Basic Suit & Super suit Template

h2ogenesis

Hi all, I want to add special design to my super suit & basic suit where can i get the basic suit & super suit template ?

MelanieL

Do you mean the Genesis Supersuit? They used to be on the Product Page before they re-designed the DAZ3D Store. There's an archive version of the Store Page available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20130114195522/http://www.daz3d.com/genesis-supersuit

Click the Resource Files tab and you can get the basic templates or ones with the material zones in different colours. (They download as .zip files)

john_antkowiak

hi, H2O... I've worked a lot adding symbols to the supersuit. I started out wondering where to find templates for them, but I've learned I don't need them or even the supersuit to make great-looking hero emblems. If this is what you're trying to do, I might have a few alternative ideas for you...

 

 

Ostadan

Adding emblems to a supersuit is going to be something everyone will want to do.  Please post your techniques for this.

john_antkowiak

Ok, Ostadan. I just hope this doesn't come off as trying to hijack someone else's thread... but this is what I would've told H2O if this was the reason for the original post.

I started out by learning to use the techniques you can find on YouTube by searching for Supersuit Tips & Tricks. To summarize, that person used what I'll call Method 1.

Method 1

1) Go out to the internet and download the highest-resolution image you can find, showing the symbol you want to use. Import it into Photoshop (in my case, GIMP) and position it on the garment's texture map in roughly the place where it belongs. (I'm paraphrasing here since the Supersuit has no texture map and I forgot how he did his.) Then make 3 images from it: A Diffuse map, a Displacement map, and an Opacity map. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything that doesn't sound familiar. When I first saw the video, I didn't know any of it.

2) Open DS and load a figure with the clothing and textures you want.

3) Load the Basic version of the Supersuit and fit it to the figure*, but in the Surfaces tab, add the three maps you created to the drop-down menus of the corresponding Surface properties: Diffuse Color, Displacement Strength, and Opacity Strength (these are 3Delight properties, not Iray). Once you do that, the Opacity map will cause the Basic suit to disappear except for the symbol, which now appears to be overlaid on the underlying clothing item.

*You might have to fit the Basic suit to the underlying clothing instead of to the figure - he was using the Supersuit so it wasn't a huge problem to fit one on top of the other, but anything else is trial and error. Until you try it the way I do it now, which I discuss below.

This is a versatile and useful technique and works for other clothing items as well. You're virtually unlimited if you want to superimpose any design you find out there onto your figure's T-shirt (like, "I'm with Stupid ->" lol). So I found this works pretty well for Superman but quickly discovered its limitations. Clothing and rendering technology have come a long way since the Genesis figure came out. If you use any Surface tiling at all, like for a bump map, then the technique falls apart. It only works with Horizontal Tile and Vertical Tile values of 1.0, and that won't work with most of the really cool clothing textures available now. (That's "texture" in the tactile fabric sense and not the 3D modeling sense.) 

Method 2

So then I started manipulating those clothing texture maps directly (that's "texture" in the 3D modeling sense). I'd open one - say, for a shirt - and import my hero symbol in a separate layer. You can expect to have to scale the symbol down to fit the clothing, but you can place it exactly where you want. Export that image to wherever you want, with whatever name you want, to serve as your new Diffuse Color map. Then when you load the shirt onto your figure, you can again load your new map into the Diffuse Color property of the shirt and you're off to the races  : )

But there are limitations here too: I often found that scaling the hero symbol to the shirt dramatically reduced its size, meaning when you load it on the figure it appears extremely pixelated even though the shirt itself doesn't. You really do have to overlay it full-size and then adjust the Horizontal and Vertical tiling - but again, this breaks easily if you have bump tiles or opacity maps. since everything tiles the same way. You can't tile the Opacity map one way and the Diffuse map another way. So now I use Method 3.

Method 3

In the case of Green Lantern, below, or Batman with the classic oval design, I add a primitive shape to the scene and scale it to act as a physical emblem to be attached to the shirt - like the one worn by the CW's Flash if you follow that reference. It's usually a cylinder primitive with, say, a diameter of 4", a length of .5", and 100 sides. You can compress that to an oval shape if needed. Then I add the symbol to the Diffuse property of the primitive and leave the clothing out of it altogether. You don't need the Supersuit at all. And here are some tips for working with primitives:

1) You can parent them to the part of the anatomy where the symbol goes, so it will follow the figure. The more extreme the pose, the less perfectly it might follow, but it's easy to adjust. 

