Dealing with ZIP files from 3D content marketplaces isn’t easy. I’ve been asked several times how to install such content, and thought this article may come in handy for future generations.
The principle is the same on Mac and Windows, however it’s slightly more tricky on a Mac because it wants to replace the whole folder rather than merge it. We’ll see how to deal with this peculiarity and have our content installed in no time!
Sometimes it’s necessary to have a 2D Texture Template for a 3D model. It makes texturing a lot easier in 2D painting apps.
While some programmes like Marvelous Designer can create the UVs, and quite clearly show them to us, there’s no easy way to export them as a flat file – akin to the one you see on the right here.
Photoshop to the rescue! All versions of Photoshop 3D and Photoshop CC can import OBJ files, and they can not only display the UV Map as an overlay, they can turn it into a new Layer for us as well.
Here’s how to do it.
While other 3D apps usually have an option to bring thickness to an otherwise flat object, ZBrush does not. Hurra.
Here’s an extremely fiddly and imprecise way to add thickness to a flat object (such as a 2D plane) using a Morph Target trick I’ve learnt from BadKing the other day.
First, bring in a flat object into your otherwise empty document. The Plane_3D primitive will suffice nicely for this demonstration. Drag it out, enter Edit mode and turn this thing into a PolyMesh 3D.
Turn the object on its side and hit Move (right next to the default Draw).
If you held down SHIFT while looking at the plane from its side, you’ll notice that you don’t see your object anymore – only the Move Tool. That’s just fine. It’s all part of the “fun” of using ZBrush. Have you used the Move Tool before? It takes a bit of getting used to. But I digress…
Click on the little blue circle on the right and you’ll see the tool change, expanding itself to the right. That’s excellent because we’ll move our invisible plane ever so slightly to the right in just a moment.
So in my screenshot, where the green line is, that’s the side of my plane. Feel free to turn the view around a little so we reveal the plane like so:
I was modelling a chair in ZBrush the other day and wanted to bring it into DAZ Studio for rendering. So I exported my chair as OBJ from ZBrush, imported it into DAZ Studio and was slightly surprised by the result: it looked more edgy, and not as smooth as it appeared in ZBrush.
Why was that, I wondered, and – more importantly – how could I fix that?
The secret sauce is called Subdivision Surfaces (SubD) and it’s easy to add to any object or figure that doesn’t already have it applied. Let me show you how to do this in DAZ Studio 4.8.
Sometimes we need to cut holes into an object. Every other 3D app under the sun would call this a Boolean Operation – except for ZBrush of course, where this problem is solved with a (totally unintuitive) DynaMesh trick.
While the ZBrush manual mentions that this is easily achieved, they’ve missed out the part on how to actually do it.
Let me explain that here before I forget (which is probably tomorrow).
Several brushes in ZBrush insert 3D meshes into your object rather than sculpting it. Some of the default brushes are named IMM in the brush menu, but you can get dozens of others from sites like BadKing.com.au (check it out – they’re phenomenal). IMM stands for Insert Multi Mesh, and such brushes can be created …
Twitter have recently announced that they will stop supporting the API endpoint that allows developers to show how many times an article has been tweeted. Services such as Jetpack, Shareaholic or even the old fashioned Twitter Button can no longer display a number next to them. Although announced a while ago, on the 20th of …
On some systems it can be hard to read the plethora of menu items that ZBrush presents. It’s hard enough to find the one you need, but it’s even harder to do so without straining your eyes. ZBrush has a lovely solution that can help us, both for modelling and viewing menus: The Magnify Glass …
There is a convenient way to create seamless texture tiles in ZBrush using the oft neglected 2.5D functionality. Like many things in ZBrush, it’s extremely easy – if you know how to do it. The principle is just like the Photoshop Offset filter. Before we start, it’s probably a good idea to resize the current …
In Hexagon you can simply select a face (polygon) and hit the delete key, but things are slightly more complicated in ZBrush. Here’s how to remove one or several faces of your 3D object in ZBrush. First, select the desired polygons. In my example above it’s the flat side of a cylinder, so I’m rotating …
Victoria 7 is here! According to the marketing hype she’s “totally amazing”, but we don’t know much about her yet. Feeling finally better, I thought I’d give the new girl a spin and see how DAZ have improved upon the previous generation of Genesis 2 (which – let’s face it – wasn’t shabby at all).
New figures are fun to play with, and I’m sure over the next two years we’ll find out more about Genesis 3 than we will in the first few days. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
In the above picture we have a render of Michael 6, the standard version on the left and the HD version on the right. Zooming in closer we can see that his abs and knees for example have a lot more detail – as we’d expect from an HD version of a model.
Comparing the two Michaels in our viewport instead of the render however, we can barely make out a difference. Both figures look nearly identical (except for the belly button indentation perhaps).
So why is that, and how can we preview those HD details before we render them?
The secret lies in our viewport’s subdivision levels.
Take Stephanie’s Peplum Dress and Blossom Shoes for a walk on the town with our brand new Cardozo Textures: 10 brand new outfits for the dress and the shoes, all carefully crafted with love from Miami Beach!
