How does this product work? PTF Grungy Threads can I get it to work in Blender?
bhfineartist_2d42f5137d
Posts: 98
I am interested in learning how these black and white grunge 'textures' work. I had been playing with putting 'finger prints' and other grime using similar looking textures onto metal spheres (working through a Blender tutorial) and I wonder how these things can actually tear the mesh or make it look so in DAZ and how to make this happen in Blender. This might also help me in getting more realistic ends of hair in polygon wigs I am attempting to make. I bought the first in a series of tutorials from DAZ on how to make hair wigs. I am trying to use blender instead of hexagon. Also, I notice the same sort of black and white ghostly images used in the eyelashes of figures. I want to know more!
https://www.daz3d.com/ptf-grungy-threads
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I don't know how the setup for this product works, but I can you tell about the "ghost"-images and how to use in general.
These are alpha maps for using in the opacity channel. The black parts let the surface of an object "disappear", the white parts stay visible. The eye lashes are small black colored planes and with her own opacity map ( such a ghost pic) you can see just the hairy parts. Make a little experiment for yourself and you will see clear:
Load two planes in DAZ and put them one above the other. Make the underlying plane red and the other green. Mark the green one in the scene tab, go to the surface tab and search for the opacity channel. There click on the little square --> click on Browse and search on your PC for a blackandwhite picture --> load it in. Now have a look on your viewport. You will see now how the green plane is cutting out on the black parts of the choosen b/w pic and you can see through on the red plane. This surface channel is very important for making holes, lace and so on. And so works that technique in all 3d programs. I think you have to put in Blender the b/w in a opacity node in the node editor... Good luck!
I did as instructed in DAZ, I had to find the plane stuff I did not know about that before, and I got exactly what I was supposed to in DAZ. COOL! Very exciting too. BUT, I exported the planes to Blender with the idea that I would look at the node setup there because I cannot find any Opacity only Transparancy and Color Ramp. Transparancy works like a png making the black transparent. I cannot get rid of the black entirely for some reason. I am using the eyelashes image because why not, lol. No nodes loaded into Blender. I used Poser settings and Wavefront Obj like normal when I export from DAZ.
I will have to ask or have a think.
Need coffee and donuts.
I think I solved it for at least a simple node set up but there is no Fresnel node or Principled Shader so the light will not act correctly which is not a big deal on small things like eyelashes but for clothing you'd want a better set up.
The color can be changed by using the node in the bottom frame. Neat.
But there still is the problem of how to combine this with hair texture. I'd like to be able to do that in both Blender and DAZ. I would like to make accessories for my DAZ figures to use in DAZ itself and also morphs or entire new characters.
More coffee and donuts.
That was simple enough.
But, like I said, with eyelashes it doesn't much matter if there is no fresnel or a really good node set up but with hair it would matter.
In Blender 2.80 you have a transmission setting in the principled BSDF, that can take an image input.
Better still, in the latest Release Candidate 2 there is an Alpha input to the Principled BSDF. If you're after transparency, as you are with eyelashes and hair, stick your grayscale image in there. Transmission behaves a bit differently.
When you're using EEVEE, you will need to go into the material tab, settings section, and set Blend Mode to Alpha Hashed (or Alpha Clip - I'm sure there is some difference but I can't see it).
Thank all of you for replying.
I use 2.79 because I can't get 2.8 to do what I want like I can when experimenting with 2.79. It doesn't want to play nice with the DAZ characters.
I have no clue what I am doing most times trying to figure out how to make the characters from DAZ work in Blender and rigging them up and all that and 2.79 seems to handle things better.
I don't like 2.8's interface or the fact that I don't know where all my most used tools are or even if they are still there or have changed in any way. I know some nodes are different like this new Alpha channel on the Principled shader.
I've built some shaders so maybe I can build my own principled with an alpha channel, I dunno. Would be fun to try until 2.8 is more stable.
There are some things I like about 2.8 but a lot I don't like I am not really sure why I need EVEE when Cycles seems to do what I want just fine.
And I don't use DAZ 4.11 the thing crashed on me and acted really weird so I went back to 4.10.
For head hair are you talking about Daz hair into Blender? or just general hair or even using Blender to make realistic/non-anime style hair from scratch? for me the diffeomorphic plugin is hit or miss on character skins but it works really well for hair and clothes. Maybe you could use it to import some simple hairs and study the nodes that are outputed into Blender?
