Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 8
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Oh wow. Zombie Walker is the character, hair, and clothes. That hair would be good for a mechanic, outdoor laborer- anyone who is working and nice and sweaty or filthy. I also like the ragtag shirt. In Fast Grab! (Thanks for mentioning the Lace Bodysuits in Fast Grab, that told me it had changed over. It sure stayed the same for awhile!)
I'll also say thank you for the heads-up on Lace Bodysuits in Fast Grab, as those will be incredibly useful.
I bought Zombie Walker more than a year ago, (for almost twice as much!) specifically for the clothes. I was disappointed. YMMV. Attached are some quick 3delight renders comparing the untextured with the textured. What put me off about the jeans was waist/belt detail. There is no way to "remove" the belt.
The materials on the G2M character are pretty good, I think, if you're looking for a zombie...
The base camp https://www.daz3d.com/the-base-camp-part-1 and 2 are really cheap right now. For some reason it is cheaper to buy the individual pieces than the bundle.
That's a good deal. I'd take advantage of it myself if I didn't already have them.
Rich, do you have that render handy to show folks, the one you did turning thatbase camp into a landing strip? That was cool. We were talking about airports and you did that for us.
@ladair Thanks for showing that. What do you think of the shirt, if you don't mind me asking? That's what caught my attention, was the fact it was tattered.
Here it is. It shows a number of the buildings and props from Base Camp. There's also a lot of fencing I didn't use. Modular so you assemble what you want/need. The plane and terrain are not part of the sets.
Ansiko is a feature artist in the "Breathtaking" sale... add two new releases from that sale and each Base Camp product is less than $4. Act fast... lol
The shirt is pretty basic. It uses normal maps to create the "worn and slept in for months" look, and the tattered look is created with an opacity map. There is a Glossy Specular map which also has the tatters. Edges are rounded to give the appearance of thickness.
Because I do not like to distract the other thread, I will respond here.
You can disable comments and hide an image in the main gallery. Remember you can use the gallery full size links in the forum. Imagine you are uploading a bunch of test renders, you can decide if you would like to spam the first page of the main gallery or not.
Example: Planet Alpine Ready to Render Scene
Some thoughts on recent purchases:
-FaceGen: Finally getting borderline competent with it. I got into Daz many years ago, after becoming obsessed with the character creation component of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which uses an earlier version of FaceGen. So the dials for tweaking your creations are actually pretty familiar to me. Best practices: you need to place the target points as symmetrically as possible relative to each other, not necessarily relative to the person's face. On the skin tab and the demographics tab, dial down the "caricature" amount significantly for faces that look more recognizable and less ridiculous in the cold hard light of Iray.
-Genevieve 7 . Lovely morph, skin with very narrow applications, kind of like Ivan in that it only works for a character who is a very specific degree of hard-living or "seedy," Makeup option are not great. Memo to all PAs and people playing with Skin Builder 3: eyeshadow and lipstick are not supposed to be THE SAME COLOR, they're supposed to complement each other. Five minutes on google will tell you that. If you have both Genevieve and Mika, try Mika's skin on Genevieve, you'll like Genevieve a lot better that way. For all the flak Dante takes, I still think he has a better skin than Genevieve.
-Skin Builder 3: fast and idiot-proof. Fun to play with, kind of like LAMH or Optitex Dynamics without the crashes and frustration. Not likely to use it as a merchant resource, since what I want out of a skin is not what most customer want.
-Angel Armor: complicated to apply, because there's a ton of pieces, but it is gorgeous. Hope @midnight_stories makes enough money to justify making a male version too. I was a little worried that the chest decorations would come off as crass, but they looked fine on Aiko 7.
-Fantasy Shapes for Genesis 3: I like these, because they remind me of the old M4/V4 creature creator morphs, with more options. Have only played briefly, though.
-Rivertina: Only played with it briefly. Very attractive and dignified Steampunk/Clockpunk outfit for G3F. Hoping for some more flamboyant textures.
Genesis 2 clothes, bought cheaply to convert to Genesis 3 using Wear Them All:
-Chandrani: converts well, except for the shoes. Lovely, semi-authentic Indian/Pakistani outfit, with lots of pose controls.
