G2 Female Surfaces
twalling
Posts: 241
Is there a resource anywhere that explains.... and I mean REALLY explains the way the G2 surfaces work?
I get very confused when I go into the surfaces tab. Between "legacy" and "skin" and "surfaces" I don't know what I'm looking at half the time.
Sometimes it sort of makes sense, I can sometimes go into the "skin" setting and change around glossiness, specular, whatever.
And then I've bought some characters from vendors that don't even seem to have a "glossiness" setting under the "skin" tab, and it has more settings like "specular 2" and "Velvet"
These characters, it's hard to describe, look almost like they're "glowing" in the preview window... look more "normal" after rendering.
I've noticed on these "glowing" characters that tweaking the dials doesn't seem to do a durned thing. And, to make matters weirder, sometimes I'll try to load a different map after looking at a "glowing" one, and it'll apply a new map, but keep the "glow".
I'd really like to be able to wrap my head around this. V4 and the original Genesis were not as complex.
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For instance:
Image removed for nudity. Please see this thread for info: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3279_98/
I used these setting to go from "shiny" to "matte"
Now, here's what I'm calling a "glowing" character:
Image removed for nudity. Please see this thread for info: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3279_98/
The settings aren't even the same:
I'd like to be able to stop the "glowing" if I wanted to.
I'd also like to be able to tweak the maps myself, like for adding a tattoo. Can't always figure out where the map I'm wanting to adjust is.
Any help is appreciated.
Oh, and here's "glow" and "shiny" right next to each other, rendered. They don't look TOO different from each other after rendering. I'm just trying to get a grip on what's going on with the different textures, so I'll be able to adjust them if one is sticking out like a sore thumb against the others.
Image removed for nudity. Please see this thread for info: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3279_98/
The options on the surfaces pane will be different depending on the shader used.
Well, that was really helpful, moderator.
I **did** have some illustrations of the issue, but they got removed.
Any help on the issue? No, but by golly, those images got pulled.
Alrighty then.
I still have no idea how to tweak them and what's going on, and, unfortunately, I can't show you examples, evidently.
Put a bikini on the figures, or just show the faces, if that adequately demonstrates the issues.
Ok, I've covered up those naughty nude figures that Daz sells, so hopefully the next moderator to scan this thread will possibly be in more of a mindset to help with the issue, instead of going into "censor" mode:
This pic illustrates one texture, (and some nice clothing too). It looks a bit "shiny" in the preview window. I can easily go in and change its specular and highlight values.
WARNING: Picture contains bikinis.
Here's another racy "help me" sort of picture.
This one is of one of those "glowy" characters. I can't seem to be able to "tweak" them:
And here's a weird issue with that...
I copied the "forearm" surface of the "glowing" character on the right, and pasted it to the "forearm" surfce of the character on the left. In the preview picture, the forearm on the left character looks exactly like the forearm of the one on the right. (As I'd think it should)
But when I render it, here is the (odd) result I get. Please note, the figures are still clothed:
That's what I did, thanks.
One last pic:
Here's the "preview" window, before rendering. I copied the forearm from the "glowing" character on the right to the "non-glowing" character on the left. You can see it looks like the character on the left's arm is "glowing" like the one on the right.
When rendered however, both the characters look normal... except that forearm, which turned dark.
Why isn't the "glowing" character dark when rendered, and why is the "non-glowing" character's forearm dark when rendered? It's darker than the exact same character with the exact same shader right next to it!??!
When you copy material settings, it does not change the shader applied, it only copies whatever settings are available on the shader. The "glowy" version is probably using the AoA SSS shader, while the other is probably using the DAZ Default shader.
Hrm. Is a shader diffferent from a surface, then?
And, is there a way to switch the "glowy" ones over to the default shader?
And conversely, would there be a way to turn on that "AoA SSS" shader on the forearms of the non-glowy character in my example?
