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Nathanomir β Materials Zone Tutorial Part 3
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Published: 2018-01-04 05:08:23 +0000 UTC; Views: 2850; Favourites: 37; Downloads: 112
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Description
The final part of my tutorial on making new Material Zones in DAZ Studio.Part Two is here:
Part Four is here:
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Comments: 48
Wonderful, thank you so much for your hard work sir!Β
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Thank you so much!
Can't wait to try this out at home!
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You are quite welcome. Let me know how it works for you.
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You missed some things, though if you don't use them or know about them that's understandable.
The tool pallet: this is good for seeing what all you can do with the Geometry Editor such as making symmetrical selection of polygons
Holding cntl (control key) while selecting polygons enables you to select all the ones you want; a nice side effect is that you can keep them selected while turning the figure to be able to get to more of them.
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I certainly didn't know about them! I do now. Thanks!
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Even though I don't use any of this, it was a very fascinating read. I actually understood quite a lot of it
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Hey, cool! That's the best test of whether I wrote it right or not.
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It's a really nice insight into what you guys do to create your art. Only ever seeing the end results, a lot of the process was a mystery to me.
The nearest equivalent for me would be if I posted a picture step-by-step in stages
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You should have seen me when I first started! Whoa. Turn on the lights? What's a light? There's a camera? Um why doesn't this dress fit right?
It's good to break the process down into the individual steps like this from time to time. It reminds me of places that things can go wrong, and that there is a difference between routine and commonplace. When routine becomes commonplace, that's when mistakes happen.
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This just keeps getting better!Β
One question: What is a Wearables Preset? Is that a Material Preset of some kind?
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Ah, the Wearables Preset. It's a good one. Select your character herself. Then Save As > Wearable(s) Preset. It's the fifth option down. It will save everything she's wearing and holding, including hair and lady bits and props. That's the default. You can check what you want her to have. That way, you can totally recreate the costume with one click of that preset on a new base figure. It's how Akizz and I shared Viona and Aura's clothes (okay, clothes in Aura's case). I use them as backups along with a shaping preset. Great for those times when DAZ gets wonky and corrupts the main character file or I get stupid and mess it up myself. And yes, I've had to use it like that on far too many occasions. You can select just one item that you've customized and want to give to your other characters. It's much easier than merging two or three in the same scene and changing the Fit-Tos.
You'll find it in the Presets menu along with Materials and Shaping. Just one click.
Wearables Preset is also an exceptional tool for any sort of external custom work. For instance, all three of the Ashe Girls' masks. Katie and Stephanie wear what began as the Ultra Cowl. I had to apply a Smoothing Modifier to get it to conform to their faces. But that caused the masks to break up along the material zone lines. Jessica's mask is one for Genesis 1. It came with that nasty duplicate ID nonsense. Well, I fixed their little red wagons. I exported all three to Hexagon. There, I welded the masks into one unit, and set the material zones. Jessie's mask didn't need anything but an export-import to cleanse it of Genesis 1 tags. Then, I imported them back to DAZ and went through the process of converting them from objects into wearable figures on a base G2F. Now, to get them to the characters, I saved them as Wearable Presets and just applied them to the respective ladies. Viola! No more breaking up and no more duplicate ID.
In a nutshell, a Wearables Preset acts just like a Content Creator's "Load Entire Outfit" button, except you make it yourself.
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The wearables preset is exactly the same thing; it's just been added to Studio so you don't have to manually edit/merge files to get the same effect.
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Nice! I'm not sure I understood all of that, because I'm going to have to play with it in order to understand it myself, but I imagine it's something like when I had Reality extras in my saved scenes for some reason (I guess it was left over from when I ported the figure from V4) and saved as a Scene Subset to get rid of them. Except this time it will give me the added bonus of when I load the Wearables Preset the costume(s) will be the way I want them.
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You worked with Reality, too? I'm running a render in Reality as I type this. Keeping my Reality muscles from getting rusty.
It's similar. Except you don't lose any of your texturing. It's also because you want to make it, not because the file freaked out and you have to make it.
It sounds harder and weirder than it is. Once you make a Wearables Preset, it will all make sense. And like any preset, you can keep overwriting it every time you change a character's costume.