-Diamond Glitter: Incredibly cute Steampunk/Clockpunk/Squaresoft (Squarepunk? LOL) outfit. Converts well, except for the heels on the shoes, which are so cute I want to learn more about rigidity nodes/maps just to make them work. Tempted to convert the more androgynous pieces (not corset or bustle, but the rest of it) to G3M.
-The Swashbuckler: Wow, a blouse with functional morphs for closing up as well as opening. What a concept! Very attractive take on a "female Sinbad" type outfit. Converts well to G3F, even the boots play nice. Less successful at converting to G3M-shirt keeps clipping through the torso.
-MechGear: Conversion went better than expected. Parent the mechanized boots (without fit to) to the shins, the cuirass to the upper chest and the backmounted sword prop to the cuirass. May need to hide hands once you get the gloves converted. Everything else "fits to" surprisingly well, although I will probably have to lock the pose controls on G3F's feet and lower chest for best results. Thank you, @SickleYield and @TheAntfarm! Looking forward to messing with the G2M version.
Other conversions:
-Lollipop Hair and Hadara Hair, converted from V4 to Genesis 1 to G3F. Mesh came out slightly crumpled at neck after V4/Genesis 1 conversion: not horrible, just made two very sleek, tidy hairstyles look messy. I've converted Genesis versions of late-era 3Dream/Mairy hairstyles to Genesis 3 relatively successfully, so this is a problem specific to hair older than that. Moral of the story: always parent pre-Genesis hair to a figure it's not designed for.
One of my top picks for January, where I mentioned just that.
LOL I can't keep up with day by day, much less four months ago! (Which is another good reason for doing the cumulative summary post of all the products recommended.)
But it just shows what good taste you have. Keep recommending products!
It is on the wear them all thread over in commons because someone asked there but I thought I'd share it here too. Some things cannot be unseen, you have been warned! Really enjoying the new wear them all expansion though.
I should get the zombie walker. :-)
I've been testing out some new purchases. Picked up this light box kit. So, far they work great as softboxes. Kind of like my real ones. https://www.daz3d.com/da-emissive-softbox-light-set.
And, I picked up the Sexy Skins gloves. https://www.daz3d.com/sexy-skinz-gloves Just started digging in light colors seem a tad off while darker colors work better. Could be something I've done incorrectly.
Those gloves look great Cismic! =-)
@reymouser69 don't laugh. I was tutued by a dude that looked a lot like that on my (25th birth a few years ago. ;-) ) at benihana in seattle. At first I hard no idea what to think! But it was funny.
The dude that tutued me though had a beard.
Funny image. :-)
Thanks @Serene Night. Still a student of 3D. Don't know where I want to go with my art and photograyphy. Basically I'm tying so many ideas. My wallet, well, you know how that can be. :-) So I do appreciate the comments.
Noobie type questions:
1) If I have Wear Them All, I don't need anymore autofit clones do I? (I had already bought some before Wear Them All Came out. The 2nd one is on my wishlist.)
2) If I have GenX, I don't need to buy any legacy shapes, correct? I can just convert anything I want? (I have all of GenX, except the A3/V3 one, which is on my wishlist. Now to spend some time conquering it!)
3) If I buy the Scene Optimizer, does that make Tenero's Iray Memory Assistant redundant? I was going to use the freebie texture resolution reduction script, but I like the idea of having everything so handy in one place with Scene Optimizer.
I am just getting into Iray and have done very little with it. But my graphics card is an nVidia GeForce GTX 960 with 4GB VRAM, so I'm going to need to keep scenes small, and I'm using stuff like Jackson's field with the NFXstudios Farmhouse, plus multiple G3's and a dragon or two thrown in. (My CPU is an Intel Core i7-3770 3.4 GHz, and I have 32 MB RAM, but I want to render GPU if possible.)
Also, does a better motherboard help with Iray? Mine's a bit older, in fact my RAM is faster than my motherboard can take advantage of.
I'm about to have more time to work in DAZ, knock on wood and Yay!!!
I wrote up how to rig the snake staff I posted a week or so again. Tutorial is here.
