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Facing the conundrum of trying to shape normal figures.
If I use displacement, I run into the issues of Iray displacement (which is that detail requires VERY high subd).
If I use morphs, I run into the issue that HD morphs are locked to only chosen PAs.
mutter
And back to the more weird stuff...
Did you happen to run into any seam issues using SP2 for this? Since it can't currently paint across texture sets/UDIMs, I haven't really made it a priority to use G3 in there.
Much of the skin is procedural with a bunch of localized layer masks and detailing.
With Genesis and Genesis 2 you can consolidate maps to three body maps, which isn't so bad.
If i need to I can work on maps in Carrara, which does cross seams with no problems.
And same skin on base Genesis, with some added bumpiness at lower level. I'm not sure it completely screams 'fungus,' but it's at least neat and weird.
Debating on whether to set up a skin for dragons or whatnot, but not sure it makes a huge amount of sense. Fungal dogs?
Interesting thing I've noted with some of my head geografts, is the weird shapes they can take on with various morphs.
Notably, I had transferred Death Cap to Genesis, and found it looks pretty darn cool with the Bubblehead graft.
To whit...
And, of course, Tentaclehead. Any calls for another fungal figure? Singers of Chzor, maybe?
I wasn't happy with trying to adapt fungal to dragons, but the dog worked out pretty well.
With some experimentation, I've found it's possible to use Substance Painter to transfer high polygon HD details into Normal maps, which can be fed into displacement.
The result is ... not as good as HD morphs, particularly with deep/high shifts in the mesh, but it's something.
Well, I WAS going to show off how this looks in 3DL, but the geografts turn to poo in 3DL. No idea why.
So, alas, mostly IRay only, I guess. :/
Wow, that fungal stuff is weirdly attractive.....
Heh, thanks.
Maybe at some point I'll try coralline stuff.
One of my big thrills with cgi is play of light, with translucent or glittery things. The other is changing figures in more abstract or distorted ways.
Wayne Barlowe, who is a fantastic artist, was driven to paint figures for his Darwin: Expedition book that didn't have eyes. Eyes are so basic to our appreciation of living things that stuff without it just... disturbs us at some level, forces us to approach a figure differently.
That's at least part of why I wanted to try the whole tentacle/bubblehead thing.
Here's a 3DL version of Fungal Man. The fungal skins play into that first thrill; the interesting slight translucence and SSS that can be caught in those ridges.
Figured out at least one problem I was running into with seams, which is to ensure that Height (displacement) outputs are Linear. Aaah.
I think it was adjusting outputs creatively by material zone, which obviously caused lots of strange mismatches.
Might have to go through and make sure all the previous stuff takes that into account. Heh.
Yeah, everything's on hold, I don't know if I'll get any of this stuff packed up.
I was really counting on some art gigs to offset monthly costs of stuff, particularly if I add Substance Painter... and I've gotten precisely nothing.
Been fun.
I can totally sympathize. Its been a difficult couple of months for us budget wise as well. My wishlist is growing exponentially. I should really make some more beads.... but I just want to play in studio.
May as well call ARISE on this thread.
So I'm poking around at figures and such. One challenge is that morphs are limited to Subd1 unless you are a PA, so I'm thinking of ways to capture fine detail to make cool figures. I'd heard that it's common to take a low and high resolution model and generate normals, so that the low poly figure looks more detailed.
Theoretically, then, I could create a detailed model, then come up with a Subd1 morph, THEN make Normal maps to add critical details.
To test my ability to do that with the tools I have, I used Exile for G3M as a base, because it has VERY highly detailed morphs (SubD4, even, which is more than most models shoot for).
The results are very promising.
The first face is the standard figure with Subdivision 4. The next one is at subd 1, and you can see how much fine detail is lost. The third is the same subd1 figure with Normal maps... and while it's very slightly different from the standard figure, the differences aren't that significant (IMO).
So... yay!
Of course, the big challenge is learning to make figures even VAGUELY as good as Crockett's work, sheesh. ;)
I used Substance Painter 2 to do the low-high poly Normal baking, and, again, this model isn't mine at all.
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Exile-Comparison-675291549
Very awesome thread Will, you have a good imagination for the sureal!
Working on a set of elementally-themed skins for G3M/G3F, 'Elemental Flesh'. So far I have: magma hot/cold, iron, stream, cloud.
One of the cool parts is that in many cases using the same maps can create very different looks. For example, 'stream' uses magma maps, just with different shader qualities.
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/MagmaM-Complete-hot-678398808 (note that this and the next are technically nudes. But I challenge anyone to notice)
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/MagmaM-Complete-cold-678399564
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Elemental-Flesh-G3M-Iron-677073421
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Stream-678385195
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Cloudman-2-678519307
Those are really cool, the cloud one is such a fun idea. It remindes me of being little and finding "things" in the shapes of the clouds.... I always found dragons of course... lol
Thanks! I'm trying to do something other than the typical mud/rock/ice that we already have. (Rawart has a number of cool elemental stuff for Genesis 3 and earlier, like https://www.daz3d.com/frost-giant-for-genesis-3-male and https://www.daz3d.com/rock-giants ...)
And another very ... not typical... channeling the elemental force of... shorelines!
Refining Cloud flesh a bit, plus some sfx...
Someone pointed out that there is almost 0 market for skins without morphs. And I can't figure out how to get morphs to work.
So I guess I'll shelve these plans until some day when I can afford several hundred dollars on something like 3dcoat.
What about joining with some other PA, who can make morphs for your set.
So, updates...
First, another PA pointed out that just 'dialspun' characters are still salable, so there's that. There are also a number of other options.
However, something about the lava and cloud has been bugging me, and it comes to a point made in the product suggestions thread. Specifically, that oddly irregular figures have a problem in that two figures are going to look identical. And when the 'style' is a weirdly convoluted crenelated creature, this makes a viewer go 'um, wut?'
For that and a bunch of reasons, I'm actually thinking of trying, essentially, WTP4; another version of my procedural shaders, but more sophisticated and tweaked to produce a very specific effect. My previous attempts had a more flexible goal in mind, but that made for a lot of confused users.
Maybe a very refined product might (finally) get Daz's interest...
So my first pursuit is recapturing the 'lava man' look. I've done stuff like it before, though my previous efforts, focused on flexibility, used a lot of geoshells and other, inefficient designs.
The other cool thing about going for a shader rather than a specific texture is that this shader can work on ANYTHING. You could make a lava chair or duck or whatever.
Here are three variations based on the Lava shader.
Note that the middle example retains the texture maps of the human figure. It's fairly easy to apply this to terrain, though since it's Iray displacement it relies on fairly robust meshes.
And then on a Metal Golem...
It looks terrific, particularly on the Metal Golem. Very realistic/cool.
And another, because you can also reverse the displacement.
Hmm. Think I've done enough with THAT shader, onward to cloud shader...
Really like it on the metal golem in particular
I have four lose projects I'm tinkering with.
The first is a further refined procedural shader pack. I'm thinking that something more focused on particular, complex, and specialized tasks might help finally get Daz' interest.
Another idea is interesting characters, but until I'm already a PA there are some big hurdles there. I do, however, have the paint/texture element of that reasonably well handled.
Body parts; weird claws, eyes, and other 'bits' that can easily be added to a figure without much fuss.
And this last that I've been tinkering with, that I might combine with 'interesting character dialed/skins', 'weird artifacts/shapes.'
I know other folks have done 'weird monuments' before, so... hopefully this will stand out enough.
(Presumably the Monument series would be a set of a handful of different weird shapes with each of the four textures)