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Oh yes. Reality was the only way to get realistic renders a few years back (at least in my experience) before Iray. It took forever and a day, but the renders came out much nicer than 3Dlight.
I'm going to try this out onΒ www.daz3d.com/stealth-siren-ouβ¦
I want to try and put the outfit on a G3 (yeah I know...good luck) and then put the red texture from this www.daz3d.com/stealth-siren-ou⦠on it, with white on the arms, and see if I can't make it look like a low cute version of LQ's suit.
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A basic body suit? I've had pretty good success exporting those and importing them back to apply to a different generation. If all else fails fitting a G8F outfit to a G3F, try that. That method doesn't work with boots, durnit.
Yeah, Reality is slow. Even Luxrender 1.6 is a slow beast. It's why I never used it for production comics work. Iray is the king of speed, even if it lacks clarity in water and glass (although that will probably change). I use Reality for fantasy art. It's handling of wood, stone, and metal looks crisper to me. Skin in both systems is comparable, even if they're totally different. Iray holds an edge with hair. One of the best features of Reality is the ability to stop the render, save it, close it, and restart it at my leisure. No worries of losing the entire thing in a Windows update.
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Actually, I found a tutorial on how to create a G8F auto-fit clone for G3F. I used it/created it this evening, and it worked like a charm. 
Combining that with your Material Zones tutorial, and I think I'll be able to get it created by the weekend!
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Share the wealth. They're releasing some outfits now that look intriguing.
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Here you go:
www.daz3d.com/forums/discussioβ¦
Look under Singular Blues down toward the bottom, and you'll find the step-by-step.
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Awesome! Thank you.
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Ok yes, now we know how to create unique outfits, add "holes," and even edit scenery, but what good is all that if you don't explain the process for creating ultimate politicians using rendering software?
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Maybe I should. We could print them in a 3D printer. Animate them. They could not be any worse.
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Cool tutorial, now I'm getting educated with new ideas for animation!
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I'm not looking at their butts. I'm looking at the empty space in the middle between them. If only I could put my head there and they slowly comes closer to each other...
*shakes head*
Man, thank you for the lesson! Being an occasional texture designer, this sure helps a lot!
Is there any chance that you can show how to rig v4 shoes to g3f using hexagon? If you know how...
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Ah, yes . The Gap of Joy.
You're quite welcome. It is addictive. Once you start having clothes and other things that don't look like anyone else's, you just can't stop.
I wish I knew how to rig! I have a feeling it's Weight Maps in Studio itself. Probably Boning and assignment of XYZ axes. Until they're imported, a pair of shoes is just an object file. It's the Transfer Morph stage that causes them to bend out of shape.
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Indeed. Your OC have their own distinctive clothing which is fantastic
Before SY made that fitting shoe from v4 to g2f, rigging using hexagon is what I saw people been doing.
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Rigging in Hexagon. I'll have to look into that.
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You've seen this one, right?
It has G3 on there now as well.
Also a trick that can help is adjusting the rigging through the edit menu.
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Yup, that's the one that I mentioned to him. Works great on g2. However, no success for me on g3.
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Hmmm, I've gotten it to work, though no lies it can be frustrating. You just have to go through the steps a couple times for it to take hold it seems. Which ones are you trying to fit?
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It's chique boots for v4 at rendo
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Yeah, unfortunately I don't have them, so I can't get them to work. Sorry about that. 
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No worries. I'm still trying and figuring out if I miss a step or wrongly interpret a step. Thank you for trying to help me.
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I did find a quick tutorial on how to make a G8 auto-fit clone for G3, and that seems to work wonders for allowing G8 stuff to fit on my G3. Perhaps the same method would work for your V4 shoes?
www.daz3d.com/forums/discussioβ¦
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It could work. I'll try it.
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Followed the instructions, tried it a few times. No success. Not sure what you mean by which one. The shoes?
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Yeah. I was going to check if I had them and could get them to fit a standard G3
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Well that's just all kinds of awesome. Gonna hafta try that out. Thanks!
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Quite welcome. Let me see what you do.
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You are quite welcome. I live in material zones these days, so it was fun to share the wealth.
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