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(EXCUSE THE NOVEL BELOW BUT I MADE SO MANY DISCOVERIES : D)
Hello everyone, so here are my latest developments!
I finally made a decent outfit consisting of a skirt and a simple top, but for now, I wanted to get one piece of the outfit right, the skirt. So I exported it from Blender (UV unwrapped it but didn´t bake it for displacement map because the folds I had there were just okay) and loaded it into Daz Studio.
I also loaded a top that came with the Daz Studio to see what settings were used creating that piece of clothing and compare it with my skirt.
But first I played with the basic surface editor settings to give my skirt a color and adjust it so it would have some characteristics of cotton/polyester like material. Like no specular and so on.
Then I started to compare the settings with the top from Daz Studio and I found out that:
- First of all, the top piece of clothing consists of several pieces, it is split between the main area and the black linings, so I was thinking, that´s how they achieved the different coloring.
I wanted to split my skirt too so the waist part, that looks like a belt would have different color than the rest of the skirt and I was wondering, if I split it in blender and export both part as one obj they would import into Daz Studio as one part, right? Or should I split them in Blender, make two .obj files, one skirt and one waist belt, then load them both into Daz Studio, adjust the color/material separately and then put them together somehow?
BUT,
then I found out all the parts the top piece of clothing consists of use the same settings and Maps!?!?!?!!!!!?!!!!!! (And I was like, why separate them then?)
Which probably means that:
- I have set the diffuse color to red, they have it white but use a map in the Diffuse slot instead, so that means that they made a color map in an image editing program (or in Blender?? I don´t know, please let me know where did they make it if you have a clue), and made a colored version of the unwrapped map that would later be used to color the whole item?
I checked the map out and it´s a colored weave pattern of some fabric. Pink with black lines just like on the item.
- They also use a map in the Specular Strength slot, it´s an uncolored, dark version of the unwrapped map with the fabric pattern on it. Was that used to highlight the fabric pattern so it would be more visible in the final render?
- And then they have a grey map of the unwrapped object with black background in the Bump Strength slot. What is pink on the item is light gray and the black lines are even lighter than that again with the fabric pattern on it. Is that used to make the fabric appear a bit mote real in the final render? With the black lines being the lightest so they´d stand out the most?
So after I compared the settings, I found myself a small fabric texture 360x360 pixels and I put it into the Bump Strength slot hoping it would appear on the item and have the fabric pattern with my red color. That was a naive idea I know : D
So, I opened it in Gimp and I was like I know, I´ll make like thousands of pixels big white page and I place the scaled down fabric all over it so then I can have it more detailed for later use, BUT Gimp for some reason tends to horribly lower the quality of picture when I scale them down, in every other image editing program I ever used before, pictures were getting fuzzy only when the were being scaled up not down, so if anybody knows how to deal with this please let me know.
So the conclusion is, it seems like going for the texture map way of creating material looks much more efficient judging from the render as the top looks like it has some material while the skirt is kind of nothing interesting really but how do I do this?
I can only use Blender and Gimp, in Blender, when I UV unwrap the mesh of the skirt and then I load a material into the UV window under the unwrapped mesh I can´t click on it, I can´t scale it down, rotate it, adjust it to fit the shape of the skirt so the better way to me how to achieve creating a material for the unwrapped mesh would be save the unwrapped mesh shape as an image and then open it in an image editor and add the fabric/colors to the shape and then use these maps in those slots
BUT
every time I click on save image in the UV editor window, it does not save it with the unwrapped shape of the mesh so what would the solution be here? : )
Thanks for reading if anybody got this far and have a wonderful day!
Hehe. I'm glad you're excited. Ok, let's take it one thing at a time.
1. The mesh itself isn't split between the main area and the black areas, it's got separate material zones. You can assign separate mat zones in Blender very easily before export. Select the part of the mesh you want on a separate mat zone (let's say the waistband) in edit mode. Go to the materials dialogue on your right-hand panel. The button for it looks like a shiny sphere. Then click the plus sign, and in the text box that appears under the dialogue type "Waistband" (you should change the other material name to "Main" or "Skirt" etc. and not leave it as "Material").
