.1... how could you pose her, and texturize her... build a brand new UV?
2. As to exporting texture maps to blender, it's doable. You just need to check 'Write Material Libray' when exporting to obj file (but roughness / bump / normal maps could not be exported). Better use Diffeomorphic Daz Importer and install a blender plugin named 'Super Solid Mode', then you may have at least all Diffuse texture maps visible in Blender - solid mode...