Firewarden, I'm still an Iray n00b myself so I can't help you with the third and fourth questions but...
1). Yes, the original Wear Them All products (one each for G3F and G3M, allowing you to retrofit clothes from Gen4, Genesis 1, and Genesis 2) are amazing. I remember when the autofit concept first came out with the original Genesis, and how crappy the results were. Wear Them All will help with most things. I also have and occasionally use SickleYield's Ultra Templates for G3M and G3F, which can be helpful for specialized types of clothes and have some added tools, but I don't feel like they're quite as essential.
2). Yes, you can do all that with GenX. I personally have only used it a few times because it's a pain in the backside, but I haven't had much trouble getting it to do what I wanted so long as I read the manual carefully and worked through it carefully.
Possibly if it has a faster CPU or one with more cores/threads, but a better/bigger Nvidia graphic card will definitely help. Depending upon the age of the computer and the size of various components, it may be cheaper to buy/build new than trying to retrofit. There's some discussion threads in Commons were people can give you good advice.
Thank you. I thought that was the case for Wear It All, but my OCD was saying that I needed every option, lol. My first trial with GenX was a failure, but I'm going to try again. Obviously I need to read the manual more carefully. Thank you for the hope. ;)
Thank you. I will check those out! My computer is cobbled together as I upgrade parts, the motherboard is the oldest. I bought the video card last summer when I was still thinking I'd only use 3Delight. :/
There's some kind of shortcut where you load the character you want to transfer, and then tell GenX to convert it to Genesis 3 somehow, but I couldn't find that mini tutorial last time I looked for it on the forums.
New G2M to G3M conversion: Military Dress Uniform. This was a bad idea. The already ridiculously high belt climbs almost to G3M's armpits, and goes all curvy as straps tend to after autofitting. If you try to smooth it, the tunic goes psycho. SickleYield Demuscler helps with the squiggling a little, but only by using high negative values that mess with other parts of the mesh. Worst of all, no mesh beneath it, so you can't hide it successfully in the surfaces tab. Use on G2M, or expect to do a lot of postworking. It's been long enough since I bought this to where I'm going to have to do the latter.
For anyone that still uses v4 this is on sale today for $2.62. I thought it was just the clothes but its everything, character, clothes, sword. Can't beat that! Frostbite
Wow-It comes with an Ice Throne and several crowns as well.
This is something that I posted in the main Centaur thread, after playing around and discovering that bulky male torsos tended to look odd with the base G3M centaur.
As for the centaur itself, I found it easy to work with and the couple of centaur poses that I tried (from Capsces's set) worked fine. I didn't explore Daz's Hides options very thoroughly, just tried the materials from Raw's Rogan on it, mostly because all the griping about Rogan being an "all or nothing" option made it sound like not even the materials would work.
FWSA Kheiron, in human form, was my guinea pig for some of my recent autofitting experiments, including the dress uniform. FWSA have very clearly defined canons of male and female beauty, and Kheiron manages to conform to those canons while still being something a little bit different. He has a very military bearing, and looked good in the uniform. I'm not sure whether he is supposed to correspond to a real-world ethnicity; to me he seems to have a North African/Berber vibe. I did not explore the facepaint options, or test render to see how he looked in Iray.
Eldritch Seeker: I had heard good things about its ability to autofit to G3M, and I was not disappointed. Excellent work from @Luthbel (no surprise, been buying his stuff on and off since M4 Wildenlander released). Holster misbehaves when posed, as autofitted straps usually do, but locking the chest joints to keep them from posing would probably prevent this without being too inconvenient. The lower back of the trenchcoat deforms badly in walking (basically you can see chunks of the red-colored mesh for the coat lining through the deformed, gray colored mesh of the outer coat), but the detriangulator morph in SickleYield's Ultra Templates helped reduce it to the normal somewhat stretchy mesh you see on a skirt misbehaving after autofit. Note that when loading the full outfit preset, the shirtsleeves and the gun holders (on holster) load as hidden, so as not to clip through the coat. It took me a few moments to realize what I was looking.
I am curious about scene optimizer. I would like to try it but the price is a bit high and I'm not sure how steep the learning curve is on it? Anyone bought and used it?