The purpose of this is to make it easier to assign different shaders to different areas, for example if one needs to be shinier than the others or have different bump strength.
2. Using a white texture and setting the diffuse in Settings is a valid workflow which I use. Making a colored texture map is also a valid workflow, which I also use. It just depends on what type of details you want an item to have. If you want color contrasts, for e.g. stitches that are a different color, or a colored border as the bra has, then yes, creating a 2D texture map is the best way. If you want to simulate the look of one-color patterned fabric with details mainly in the bump and displacement, diffuse recoloring is a fine method to use.
3. I assume that's why they gave it a spec map. That's not necessary 100% of the time, but it can definitely be used that way. The specular map should be grayscale, and white areas will be shinier while dark areas are less shiny; remember that you must have a non-black specular color and highlights at less than 100% but more than 0% for it to work (this is the "glossiness" value, and the lower it is, the bigger the highlights; at 100% there are no highlights at all, never use that value because the item won't react properly to lights). If you want the item to show EXACTLY the effects of the spec map, specular should be white and glossiness around 50%.
4. The bump channel can be used that way, yes. Bearing in mind that nothing in it will change the geometry as a displacement map will, it can certainly be used to slightly raise or lower areas of texture as well as to more strongly define fabric weave. And yes, the black area on diffuse being light on the bump map means it will stand up more in render (not very much in this case).
5. You save a UV map to draw on using Uvs--Export UV Layout. Save Image only saves an image that is baked or otherwise created in Blender.
I have a tutorial on 3d painting if you get to a point where you want to try that method, but drawing on the image map in GIMP is not a bad start.
I just saved the UV map as .png but when I try to zoom in it gets really fuzzy, does it always do this?
Save it as a .png of the same size you want to do a texture for. Definitely not smaller than 2048x2048, I often go for 3072 for short dresses or long shirts. There's a setting on the left for this when the export screen comes up.
Yay I made it! The skirt finally looks more like a skirt! I can´t decide which bump to go for though, because on real clothes, the fabric pattern of cotton/polyester is hardly visible so I think I´ll stick to the left one, the one on the right has + 25% bump added to it.
Some makers offer different bump settings for different render distances for that exact reason, actually. That's just up to you.
Nice skirt you've made there, Dave. Congratulations on all your progress and thanks for sharing it all with us.
Blender and GIMP can both be powerful tools and the more you learn, the more you discover. :)
Right now I´m trying to put the rest of the outfit together.....buttons are killing me : D And then there´s shoes, I have no idea how I´ll put those together but I´m gonna give it a try!
So I made like an alpha base of the outfit and I ran the fitting tool but instead of fitting to genesis, both pieces of clothing jumped to another location far away from genesis as u can see...(didnt show her body because of nudity so theres just her hand : D ) I´m really tired so I´ll try it again tomorrow but if anybody knows how to fix this so the clothes would fit properly, I´d be very grateful!
Were they properly positioned on import, or did you move them after importing the objs?
I moved them, is that the problem?
Yes, Transfer utility works on the zeroed state of the mesh. You can always adjust them to match, export as OBJ using any preset, reimport using the same preset to freeze the transforms, and then run the Transfer Utility.
<-- +1 Mr. Kitty Cat.</p>
Thanks everyone, got it working now, still struggling with creating a button that looks like a button : D
You're making great progress! The folds on the skirt ended up looking very good, I forgot to say.
The kind with holes or the full round kind? Maybe I can offer suggestions.
The buttons in the picture weren´t really detailed just simple round, this time I got the surface of the button quite right but i´m having trouble cutting holes in it, its made of basic cylinder mesh and I can´t subdivide the central big face of it, I was looking online for tutorials on holes making in meshes and there was something about boolean modifier which I tried using but didn´t work out, I also asked on Blender forum so maybe they can help me out with this but if u have some quick tips how to cut holes let me know!
And I have no idea how to use the knife tools in Blender : D I was hoping that I could finish the outfit today and move to shoes but I spent 6+ hours just correcting the upper part so it looks decent : D
I wouldn't use knife or boolean on clothing. They create terrible polygon setups. Using a cylinder with two ngons is also not a good idea unless creating a gemstone (an ngon is a polygon with more than four sides).
