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Fleshling dragon: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Fleshling-dragon-662696820
And the fleshling monk, which shows off the materials for four arms and octoloegs plus my tentaclehead: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Fleshling-Monk-662696665
A third skin. Once I get the base human head done, need to poke at Bubblehead to see if it's ready and actually organize stuff to try to pack up and drop on Sharecg.
These skins are fun to try on various characters.
The mix of the skin's normals and the underlying HD details works nicely here, I think.
Down the road I might take suggestions on odd figures to create skins for, help breath life into older stuff. I also think I want to take some clunky old models saddled with limited textures and revamp them.
Thank you for the suggestion! What a wonderful and whimsical artist! I love his sculptures, they gave me chills looking through Google images - they are soooo good. The textures of the stainless steel ones in particular just make me want to reach touch them. His paintings and the rest of his work are also breathtaking - like a dream world. My favorite painting I saw of his was The Messenger. It's incredible!
To me it looks like she's the messenger of inspiration. Like she's delivering the ideas to the writer, who looks like she's worked late into the night "in the zone" while writing.
I love the painting - such a great piece!
Thanks again for the suggestion to look up Gil Bruvel. I have spent quite a bit of time on Google Images soaking up the beauty of his work - I'm definitely a fan now.
Yeah... oddly there was a video game in the... 80s? Based on his work. Like, you wandered around and unlocked masks and other weird stuff.
Very surreal.
(Looks it up) Oh, 1990s. And while it was interesting, it apparently wasn't very GOOD. I only have hazy memories of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Light_and_Darkness:_The_Prophecy
Fixed up the texture on the dragon (the head had a map from the human torso, woops. that looked weird)
The skin works well with Witherdreki, except the claws -- the skin 'pulls' from the witherdreki claws a little. I suspect the base skin has displacement or something. Dunno.
At this point the remaining obstacle is documentation. ;)
I don't need a LOT, but I need some clear instructions on stuff. Then I need to pack it up ... maybe put it on my dropbox for some of you to test installation, then on to ShareCG.
I'm still trying to understand the whole geo-grafting thing. Does this have to do with the different mapping systems? Admittedly I got into all this with G3, and I never touch the other figures. I know it's an iterative software platform that's been evolving for a good while and G3 (with the HD morphs) and Iray seems to be the latest version, but the differences between versions is beyond me. I'm glad it's working out well for you, even if I don't understand it.
I'd be interested in trying out any textures you have for Daz Horse 2, and see what I can do with them if your looking for beta testers or what not.
Well, I have a very weird horse texture, at least!
I made a stab at a bump texture for the horse but I suspect it's beyond my current abilities.
The lack of painting across seams is a big hamper for that, since generated solutions just look bad.
On the other hand, when things work, I find SP just hums along with how I do things. Just that one big wrinkle.
I just went through demos of 3D Coat, Blacksmith, and poked harder at Carrara... and I just don't find any of them quite as exciting to use or oriented toward my workflow.
So I suppose I'll keep with my plan on getting SP (at $20 a month) and then suck images over to Carrara when I absolutely need to paint across seams.
Here's a SP experiment. Think I should include it?
(Each extra skin adds sometimes considerable load..)
And here is same skin on humanoid.
Sometimes, your work scares me just a little bit, Will! :)
Quick question, what exactly makes a shader procedural rather than a simple shader or shader preset? I've been playing with making my own shader presets the last few days after taking Esha's class with Digital Art Live on creating shaders. It's fun, but I'm not sure I understand the whole procedural thing. Does that just mean that it goes on seamless as long as there is a UV? or does the procedural part mean that UVs aren't needed? And, if the UVs aren't needed how exactly do procedural shaders work?
Oh, and do you have to actually go into the Shader Mixer and play around with the MDL bricks? or can you do everything from the DS Surface tab?
And, that was more like a bunch of questions rather than just one quick question. :)
Procedural basically means the characteristics of a surface are governed by some sort of function/algorithm rather than a simple value or referenced from an image file.
So, for example, you could have a brightness of color determined by elevation of a given point. When the rendering engine is rendering the tip of someone's nose, it checks and the function spits out 'at height BLA, brightness is BLA'
Most of my shaders use Perlin noise, which basically takes the position of a pixel and runs it through gremlin magic to spit out a value, which, if you send that in as 'color brightness,' ends up looking like lumpy clouds. From that you can do all sorts of funky things.
My snow cover shaders use surface normals, which are basically 'which way does this pixel face,' to filter out colors. For example, 'if the pixel points mostly upwards, it should be snow (with BLA details). Otherwise, it should be transparent (showing what's underneath).'
And yes, you have to go into the MDL bricks, which leads to MADNESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
There are a few existing procedural things you can play with without going directly into the shader mixer, but that's where most of it is.