Here is one you can look at for mine. The eyelash is a pretty simple setup. Texture with black background which is the transparent part and the hair strands are drawn out in white and off-white colors. It's basically a mask i believe with varying strengths of transparency. The pure white has zero transparency while the offwhite and other colors closer to black have a little bit of transparency with black having full transparency of course. The color of the hair in blender i adjust with the color on the diffuse node. Thats the basic concept of how a grunge texture would work too FYI. Make an image texture in mspaint with a black background and have varying degrees of grey-scale all the way up to pure white for the dirt or grunge patterns. If you want a dirt smudge to be more see-through so that you can see the clothes or skin underneath then its color on the texture map needs to be closer to black, but remember that pure black in blender would be 100% transparent. If the dirt or whatever needs to be really thick and cannot be seen through then it needs to be closer to white or maybe even pure white. So i just use the eyelash texture and plug its color into the fac plug on the mix shader. Transparent is the top plug and diffuse (or principled bdsf) is the bottom plug and i use that to adjust colors or glossiness or plug in normals and bump or whatever else the principled has.
https://i.imgur.com/ZhnUfCz.jpg
For the hair its a bit more complex as you can see in the second pic below. I organized it a bit so its easier to see. You see the top image texture? thats a black and white image similar to the eyelash mask i just talked about in the previous paragraph. See the plugs that are connected to it? its structured similar to the eyelash one in the paragraph above. The middle image texture is the hair color and the texture is varying shades of brown and its only plugged into the base color and subsurface color. The bottom texture is a greyscale version of the middle texture. And its used for bump, clearcoat and specular.
https://i.imgur.com/S4aK1iI.jpg
Here is another one that you might find useful. Its how i applied a tanline to a character in Blender. The topmost image texture is basically the mask or the outline of the tanned area. The back and white colors on the image texture were reversed though so rather than editing the image in GIMP or mspaint and making the black colors white and the white colors black i just used an invert node. The second image texture is the skin texture and its plugged into an HSV node or a Hue Saturation and Value node to darken the skin. The Fac or Factor plug or slider lets you set how strong that effect is applied right? if the slider is at 100% or 1 then the HSV effect is at max but if the fac slider is at zero the HSV and its values are there but they arent being used. So when you take the mask and plug it into the fac plug what it does is make one color of that mask transparent and the other color of that mask is non transparent.
https://i.imgur.com/ix8oc9e.jpg
Hopefully i got all that right or close to it. I just learned a lot of it recently so it was still fresh on my mind.
I don't use diffiomorphic.
I am talking about building wigs like Daz has which are just strips of mesh (polygon wigs are what they are called) with a texture. I want to build them in Blender because I have discovered that the daz wigs do not have the strips connected to the wig cap in any way and putting a cloth modifier on it makes the wig fall apart. And I want to be able to have styles that I want and not be stuck with one or two free wigs that came with Blender.
Thanks for the images. I will have to zoom in more to try to see the names on some of the nodes the image is too small even zoomed in online. I'll try my glasses too,lol.
You could give diffeo a try, even if its just to see how certain things could work. Build your own shaders and then compare them to the diffeo and see which one is better and what tweaks you can use. I've been messing around with hair on my own for a while. But the first time i used the diffeo plugin the hair that was converted looked slightly better then my shader setups. They were very similar but the diffeo converted hair might have a multiplier node here or a translucent node there. Ohh and you should also look at some of the hair tutorials for blender on youtube. There are tutorials for anime style hair, realistic style hair using hair cards or bezier curves to control the appearance of the hair and even some particle hair tutorials.
Anyways maybe i'll reupload the images in a little bit with text saying what each node is.
here you go (1) particle hair (2) cartoon/anime style hair using bezier curves (3) another tutorial making hair with curves
Here i resized the pics
https://i.imgur.com/Issbycy.png
https://i.imgur.com/UfC6vEu.png
Aw, Thanks that's nice of you!
But, I've seen these tutorials a good while ago. Particle hair sucks because you can't get long hair. The more you try to 'brush' it to make the ends lay down the more the top, no matter if you are touching that area or not, goes through the head mesh and makes 'male pattern baldness' spots. And as for the others I want realistic hair not anime. I'll check out the last video and see what that is about.