2) You can add the Opacity map you created to the primitive as well - so that all but the symbol disappears, like in the Batgirl example. But don't be surprised when you discover that the Diffuse map is added to all sides of the primitive and when you make the rest of it transparent, now you can see the symbol on the backside of the cylinder as well as the sides. There are two ways to overcome that depending if your primitive is opaque like Green Lantern's or transparent like Batgirl's.

3) If it's opaque, you can add a second cylinder to the mix. Select the first one and press CTRL+C to copy its properties. Add a new cylinder to the scene. Select it and press CTRL+V to paste those properties onto it. Now it has moved to occupy the same space as the first primitive (because you gave it the same X-Y-Z coordinates). Make its surface black in color. Now all you do is expand the cylinder's diameter just a bit (adjust the X and Y scale parameters equally) and you have a black cylinder just a bit bigger than the center. Finally, you adjust the black one's Z parameter just a bit so that you push it back away from the center. That exposes the surface of the center primitive and makes the symbol pop out, surrounded by a black ring. Add both cylinders to a group (so you can move them both at the same time) and parent the group to the chest. 

4) If it's transparent, adjust the Z property so that the primitive is thicker. Push the whole thing deeper into the chest so that the back surface is hidden inside the body. The deeper you push it in, the closer the front surface gets to the surface of the clothing, yes? So hopefully there won't be enough of the sides showing to give away the fact that the image appears on the sides too.

5) You're still going to have to worry about tiling and centering the image on the surface of the primitive... but now at least you won't be competing with the clothing tiling. And it'll still look pixelated in really close-up renders but not nearly as bad.

If you're rendering with Iray, there's a whole separate quirk I'm trying to figure out, but it's fixable. The Flash, below, is a modification of Green Lantern's method but the jury's out whether I'll redo it using Batgirl's method.

Please ask questions; I hope you're as happy with these ideas as I am  : )  And note that none of the figures are really done yet.

 

Happy rendering  :)

John A

megarandommadness

john_antkowiak said:

Ok, Ostadan. I just hope this doesn't come off as trying to hijack someone else's thread... but this is what I would've told H2O if this was the reason for the original post.

I started out by learning to use the techniques you can find on YouTube by searching for Supersuit Tips & Tricks. To summarize, that person used what I'll call Method 1.

Method 1

1) Go out to the internet and download the highest-resolution image you can find, showing the symbol you want to use. Import it into Photoshop (in my case, GIMP) and position it on the garment's texture map in roughly the place where it belongs. (I'm paraphrasing here since the Supersuit has no texture map and I forgot how he did his.) Then make 3 images from it: A Diffuse map, a Displacement map, and an Opacity map. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything that doesn't sound familiar. When I first saw the video, I didn't know any of it.

2) Open DS and load a figure with the clothing and textures you want.

3) Load the Basic version of the Supersuit and fit it to the figure*, but in the Surfaces tab, add the three maps you created to the drop-down menus of the corresponding Surface properties: Diffuse Color, Displacement Strength, and Opacity Strength (these are 3Delight properties, not Iray). Once you do that, the Opacity map will cause the Basic suit to disappear except for the symbol, which now appears to be overlaid on the underlying clothing item.

*You might have to fit the Basic suit to the underlying clothing instead of to the figure - he was using the Supersuit so it wasn't a huge problem to fit one on top of the other, but anything else is trial and error. Until you try it the way I do it now, which I discuss below.

This is a versatile and useful technique and works for other clothing items as well. You're virtually unlimited if you want to superimpose any design you find out there onto your figure's T-shirt (like, "I'm with Stupid ->" lol). So I found this works pretty well for Superman but quickly discovered its limitations. Clothing and rendering technology have come a long way since the Genesis figure came out. If you use any Surface tiling at all, like for a bump map, then the technique falls apart. It only works with Horizontal Tile and Vertical Tile values of 1.0, and that won't work with most of the really cool clothing textures available now. (That's "texture" in the tactile fabric sense and not the 3D modeling sense.) 

