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Help with BEO Arch Angel Figure

falconts1falconts1 Posts: 4
in New Users

Hi folks! I'm a complete beginner, and am trying to teach myself Daz to make book covers.

I'm struggling with the BEO Artchangel figure, and wondered if anyone has it and can help?

For some bizarre reason, the artist chose to include a playing card symbol on the chest of this alien killing machine...?!?!? It doesn't appear on any of the promo shots in the Daz store product page, but it's emblazoned across the chest of the figure and nothing I can do can get rid of it. Like, why on earth...? The mind boggles. But the figure is essentially useless with this on it, unless I pose every scene to hide it with a fist.

I'm looking at materiels, but there's only one preset for the entire chest armour piece, and no hint of any way to select or remove the logo.

Any thoughts? Thanks folks! Screenshot attached :)

Tony

Sera in White first try.png
2000 x 2000 - 3M

Comments

  • NorthOf45NorthOf45 Posts: 5,482

    Why? Dealer's choice? Luckily, the playing card logo and the the other symbols are on a bitmap that can be changed for another that does not have them. There is no preset for it, but it can easily be changed in the Surfaces tab. Best done using the Surface Selection tool to get to the proper surface quickly.

    Load the chest armor by itself to avoid clutter, that set is visually distracting. Click on the surface with the logo, it should select Armor-1. In the Surfaces tab, click the microthumbnail for Diffuse Color and select BEOARCH_Chest from the list to replace BEOARCH_Chest2a. Do the same on the Bump Strength channel, using BEOARCH_ChestBump to replace BEOARCH_Chest2aBump. And that's it.

    When satisfied with the results, you can save as a new Materials Preset that you can re-use later.

    Have fun!

  • falconts1falconts1 Posts: 4

    Oh wow, thank-you so much! That's perfect! I had no idea there was an alternative materiel hidden away in there. Is that something that's supposed to be obvious? Man, it's quite terrifying just how much I have to learn, I never even thought about looking in that menu.

    So I have removed the human symbology from my alien killing machine! Now I just have to make it a little more... human again ;)

    The other bit I can't figure out is how to make all the glowing bits glow - with the model as it comes out of the box, they just show up as sunken dark blue circles. Do you happen to know if that's to do with the lighting on the scene, or is that something else that needs changing with a material or some other parameter I'm not familiar with?

    MASSIVE thanks, by the way!

    Best wishes,

    Tony

  • NorthOf45NorthOf45 Posts: 5,482
    edited April 2021

    Well, that was a lucky break, I didn't know there was an alternate set, but that other set is used on the other half of the armor. There are two zones for the armor, each using half the bitmap, and the two are identical except for the logos. Anyway, it worked out. If not, you could have made a clean one with any graphics editing tool.

    The glow is a 3Delight effect only, using the Ambient channel. If you want to use Iray, you have some converting to do. Studio will dutifully convert on the fly from 3DL to Iray shaders, for the most part. Ambient is not one of those surfaces it can do. You can, however, convert to Iray before rendering. It is a bit involved with all the different surfaces.

    First, select any surface named Glow and convert to the Emissive Iray shader (Shader Presets -> Iray -> DAZ Uber -> Emissive .duf) by applying the shader preset. It won't keep the color, so you will have to change it to some sort of blue (or any color you like). You can select multiple surfaces at once, and apply the shader, then set the color for all at the same time. You might need to adjust the Luminosity and Emission Temperature.

    You can do all the other surfaces with the regular DAZ Uber Base shader. Use the CTRL key when applying the shader to get the Material Preset Load Options dialog. Here you can choose to Replace or Ignore the existing surface bitmaps. In this case we want to Ignore the images (otherwise they will get replaced with blanks).

    You might need to tweak some surfaces, which is an art in itself.

    Post edited by NorthOf45 on
  • falconts1falconts1 Posts: 4

    Awesome, cheers mate!

    Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you, I've just gained a daughter and haven't had much time to work on Daz ;)

    Many thanks for your advice, it was much appreciated!

    Best wishes,

    Tony

  • NorthOf45NorthOf45 Posts: 5,482

    Well, congratulations! I guess you will have your hands full of real life for a while.

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