Creating Stuff ... 'tis a journey

patience55

One filled with many learning experiences along the way. The purpose of this thread is to possibly save some people's hair. It takes a long time to grow it in.

Tools: D/S4.x Hexagon and sometimes a 3rd party program.

Materials: Seems to be one of the major "communication" issues between ALL 3D programs, modelers and stages.

Hexagon [which I do use and like - most of the time] has this thing about Shading Domains and materials. For the final .obj before exporting out, they must be named "the same". If not, saved projects will open with changes made as Hexagon figures out its own version of what to do with them all. The exported .obj will also have some surprizes.

One way to avoid surprizes, is to name all these fields appropriately in Hexagon ... or, if there be many and lots of extra mats to be washed out ... simply apply a new Shading Domain TO each and EVERY existing Shading Domain. The .obj exported out will then be given a new shading domain named by Hexagon to match the material.

That is all wonderful for "one" item in the scene.

Now ... if you have multiple items in the scene and have used any form of cloning or symmetry ... oh the fun.

One tends to rename .obj groups so everything is not named the same.

Hexagon does not like differently named .obj groups having the same Shading Domain, let alone material. And oh what a mess it can make and it coyly rearranges everything.

Upon opening the project to continue working, or upon importing that last export, wowser. It can give the same shading domain to different .obj groups ... renaming some ... giving "default mat" to some ... doing all kinds of imaginative things.

So ... one redoes a lot of work every now and then.

In D/S there is a very nice "content creator's tool" for renaming, reassigning, selecting, etc. geomtry which gives the appearance of fixing very nicely all this major-minor issues.

So the scenario: one loads a geometry in the skeleton tab and "legacy" rigs it. Creates it. Fine. Then one makes changes to the surfaces, renaming, collecting, separating, fixing, re-assigning, etc. making a rather large list of "surprizes" down to a manageable long list of materials. DO NOT DELETE THIS FIGURE YET.

I did not and am very glad I did not. Why, because the new .cr2 created was NOT all fixed. SAVE OUT A MAT FILE.

One "has to" "export out a NEW .obj file" [give it a NEW name] and rig the figure all over again. Not a major deal for a scene set ... but if one has a large figure with 100s of bones, it would be.

Clear out the skeleton tab, bring into it that new .obj file ... carefully rename all the 'bones' to be whatever it is was made for the "fixed" file [and will thusly agree with the mat file] ... adjust the bones, etc. and create once again the new figure. [make sure nothing else is open/visible/selected in the scene to cause any surface name conflicts]

Apply the mat file. If all looks well, once again export out a new .cr2 file with a NEW name.

If thinking all is well, clear the scene and load the new item.

 

 

 

patience55

From some projects one can learn many things ... like do NOT "hide" things in D/S and expect a "clean" .obj file export.

Curiously when importing its own exports back in, the maniupulator is at centre while the .obj part is not. But in Hexagon importing the same .obj file, everything looks fine. So simply did a straight export back out ... and notice the file size difference!

 

patience55

Today's journey included trying to figure out why D/S keeps zapping uvmaps when trying to load them ... or when making new clothing/hair ... for the fancy figures [i.e. G3] the bridge is the best way "out" of D/S to get something one can remake the uvmaps and then "export" that little figure out of Hexagon so it's uvmap can be loaded into D/S. One cannot change the mesh at all, same as for morphing, or one of the 2 programs [if not both] change the vertex count. Not to mention the changing of names and/or materials depending upon the entire scenario.

So taking a break from uvmapping, tried making hair. Now this was supposed to be easy but nope, once again D/S totally messed up the uvmaps. Why?

Well, the answer apparently is that if one has face normals side by each D/S is WELDING them together. Welding of course zaps the uvmaps. That might explain some of what has been going on with the failed uvmap attempts because yes there are some funky faces in those fancy figures. [going by the number of loose dots and shimmer]

Then we discovered that indeed yes, for some reason imports from Hexagon to D/S are indeed arriving in BLACK. Why so dark? Check the diffuse, it was black. It is not supposed to be black. That was via the beta but somewhere in the forums somebody else was also mentioning this so possibly it is still happening in the release - and maybe somebody could fix that ;-)

Making hair ... well now, that is something I have done before but yes the workflow is now rather um, interesting, I guess. You cannot make the hair and then parent it to the figure. Nope. It flies up into the air way above the head ... actually yes you can parent it the root of the figure and it'll stay on the head, but one needs to parent it to the HEAD.

So everybody making hair might want to check their workflow to be sure their hair stays on their head(s). ;-)

WHILE making the hair, i.e. figure is loaded, .obj is imported, PARENT IT TO THE HEAD ... then use the transfer utility to rig it and save it ... and that can then be "fitted to and parented" to the head. If it's working right, save the file. Then work on the morphs, etc. Beatnik for G3 WIP.

 

 

Lorwinith

There is a standerd shading for all 3D modeling programs and more complex shaders will not transfer, you will have to do that in daz or transfer textures into daz.

I had the same problem with Blender, and again with Hexagon.