Method 2

So then I started manipulating those clothing texture maps directly (that's "texture" in the 3D modeling sense). I'd open one - say, for a shirt - and import my hero symbol in a separate layer. You can expect to have to scale the symbol down to fit the clothing, but you can place it exactly where you want. Export that image to wherever you want, with whatever name you want, to serve as your new Diffuse Color map. Then when you load the shirt onto your figure, you can again load your new map into the Diffuse Color property of the shirt and you're off to the races  : )

But there are limitations here too: I often found that scaling the hero symbol to the shirt dramatically reduced its size, meaning when you load it on the figure it appears extremely pixelated even though the shirt itself doesn't. You really do have to overlay it full-size and then adjust the Horizontal and Vertical tiling - but again, this breaks easily if you have bump tiles or opacity maps. since everything tiles the same way. You can't tile the Opacity map one way and the Diffuse map another way. So now I use Method 3.

Method 3

In the case of Green Lantern, below, or Batman with the classic oval design, I add a primitive shape to the scene and scale it to act as a physical emblem to be attached to the shirt - like the one worn by the CW's Flash if you follow that reference. It's usually a cylinder primitive with, say, a diameter of 4", a length of .5", and 100 sides. You can compress that to an oval shape if needed. Then I add the symbol to the Diffuse property of the primitive and leave the clothing out of it altogether. You don't need the Supersuit at all. And here are some tips for working with primitives:

1) You can parent them to the part of the anatomy where the symbol goes, so it will follow the figure. The more extreme the pose, the less perfectly it might follow, but it's easy to adjust. 

2) You can add the Opacity map you created to the primitive as well - so that all but the symbol disappears, like in the Batgirl example. But don't be surprised when you discover that the Diffuse map is added to all sides of the primitive and when you make the rest of it transparent, now you can see the symbol on the backside of the cylinder as well as the sides. There are two ways to overcome that depending if your primitive is opaque like Green Lantern's or transparent like Batgirl's.

3) If it's opaque, you can add a second cylinder to the mix. Select the first one and press CTRL+C to copy its properties. Add a new cylinder to the scene. Select it and press CTRL+V to paste those properties onto it. Now it has moved to occupy the same space as the first primitive (because you gave it the same X-Y-Z coordinates). Make its surface black in color. Now all you do is expand the cylinder's diameter just a bit (adjust the X and Y scale parameters equally) and you have a black cylinder just a bit bigger than the center. Finally, you adjust the black one's Z parameter just a bit so that you push it back away from the center. That exposes the surface of the center primitive and makes the symbol pop out, surrounded by a black ring. Add both cylinders to a group (so you can move them both at the same time) and parent the group to the chest. 

4) If it's transparent, adjust the Z property so that the primitive is thicker. Push the whole thing deeper into the chest so that the back surface is hidden inside the body. The deeper you push it in, the closer the front surface gets to the surface of the clothing, yes? So hopefully there won't be enough of the sides showing to give away the fact that the image appears on the sides too.

5) You're still going to have to worry about tiling and centering the image on the surface of the primitive... but now at least you won't be competing with the clothing tiling. And it'll still look pixelated in really close-up renders but not nearly as bad.

If you're rendering with Iray, there's a whole separate quirk I'm trying to figure out, but it's fixable. The Flash, below, is a modification of Green Lantern's method but the jury's out whether I'll redo it using Batgirl's method.

Please ask questions; I hope you're as happy with these ideas as I am  : )  And note that none of the figures are really done yet.

 

Happy rendering  :)

John A

Which method is the hawkman logo done, and would you know how to make make lines glow like in the gl movie?

RKane_1

You may want to mention, btw, that opacity and displacement need only be greyscale files.

 

Opacity maps make the white in them more visible and the black less visible with varying shades of grey somewhere in between.

 

Displacement maps do the same but with the whitest part more projected outward and the blacker value receeding furhter,

 

IRAY does have an opacity value called cutout opacity which functions the same.

megarandommadness : The lines in the Green Lantern suit can be achieved by using an Emission map with the whiter the value the brighter the color and black having no value at all. You can either use color on it or not, though and it will project the color needed or you can play with the emission color for a monochromatic character.

 

megarandommadness

RKane_1 you are my new Senpai lol

RKane_1 said:

You may want to mention, btw, that opacity and displacement need only be greyscale files.

 

Opacity maps make the white in them more visible and the black less visible with varying shades of grey somewhere in between.

 

Displacement maps do the same but with the whitest part more projected outward and the blacker value receeding furhter,

 

IRAY does have an opacity value called cutout opacity which functions the same.

megarandommadness : The lines in the Green Lantern suit can be achieved by using an Emission map with the whiter the value the brighter the color and black having no value at all. You can either use color on it or not, though and it will project the color needed or you can play with the emission color for a monochromatic character.