I bought part one of that three part or four part tutorial on hair from DAZ so I guess I will just continue with that and set aside Blender for a while and learn Hexagon. Blender is becoming more and more 'professional users/game makers' in its styling and even BornCG who makes great tutorials is starting to do more with games. So I was thinking last night that since I am also having trouble with the rigs I am building (for DAZ G8 models exported into Blender as Wavefront Objects) not deforming the mesh correctly in some areas and I really don't want to be bothered with trying to figure that out I will just learn more about DAZ since it looks like I can alter the figures and do UV maps and all sorts of stuff in DAZ. (I did look at some older rigging tutorials on youtube and learned some tricks to deform elbows better and such using 'socket rigs' by Dan Pro and then some other guy had a video where he showed how he just added extra bones here and there just to 'fill out' the mesh and all that worked to some extent but its a lot of work when if I could just make the characters look like I want and make them new skins like I can in Blender if I can do that in DAZ it would save a lot of effort.)
I imported an object (into DAZ) I downloaded from Turbosquid last night and got it to work even though I DO NOT understand the whole 'strength' thing with the diffuse settings and why the colors on the sliders don't look like those on the object... yadayadayada.
Lol, one of these days I will know what I am doing. The only problem is that I have a character I have been working on for a long time in Blender based off the G8 male. I don't know what to do about that. Probably start over. Bummer.
And how do you make the clothes fit other characters? That was the good thing about Blender I could use anything I wanted from the DAZ store 'cause I could alter it and size it to fit. If I dump Blender and go all in with DAZ I won't have that sort of control or will I?
Hey, whatever its a challenge and both programs are fun.
Thanks again for helping me. I know I will have LOTS more questions in the very near future. Maybe even in the next few minutes as my goal for today is firing up Hex and seeing what that is all about.
Actually, I do have a question. I downloaded a lot of low poly toony assets because I had created this turtle character, from a tutorial on youtube, and was going to write some stories and do some short animations as a hobby type thing ( I am not a professional I am an artist who started learning Blender and then DAZ because I wanted to set up realistic reference for real world paintings. And things quickly got out of control, lol. ) Could I import them into DAZ? I know the armature won't transfer over so I'd have to learn how to rig a character in DAZ now yet.
OR just buy a toony turtle from DAZ and alter it's mesh to look like I want in Hex? Is that what you call a morph?
Soooooo much stuff to know!
Alright, I go off and run some experiments now. (mad scientist laughter.)
Here are some screen shots of the moon object and Blender and Daz and such.
Well, actually you can get long hair from particles in Blender. Yes, when styling you can push the hairs through the 'emitter' mesh, I don't believe there is anyway to get Blender to prevent that. But as long as you avoid that, when you simulate the hair it is possible to prevent it falling through the mesh (with some minor exceptions). Very quick and dirty example below. (The bit sticking up is because it needs some more frames to finish simulating.)
I am talking long hair like waist length or longer. I've tried it. Anything below the top of the shoulders just doesn't work for me.
OMG you guys! I finally downloaded and started doing a few simple tutorials in Blender 2.8 and after I got used to where all the stuff was I am like well, lets import a Daz model and see what happens. And to my utter shock and surprise THE TRANSPARENCIES ON THE EYELASHES AND WIGS WORK WITHOUT ANY FIDDLING! You can even change the eyelash color easily! There are only three nodes or I guess what blender is calling shaders now one for the picture of the lashes, one for the transparency, one Principled shader and then of course the output.
Amazing. If I'd known this before it would have solved a ton of frustration and I would have jumped on the 2.8 bandwagon earlier.
I even understand now how to make and texture my own wig because of studying that simple basic wig that comes with Daz. I think it is called tralus traslous or something like that.
Just thought anybody interested in making morphs or whatever in Blender might want to know about this.
Check this out, I got the eyeballs to work too. Not only do the lashes look nice, at least when you can see them like on the girl who has thicker lashes, but the eyes look a lot better than what I was trying to fix in 2.79 and there is a nice gloss I was able to get with a simple node set up on the outer covering of the eye that shows up white during the transfering. You just select the covering with the L key, then make a new material and then in Edit mode assign that new material and suddenly the picture of the eye on the under lying layer becomes visible.
I don't like the redness so I will be using Krita to tone down the original texture.