And the problem there is that there's almost no real documentation, so you basically have to thrash around and cry and work out what the flip stuff is supposed to do.
so horrible
Which reminds me... if you don't have it, I HIGHLY recommend picking up Carrara at some point. Even if you don't render in it (I don't), the ability to model and texture and do all sorts of things in it is amazing.
And unlike MDL, the shader functions in Carrara are both better documented and WAY more 'English readable.'
Like, there's a 'Cellular pattern' option. I can drag it into Color. Now it's a black and white cellular color. Or I can drag it into Bump, and it's a cellular bump. or both.
Or I could put Color : Mixer, and put two different colors, and put Cellular into the Blend option.
Or I could then copy the previous bit and paste it into Color : Mixer, Selection 1, and then put something else into Selection 2, and then set the Blend option to 'elevation gradient' so it goes from one thing to the cellular mix as you go up the object.
Then you can copy that into Bump and change the colors to raw values if you feel like it.
And the 'function' option is very English readable.
Like I made a simple 'snow' like function simply by making a Mixer with blend option: Function
And in the Function text:
value = ny;
(That is, the brightness returned is equal to the Normal Y component, which means 'how much does this point up')
I was strongly considering buying Substance Painter, but it doesn't let me paint across material zones, which is very ... stinky.
It encouraged me to take a long hard look at Carrara, which I already own (you can often get it $60 on sale). And Carrara _does_ have 3D paint functions. It requires a little more creativity in using shaders, but, again, more documented and can do a lot.
Thanks, Will. Huh, I actually understood most of what you said, too. {{Pats self on back}} I must be learning something! :)
I think, for now, I'll stick with just the shader presets. I'll wait to get into the procedural stuff later. I'm not really that ready for messing with the bricks in Shader Mixer and going into Madnessssssss!
Cararra, I have that. I've been in it a few times. I even managed to get it up and running in Linux. Last time I tried, though, I think I broke it so I'll have to figure out what I did there. I might have to install in my Windows drive and play around with it some more. I hate to do that, though, since I only have things installed through Connect in the Windows setup since I don't use Windows that much. I'd rather get it working again in Linux since I have most of the Carrara compatible files all installed through DIM on the hard drive there. I just had to point Carrara to where it was. Carrara can't use any of the Connect files, it still has to be installed through DIM. I'll get in there again soon.
Thanks for the info, Will. I appreciate it.
One of the things that ticks me off most about shader mixer is that you can't even do a search for bricks. Like, if you discovered some cool brick that you like and want to find it later... welp, better remember where you found it or be prepared to look through EVERY FREAKIN BRICK to find it again.
(I'd also like documentation on just what the heck given bricks are or even a popup. And a magic talking pony)
This reminds me very much of shark skin. Very cool!
I think Carrara is a massively underated program given everything it does. I'm dipping my toes in the modelling side at the moment, slow going but getting there.
I would be happy to test out any skins for you as well. I have almost all of the dragons, most of the dinosaurs, and all the horses, cats and dogs.
Slight set back... since I've decided to stick with Carrara, I need to redo the skins with it. (Not really... kosher to create skins with a demo and then distribute them without buying the program, I think)
I'm probably going to just create a bare minimum to start with, then release skin packs after that.
Actually... nm, I like SP2 too much. ;)
And here's my first attempt at human skin with Substance Painter 2. I can't take credit for the hand details, I used Aging morphs to bring those out. (I'm on the fence about whether I'd rather have details like that come from skin or morph)
Note I did skin only, not eyes or hair or clothes.
The skin is looking good. I'd add a little bit of color/pinkness to the tips of her fingers and/or the knuckles/finger bends, as I think that might give a bit more realism to the skin. That is just IMO of course - I could be wrong. :)
It's looking good reguardless! :)
Good suggestions, thanks!
I'm wondering, for 'regular human,' what kinds of skins people find the most need for. Hrm.
Tweaked a little more. Fingernails are still... sub-par, but improved.
A third pass. I removed the hand morphs to show it more 'honestly.' Though I generally prefer to use HD detail morphs rather than relying on skin.
Still, despite some imperfections, I think this holds up to at least a few of the skins I've actually spent money on, so hey.
I think I need to tweak the general skin bumpiness down about... half...
Looks good so far. It is nice to see what is from the skin and what details are from the HD morphs.
I softened the knuckle wrinkles and yoked down the roughness. Will try rendering her in a different pose, for a change, maybe see more of her face.
It's looking great!
Another two. Keep adjusting the skin detail... rendered at Subd 4 to get sufficient detail to pop.
That looks pretty darn good
Thank you! Learning so much, very fast. Heh.
This week I need to belt down and get stuff in order to release. Tentaclehead, Bubblehead, plus several skins (Orca, Fleshling, Metalloid), and Beauty is just about done.