 

 

RKane_1

megarandommadness said:

RKane_1 you are my new Senpai lol

RKane_1 said:

You may want to mention, btw, that opacity and displacement need only be greyscale files.

 

Opacity maps make the white in them more visible and the black less visible with varying shades of grey somewhere in between.

 

Displacement maps do the same but with the whitest part more projected outward and the blacker value receeding furhter,

 

IRAY does have an opacity value called cutout opacity which functions the same.

megarandommadness : The lines in the Green Lantern suit can be achieved by using an Emission map with the whiter the value the brighter the color and black having no value at all. You can either use color on it or not, though and it will project the color needed or you can play with the emission color for a monochromatic character.

 

 

In a gravelly, deep voice "Dat's nice. Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school." :)

Geminii23

john_antkowiak said:

Ok, Ostadan. I just hope this doesn't come off as trying to hijack someone else's thread... but this is what I would've told H2O if this was the reason for the original post.

I started out by learning to use the techniques you can find on YouTube by searching for Supersuit Tips & Tricks. To summarize, that person used what I'll call Method 1.

Method 1

1) Go out to the internet and download the highest-resolution image you can find, showing the symbol you want to use. Import it into Photoshop (in my case, GIMP) and position it on the garment's texture map in roughly the place where it belongs. (I'm paraphrasing here since the Supersuit has no texture map and I forgot how he did his.) Then make 3 images from it: A Diffuse map, a Displacement map, and an Opacity map. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything that doesn't sound familiar. When I first saw the video, I didn't know any of it.

2) Open DS and load a figure with the clothing and textures you want.

3) Load the Basic version of the Supersuit and fit it to the figure*, but in the Surfaces tab, add the three maps you created to the drop-down menus of the corresponding Surface properties: Diffuse Color, Displacement Strength, and Opacity Strength (these are 3Delight properties, not Iray). Once you do that, the Opacity map will cause the Basic suit to disappear except for the symbol, which now appears to be overlaid on the underlying clothing item.

*You might have to fit the Basic suit to the underlying clothing instead of to the figure - he was using the Supersuit so it wasn't a huge problem to fit one on top of the other, but anything else is trial and error. Until you try it the way I do it now, which I discuss below.

This is a versatile and useful technique and works for other clothing items as well. You're virtually unlimited if you want to superimpose any design you find out there onto your figure's T-shirt (like, "I'm with Stupid ->" lol). So I found this works pretty well for Superman but quickly discovered its limitations. Clothing and rendering technology have come a long way since the Genesis figure came out. If you use any Surface tiling at all, like for a bump map, then the technique falls apart. It only works with Horizontal Tile and Vertical Tile values of 1.0, and that won't work with most of the really cool clothing textures available now. (That's "texture" in the tactile fabric sense and not the 3D modeling sense.) 

Method 2

So then I started manipulating those clothing texture maps directly (that's "texture" in the 3D modeling sense). I'd open one - say, for a shirt - and import my hero symbol in a separate layer. You can expect to have to scale the symbol down to fit the clothing, but you can place it exactly where you want. Export that image to wherever you want, with whatever name you want, to serve as your new Diffuse Color map. Then when you load the shirt onto your figure, you can again load your new map into the Diffuse Color property of the shirt and you're off to the races  : )

But there are limitations here too: I often found that scaling the hero symbol to the shirt dramatically reduced its size, meaning when you load it on the figure it appears extremely pixelated even though the shirt itself doesn't. You really do have to overlay it full-size and then adjust the Horizontal and Vertical tiling - but again, this breaks easily if you have bump tiles or opacity maps. since everything tiles the same way. You can't tile the Opacity map one way and the Diffuse map another way. So now I use Method 3.

Method 3

In the case of Green Lantern, below, or Batman with the classic oval design, I add a primitive shape to the scene and scale it to act as a physical emblem to be attached to the shirt - like the one worn by the CW's Flash if you follow that reference. It's usually a cylinder primitive with, say, a diameter of 4", a length of .5", and 100 sides. You can compress that to an oval shape if needed. Then I add the symbol to the Diffuse property of the primitive and leave the clothing out of it altogether. You don't need the Supersuit at all. And here are some tips for working with primitives:

1) You can parent them to the part of the anatomy where the symbol goes, so it will follow the figure. The more extreme the pose, the less perfectly it might follow, but it's easy to adjust. 