This gives you a total of 40 Material Presets for both DAZ Studio and Poser (via DSON Importer). This is our second release on Hivewire3D, and something tells me it ain’t gonna to be the last 🙂
I’ve rendered the promo shots using Stephanie 6 (it is her dress after all, even though it fits all the Genesis 2 Females) and Stonemason’s fantastic Streets of the Mediterranean.
In the background you’ll find 3D Universe’s Jason and Amy walking up the stairs, the Millennium Cat licking his paws and the Toon Mouse fleeing in panic (and presenting the shoe compilation too). The red bike is courtesy of Carrara.
Summer Time means Bikini Time – unless you live in Miami Beach, where it’s Bikini Time all the time. May I present with pleasure a brand new texture set from Team V:
Breakwater Textures adds 10 new Material Presets for the beautiful Frilly Triangle Bikini by Nikisatez. Take your Genesis 2 ladies out for a dip in the lake or a stroll at the beach and give the Frilly Triangle Bikini a whole new spin (watch out for little green monsters though).
The set is now available from Hivewire3D.
All the above were rendered in DAZ Studio, but separate Poser Material Presets have been carefully crafted from scratch. The backdrop was made in Carrara using HowieFarke’s beautiful Secret Lake scene, and the little green critter is another 3D Universe classic called “Monsters in my Cupboard” (both available from DAZ).
Our models are Victoria 6 (left) and Lilith (right, and in single shots), featuring textures designed by my wife Julia. Right on!
Let’s see how to use those Breakwater Textures.
Did you know that you can change the splash screen / launch image that comes up when you start DAZ Studio? It’s nothing major of course, but just in case you find the default image too distracting you can make DAZ Studio launch with something more plain, as pictured above. Head over to Preferences – …
Are the viewport movements in DAZ Studio getting you down? Does it seemingly take forever to make a small camera adjustment, despite your decent hardware? Check if Hardware Acceleration is enabled – because it isn’t by default. They do this so that most hardware will work with DAZ Studio out of the box, but they don’t …
Something that’s always been bugging me is the “frost effect” that DAZ Studio introduces on renders with depth of field. The above picture is a perfect example of it. Where does it come from, and how can we avoid it? I’ve mentioned two approaches in an earlier article that discusses how to setup depth of …
I have previously described how to render DAZ Studio Scenes without DAZ Studio. This is done by rendering to a RIB File (RenderMan Interface Bytestream), using the standalone 3Delight Studio to create the final render. The procedure frees DAZ Studio up and allows you to work on your next scene without having to wait for the render to finish.
I generally use Xender for PC for my file transfer needs, but I’ve been looking for ways to transfer such RIB files to another computer which does not have the content or even DAZ Studio installed, and I think I’ve found another one!
When used as described in my previous article, DAZ Studio creates a RIB file that references temporary files as well files on the local system. Neither of those can be used on a different computer because they most certainly don’t exist. This means your render will likely be missing a few textures.
There’s a handy command line tool that will collate all those files needed to render the image. The drawback is that – depending on the size of your scene – this may result in a rather large file (1GB or more). However the approach is great if you’d like to render that super long animation for several weeks without blocking your regular office computer.
Here’s how to do it.
If you’ve read my previous article about rendering DAZ Studio files without DAZ Studio, you already know that I’m big fan of batch rendering my images. For this I mainly use the excellent Batch Render Script by Draagonstorm. It allows me to queue up several scenes, and while I do something else, DAZ Studio will load up one after the other and render like a champ.
Windows users have a special treat that can have the same script create a .bat file, allowing the 3Delight standalone renderer to work on a batch of files without using DAZ Studio. Mac users don’t have such luxuries, and will still “block” DAZ Studio until all renders in the batch have finished.
I have good news: for the hackers among us, we can create such a batch queue on the Mac manually, using a simple Shell Script. In this article I’ll show you how to do it. Some Mac/Linux command line experience is necessary to follow along.
When you’re rendering a multi-camera animation, chances are you want to change shots from one camera to another. This means that you have to render your sequence from all camera angles and then employ an editing application to stitch your shots together.
There are several drawbacks to this approach: for one, a lot of render waste will accumulate for the images you don’t want to include in the final animation. Another is the time it takes to render an animation several times – as if one pass doesn’t take long enough already.
Thankfully there’s a free script that can help us render much more efficiently, and create the whole sequence in one pass: it’s called CamSeq by the amazing mCasual / Jaques (thanks, Jaques!)
Here’s how to use the script in DAZ Studio 4.8, step by step.
DAZ Studio can handle two types of animation: aniMate aniBlocks, as well as traditional keyframe animations, much like many other 3D applications. The principle of animating objects is very simple, but as a scene becomes more complex you may find that additional tools (such as graphMate and keyMate) may be of help.
Here’s how it works:
When you move the timeline slider back and forth, DAZ Studio will calculate the movement between the two positions. All aspects of an object are animated, so with cameras it includes the depth of field and focal length, or with lights it would include the intensity. Sometimes you may need to tweak the keyframes, or set additional ones if the calculated motions aren’t working well.
