Adding Skin Presets to Anatomical Elements?

callumlulz

I have a characters skin preset that I am using on a character, and there is no material for the genitalia that is for that character, how would I get the genitalia to match?

nonesuch00

Well that's going to be tough if you are using realistic looking textures because they look to me to be 3D scanned and it will be tough for a person in photoshop to do better than a 3D scanner can do. However if you are doing less realistic textures take all the textures into gimp or photoshop, strip the color, and then recolorize is about the easiest way. And if the texture seams that don't match you need to zoom in at the seams and make them match pixel by pixel or with a texture brush stamp that will blend the seems together. 

You don't want to change the originals

1. so in the Surfaces Tab 'browse to' one of the surface textures and make not of the path they are all at.

2. now in Explorer or File Manager go to that path and copy the entire folder to a location in your DAZ Studio <Content Root Folder>/Library/Runtime/textures/<Your Prefered User Name> and then rename that copied folder of textures to a character name you prefer. For my first foray into doing this I decided to seperate different product base types with subfolders before I get to <character name>, eg. .../textures/Genesis 3/Female/<preferred character name> 

3. Now in DAZ Studio create a new empty scene and import the character you want to modify and apply the character skin materials and since you lack matching genital skin materials that match, use the ones that match the closest and save this character as a Character Preset. To do this make sure the main character mesh is selected in the scene tab. You will get a File Explorer navigator when saving so navigate to your DAZ Studio Content Folder Root/Library/Presets/Characters/<create folder with your user name>/Genesis 3/Female/<your character's name>/yourcharactersname.duf. Now in the scene tab you'll need to select the genitalia and save those as a Character Preset. Save in the same location and call it something sensible like Genitalia. The icon generated for the character will say actor and the icon generated for the genitalia will say attachment.

4. Now in the scene tab select the main character again and this time save a Material Preset in the location  your DAZ Studio Content Folder Root/Library/Presets/Materials/<create folder with your user name>/Genesis 3/Female/<your character's name>/yourcharactersname.duf. Likewise do the same for the genitalia similarly as in step 3.

5. In your OS file explorer navigate to where you copied those textures and looking at the naming conventions the original artist used, rename those textures to be your character's name using the same naming convention. Once you've rename the textures copy the entire folder to two locations outside the DAZ Studio content location and one is where you'll directly edit the textures in Gimp or Photoshop and the other a back up.

5. Now, next to the altering of the copied textures the most tedious part - you need to select your character and go to the surfaces tab and for each type of texture present you open the Layered Image Editor and 'Add Layer'. You then rename this new layer to the name you renamed the image on the disk and make sure you change the image name at the top too. Once you have double & triple checked you then select the new layer if it became unselected and 'browse' to the locations of the corresponding original file that you renamed and add that file as the image for the layer. Once that is done you delete the orginal layer and 'Accept' the changes you made in the LIE (Layered Image Editor). Once you've added a new layer and image to a surface be careful not to open the same surface twice in LIE or you will get the DAZ Studio auto-creating a new image name for a surface and that will cause trouble when you overwrite you character and material presets for the character and genitals. So once you do a couple of those you repeat until all the character's original images used in surfaces are replaced by the same images but renamed and copied to the runtime/textures folder as discussed earlier.

6. Once 5. is done save the character as changed by overwriting the character and material presets you made for it earlier.

7. Do as in 5. but this time for the genitals.

8. Once 7. is done save the genitals as changed by overwriting the character and material presets you made for it earlier.

9. Test you work by exiting DAZ Studio and restarting DAZ Studio. In an new empty scene use your saved Character and Material presets to add the character and genitalia to load them into the scene. If you did everything correctly, when you go to the Surfaces Tab and look at the used images then they all should be using the new name in the new location you made for the images earlier.

10. Now you can edit the images you copied outside of the DAZ Studio content location with confidence and when you want to see how good a jobs you've done simply copy the edited image over the image in your personal runtime/textures/ location you created for that character earlier and reload the materials with the preset(s) you made.

11. You of course can't give away or sell this character as an original work because you copied the textures. However, if you create a completely personal original set of textures then you may give away or sell that texture set. So al that trouble you did earlier isn't for naught and is how people you share textures with would expect to use them.

That's how I'd do it as an amateur with few tools at his disposal. Someone with more experience that my might advise an easier way so be patient.

Now as far as modifying the textures to your satifaction or creating a brand new set of textures to replace the originals, other than the general technical guidelines I spoke of above already, I recommend you learn how to use gimp or photoshop and the needed Toolbox and feature items in those programs to make those changes. I recommend you search youtube for tutorials as those things are better visually illustrated than verbally explained.

Good luck.