When you want to make something with holes in it, the way to do it is to plan ahead. To make a two-hole button the best way is actually to create a circle, duplicate it in edit mode, and move it over next to the first circle. This will form your holes. Then duplicate one of the circles again, and move/scale it up so it's around the other two to form the edge of the button. You end up with two circles inside a third circle, is the idea.
Now you're going to have to do some manual filling to fill in the space between the two small circles and the big one, by selecting four polys at a time and pressing F. You may end up with some triangles too, but in this case that's okay.
When you've filled them all in, select the whole thing, press E, and extrude it to create the full shape of the button. You can extrude or double-extrude the two rows of vertices at the rim to create a border if you want one of those, too.
This may seem overly time consuming for something so small, but it's worth it because you can then export this "base" button as an obj to reuse in other items once you've got a good one.
---
Side note:
When making a hole in clothing, say to add eyelet holes in a corset, the best way is to delete a single polygon, select the edges of the hole, subdivide, and extrude to form a rim.
I see, I managed to create cuts in the big face now so I am trying out another method atm but if it fails, I´ll try out yours : ) One day I should do like 10 button presets and not just buttons but other stuff too because I always forget to save something and I have to create it all over again : )
Finally I got the button done! : ) Such time consuming little detail : D
You did the threads manually? Wow. :D How many polys did that whole thing end up?
I have no idea I closed that file and now I´m adjusting the skirt, don´t wanna see no buttons anymore : D
Here comes a first render of the outfit!!! Any suggestions you might have regarding improving the quality of anything and everything are welcome! When you look real close you can see the fabric but I think I might need to improve the mapping.
But this is just like how it´s going so far : D And excuse the lighting, it turned out to be terrible I placed the light on the left too low. : D
Also, I was trying to achieve kind of simple retro like look or something, I don´t know. Not something I´d wear if I were a girl but I will come up with something better next time I hope : D
And also i´m not quite happy with how the buttons aren´t reflective, maybe it´s because theres not much light shining on them right now but I´ve had this problem earlier where I placed light directly in front of the black button and in the 3D view it was reflecting nicely and then I rendered it and it was all black so if anybody know how to handle this problem, let me know!
Things won't reflect in a scene without a skydome, an HDRI sphere like the one from AOA's metalized glass shaders, etc. They need something in the scene to reflect.
I see so if I want reflections, I need to load an HDRI image to the background?
Not in the background. It needs to be all around the figure - that's why a skydome, box or sphere.
I see, so into which slot does the image go then? : )
Nice going Dave.
You could make a quick half sphere in Blender.
Create UV sphere, select half of one side and delete. Then select faces and reverse normals. Look into the sphere straight on view and UV project from view and then select fit to boundaries in the UV unwrap selection.
Then just place it behind the camera in Daz Studio. Make sure the image is in the ambient also.
Thanks got it now : ) I´m having a problem creating shoes for genesis in Blender, lets say I want shoes with slightly higher heels which cannot be created with the default genesis position as she is standing on the ground with her feet so how do I deal with positioning of her feet? Do I adjust it in Daz Studio, export it when I´m satisfied with the foot pose into Blender? But if so, if I make the shoes in Blender on the figure with the feet posed so they´d fit the high heel silhouette of the shoe, how do I make them fit the default genesis figure back in Daz Studio? Any ideas how to deal with that?
What you do then is offer the pose you made them for with the shoe. You also then need to manually edit the weight maps and/or delete toe bones, so that the entire lower shoe is painted to the foot, none to the toes.
You mean pose the Genesis figure in Daz Studio and export it to Blender with the pose? And I suppose I should also save that pose in Daz Studio since i won´t be able to make the shoes fit the default not posed genesis figure, right? And then when I create the shoes and import them to Daz Studio, I suppose there should be a way to save them with that pose so when I load them next time to genesis figure without any pose, the feet will automatically position themselves to pose for the shoe, right? As for weight maps, I have no idea what to do with these, I need to look into that.