Does the shader have to cover the entire model, or can it be applied to the individual parts? (not that I can see a particular reason to make "glowy" forearms, but I'm sincerely trying to learn what's going on here, and what I can and cant do witth the materials and evidently shaders on G2)
I appreciate your help!
When you have a surface selected the shader used is displayed at the top of the Surfaces pane. To apply a different shader, use the Presets tab in the Surfaces pane, or go to Content Library > DAZ Studio Formats > [name of content folder] > Shader Presets; the main ones in that folder are "Age of Armour" for the AoA SSS shader, "Omnifreaker" for the Ubersurface/Human Surface Shader, and "DAZ Defaults". If you hold down the Ctrl key while applying the shader, you can choose to Ignore the textures instead of replacing them (leaving the current texture).
Ah ha! That's it.
Thank you very much for your help!
Whoops, for some reason I did not spot there was a page 2! ;)
A few things to consider: what you see in the viewport is only a guide to the final result. The final, rendered, result will depend upon the shader applied to the item and the lighting in use.
The G2 figures have two ways of looking at textures - the new way and the legacy way. In the new way you can select, say, Skin and Daz Studio will, behind the scenes, select all the legacy surfaces it deems to be skin (if you expand the legacy tab you will seem them high-lighted). Any changes made to setting under the Skin proeprty will be global to the skin surfaces of that figure (really suggest you don't change maps!!!!). This makes it easier to adjust levels of specularity, etc., across the figure without having to pick each one out at a time and hope you remember what settings you are changing and to what. If you wanted to give your figure a slightly duskier skin tone, you'd pick Skin,and then darken the Diffuse color setting (not that map, remember!).
There are a wide number of shaders and ways of using them in use, from the 'original' DAZ standard shaders (and that can be handled differently if the type is set to Plastic or not), then there are the HSS (or EHSS) shaders, based on the UberSurafce shaders and a specific sub-set of those. We also hav UberSurface2 now and, of course, the new Age of Armour's SSS. Each will have a different look in the preview pane and the rendered resulat can, again, look quite different to that.
I'd suggest gettting a 'decent' light setup to use as a baseline and seeing how each of your figures looks under that once rendered.
Thanks for all the help, y'all. I was missing out the "shader" portion of the equation. I've owned G2 for a while, but got stymied by some of these issues before, put her away, and have only begun working with her for real. Being able to control the shaders and materials is important to me.
I know the preview window can look much different than renders, but I didn't know why some were appearing one way, while others were appearing differently. Now I understand it was the shaders, and I know how to change them. That was definitely the answer I was seeking.
Thanks again!
EDIT: But, just to complicate matters further, I usually do my rendering outside of Studio... either Reality for "indoor" scense, or Vue for "outdoor" ones.
I'm guessing that the shaders won't port over to these programs. I'll have to experiment.
The answer to that is the same as most other things when you're working on a computer, "it depends". Reality is actually a translator to convert a DAZ|Studio scene so it can be understood by LuxRender, which is a separate rendering engine and an alternative to the 3Delight renderer D|S uses by default. It does usually do a pretty good job of converting 3Delight-type shaders, but it does have limits, and you will usually get better results if you set up the scene with proper Reality materials and lights before trying to render.
Vue is a completely different program altogether, it does not understand anything about D|S advanced surface parameters, so if you want to do fancy effects (like the sort of things you can do with UberSurface or the AoA SSS), you will have to rebuild the materials once you've imported the scene into Vue.
Lights are also very important, setting up the right lighting rig can make the difference between a good realistic skin tone and a plastic-tailor's-dummy look. And again, lights in general do not convert well between programs and render engines — Poser, 3Delight, LuxRender, Vue, they all do very similar things in very different ways. All you can do is learn how everything works in each program and adjust materials and lights accordingly.
Yep, and that's what this thread's really been about for me, learning the shaders and settings in Studio, more in-depth than I have in the past.
Vue plays with Poser better than it does with Studio, all you can do with Vue is export an OBJ and import it in, where with a Poser scene, it loads pz3 files and transfers the material settings.
Oh well, I still prefer Studio any more.