2) You can add the Opacity map you created to the primitive as well - so that all but the symbol disappears, like in the Batgirl example. But don't be surprised when you discover that the Diffuse map is added to all sides of the primitive and when you make the rest of it transparent, now you can see the symbol on the backside of the cylinder as well as the sides. There are two ways to overcome that depending if your primitive is opaque like Green Lantern's or transparent like Batgirl's.

3) If it's opaque, you can add a second cylinder to the mix. Select the first one and press CTRL+C to copy its properties. Add a new cylinder to the scene. Select it and press CTRL+V to paste those properties onto it. Now it has moved to occupy the same space as the first primitive (because you gave it the same X-Y-Z coordinates). Make its surface black in color. Now all you do is expand the cylinder's diameter just a bit (adjust the X and Y scale parameters equally) and you have a black cylinder just a bit bigger than the center. Finally, you adjust the black one's Z parameter just a bit so that you push it back away from the center. That exposes the surface of the center primitive and makes the symbol pop out, surrounded by a black ring. Add both cylinders to a group (so you can move them both at the same time) and parent the group to the chest. 

4) If it's transparent, adjust the Z property so that the primitive is thicker. Push the whole thing deeper into the chest so that the back surface is hidden inside the body. The deeper you push it in, the closer the front surface gets to the surface of the clothing, yes? So hopefully there won't be enough of the sides showing to give away the fact that the image appears on the sides too.

5) You're still going to have to worry about tiling and centering the image on the surface of the primitive... but now at least you won't be competing with the clothing tiling. And it'll still look pixelated in really close-up renders but not nearly as bad.

If you're rendering with Iray, there's a whole separate quirk I'm trying to figure out, but it's fixable. The Flash, below, is a modification of Green Lantern's method but the jury's out whether I'll redo it using Batgirl's method.

Please ask questions; I hope you're as happy with these ideas as I am  : )  And note that none of the figures are really done yet.

 

Happy rendering  :)

John A

Hi.  I stumbled upon this thread while trying to figure out how to make my own hero emblems.  Not sure if you are still monitoring this one.  I am trying to create a nice Green Lantern emblem and have been following your steps but I am running into a problem where I can not get the diffuse image to be centered on the surfac of the cylinder.  No matter what size I make this image it seems to always show up off centered.  Can you tell me how you are able to center your images on the primitives?

Thanks

 

john_antkowiak

Today's your lucky day, @Geminii23. I haven't been to the forums in months but I'm catching up prior to posting a new render. I noticed in the Ready to Render thread that you're trying to do some of the same things I did. I'm glad you found my long post - esecially if it's helping you out. Now for the bad news: the only way I was able to center the symbols on the primitives is by trial and error.  But I did notice that, for me anyway, they're always off by the same amount in the same direction so once you figure it out, try that first next time. I don't know why this is a problem in iRay; I don't remember having the issue at all when I was learning in 3Delight. But here's what I do: I center it in the viewport, then do a spot render. The primitive usually turns up blank. If I remember right, it was only an issue of vertical offset needing adjustment. My render is crunching away now, but later I can pull up a few examples and give you some numbers. Keep playing around with it. Until you get the hang of it, go to your symbol image and add some north, south, east, and west reference points starting outside the symbol and extending outward in all 4 directions - like the X, Y number lines you learned in school, with the symbol at 0,0. That way, you're more likely to run across something you recognize when you're adjusting your horizontal and vertical offset values. I hope that helps. Feel free to send me a PM if you have any other questions about anything I wrote. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your stuff  :)

p.s. a few hours later, it occurs to me I may have misunderstood your question. The one I tried to answer is: "How do you center the image in the render?" Not: "How do you initally center the image on the primitive during the design phase?" I can think of two ways to try it, but only one of them will work. When you said, "No matter what size I make this image," it makes me think you might be going at it backwards. Rather than changing the size of the image in Photoshop or whatever you use, change the Horizontal and Vertical Tiling values and the associated Offset values in the Surface tab. Let me know if any of that still isn't clear  : )

john_antkowiak

Here's my attempt at GL...

Mage 13X13

MelanieL said:

Do you mean the Genesis Supersuit? They used to be on the Product Page before they re-designed the DAZ3D Store. There's an archive version of the Store Page available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20130114195522/http://www.daz3d.com/genesis-supersuit

Click the Resource Files tab and you can get the basic templates or ones with the material zones in different colours. (They download as .zip files) Thank you for this

Thank you for the link. I was able to get both zips. 

Mage 13X13

Is there also a template for the Basic Suit?