Let’s see how this works with a primitive.
Material Presets in DAZ Studio describe the surfaces of your 3D objects. A simple object may only have one material zone, but more complex objects can have several. These zones are also known as Shading Domains, which are setup when the object is created in a 3D modelling application.
Material Presets are closely related to Shaders, in fact they work with very similar concepts. The difference is that a Shader describes a single surface, whereas a Material Preset describes which Shader is applied to which part of an object, or more accurately, which Shading Domain shall be rendered with which Shader.
While you can apply a Shader to any object’s surface, you cannot necessarily apply any Material Preset to any object: Material Presets are object specific, whereas Shaders are not.
Let’s take a closer look at Material Presets in DAZ Studio, how to set them up and how to save them to your library.
Sometimes we need to render images that include shadows without objects to cast them on. In multi-pass rendering for example, where we may have a background and would like to render a figure separately, the figure’s shadows can only be cast if the background is rendered at the same time.
It’s easy to do by creating a plane primitive, have our character walk on that, and turn it transparent. However, if an object is transparent, then no shadows are cast upon it. So how do we solve this conniving conundrum?
With DAZ Studio’s Shadow Catcher function of course! Shadow Catcher is a node (or brick) in Shader Mixer, which will let us do just that: render shadows without the plane underneath it. Let’s see how we can set this up.
We’ve been hard at work on another texture set last week, and yesterday night it has been released: Club Monaco is now available – a set of 12 ravishing textures for the gorgeous G2F Shoulder Dress by kang1hyun (both available from Renderosity).
Club Monaco comes with 12 textures for the dress and 12 matching textures for the shoes.
I’m enjoying the team spirit Julia and I have going on these projects: she has a great eye for textures and patterns, and I’m the technical genius who makes it all work in DAZ Studio and Poser – not to mention creating those promo renders. It’s a bit addictive I don’t mind telling you 🙂
DAZ Studio 4.7 introduced an auxiliary viewport option with an Interactive Preview Render feature. This is a new panel that can be docked anywhere in your workspace (or free-floating if you prefer). You can find it under Window – Panes (Tabs) – Aux Viewport.
It looks and works much like the ordinary viewport in the middle, but at first glance it seems to have less options. Observe please: hover over the Aux Viewport to see the familiar camera selection and drawing style appear – they’re just hidden to clean up the interface when no mouse is in the vicinity. Very handy!
Poser has an ingenious weapon against one of the biggest annoyances of 3D clothing: poke through. It’s caused by the clothing intersecting with another figure (the character, or another piece of clothing), causing undesirable effects. Take this example below: Roxy strikes a pose, and somehow her shirt and pants reveals her skin in several places. …
Wardrobe Wizard is a Python script that has been included with Poser since version 8. It allows us to convert clothing that was made for one particular figure and use it on another using a set of intricate calculations.
By default, Wardrobe Wizard will allow conversions between most Poser characters (Rex, Roxy, Simon, Sydney, etc) – but there are add-ons available that allow conversions to and from Genesis, Dawn, Victoria 4 and many others.
The script was not created by SmithMicro, but instead by PhilC who kindly sells these add-ons on his website http://philc.net (the link is also available from within Poser).
Let’s see how Wardrobe Wizard works in Poser Pro 2014.
For this example I’m using Rex’s Polo Shirt and Shorts. The items fit Rex nicely (right), but for Roxy they’re just a little bit too big (left). Just like in real like I guess 🙂
Most 3D apps usually have some kind of symmetry function that allows you to make a change on the right side of the model, and as if by magic it appears on the left hand side of the model too. It’s an important feature to have.
Marvelous Designer works a bit different because we don’t “model” objects as such. Instead we create 2D patterns. So how can we tell the app that a pattern is symmetric?
There are two tools that can help us accomplish this tricky task: Symmetric Paste and Unfold. Let’s examine both options.
The pivot point is the location at which the universal manipulator gizmo is shown on a 3D object. From this point you can usually move the object, or rotate it around this very point. Blender calls this the “origin point”, while Carrara calls it the “hot point”. I’m not sure if DAZ Studio refers to it as anything in particular.
The location of the pivot point is of strategic importance, and it may not always be where you want it to be. New primitives and figures usually have it at the centre bottom, which works well for positioning the whole figure.
It can however be undesirable when you’re trying to rotate an object (like the cube below) around its centre. We’d need the pivot point to be at a different position to pull this off.
But how do we change its location in DAZ Studio? Let’s find out.
Inspired by our Bayside Bikini Textures, Julia has been busy last week and made some textures for the beautiful Seana Dress by Nikisatez. It is with great pleasure that I give you our second ever Rednerosity product: Murano Textures for Seana Dress!
The dress fits all Genesis 2 Female characters, such as Victoria 6, Stephanie 6, Aiko 6 and all the other Generation 6 figures. Take’em out for a stroll this summer with a pretty dress and 8 new additional textures from us 🙂