New-ish member with a question about Bot Genesis

corrose

Hello all,

First time posting here.

I have been playing with Daz 3D now for a few months, kinda teaching myself as I go.
I feel like I have the basics down very well,posing, lighting, rendering, using morphs etc.

The area Im getting stuck in is some of the texture stuff. It's very overwhelming.

More specifically I bought Bot Genesis today.
I'm trying to replicate one of the images on the item post where the genesis model has the cyborg elbow, knee and ankle joints.
I apply the attachments and of course when you render, the joint areas render with the chrome texture, and the rest of the body in the skin texture I applied.

Is there a basic setting, or way to basically have the joint's texture just apply the skin texture so it looks seamless?
My background in design is photoshop, so the only way I can really ask in terms that make sense to me, is there a way to turn off the opacity of the built in texture, and allow the skin map to show through, or does it not work that way?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

JimmyC_2009

I don't have this set yet, but you could give that a try. You will find the Opactiy slider in the Surfaces pane, just select the part of the texture you want to make transparent. There is also a Surface Selection tool (Alt+Shift+M) which will select the texture area for you when you right click. See if that works.

EDIT:

Thinking about this, I don't think that would work. Can you post an image of what you are seeing in the viewport?

You may need to apply a skin shader to the area, and we can help with that I'm sure.

corrose

See both attachments, one is from the Daz product page, the other is what my current render looks like, I just want the chrome to be the same skin as I have on the genesis model.

I run into this same issue with the female genitalia morph, it applies the morph which is a silverish-white, and the only built in textures that can be applied to this are from a different skin set and it doesn't match, this is similar to the bot issue where I wish I could almost dial back the opacity and the the original texture show through. I know it's different with 3D but thats basically what Im trying to do.

Canary3d

I can't answer the specific question about bot genesis (I bought it but haven't installed yet :) but maybe this will help a bit in thinking about textures.

In 3d, every surface of a model has a set of properties that determine what it looks like when you render. If you're used to photoshop, think of the surface properties as a stack of channels. How many channels you get, and what baseline properties they have, is a function of a "shader." Think of the difference between RGB, CYMK, Grayscale in a 2d image.

A very very basic 3d shader would have Diffuse, Bump, and Opacity channels set up. Diffuse is the color, which you can do a color picker/RGB color for or load a flat 2d image onto - like a skin map for example. Bump is usually done with a greyscale 2d image that it interprets to give a 3d texture - like the texturizer filter in photoshop, but in 3d instead of 2d and the lighting happens as part of your 3d setup instead of being baked in when you run a filter. Opacity/Transparency determines if you can see through the surface, and how much.

A more complex 3d shader would also have reflection, refraction, luminosity, and some other values set up.

Even more complex shaders have special behaviors depending on the lights you put in the scene. All of these things are properties of the surface. When you set all these channels up and save the settings with the texture references etc, that's called a Shader preset. The Bot comes with some special shaders that do cool chrome effects, and with some shader presets for more regular shaders.

So...if you have a skin shader preset that references a skin texture, you select the surface you want it on and apply the preset to that surface. Same for any other kind of shader or shader preset. You can set it up manually by choosing the channels you want to change (go to surfaces, select the surface, and then you will see a bunch of sliders - those are the channels) and adding textures to them, but the other properties/channels of the shader will stay the same. So if you put a diffuse skin shader on a surface but it's got reflectivity set to 100% in the reflection channel, you will get an interesting result but probably not the one you're trying to get.

Does that help at all?

Canary3d

Ahh, I see - that bot elbow isn't on top of the girl's elbow, it's a geografted replacement elbow (I think) so you'll need to select it in the scene hierarchy (maybe it's in the genesis hierarchy under "shoulder" or maybe it has it's own entry in the scene) and then you can manipulate its surfaces by applying different shaders.

The V5 gens is also a geografted replacement part, and it uses v5 UV mapping, I think, so you can't use a V4 texture on it - to get it to match up you need to use a set designed for v5.

corrose

Take a peek at this attachment, and keep in mind, all of this is very new to me, so some of the terms I'm still trying to get used to.
I select the elbow in the scene (you can see I have it selected)

Editor in the upper left is selected and under that are like 30 sliders to change, it's pretty overwhelming.

So I'm not sure which to choose to even attempt to load a skin texture into, or am I approaching this the wrong way still?

Canary3d

You're almost there! All those sliders are properties of the "shader," which is a fancy one designed for chrome. It looks like it does not have a channel for a diffuse texture, at least not in the part that shows in your screen shot. You want the DS basic shader, I think, or the human surface shader which makes skin look nice, which will be in your content library under "shaders" or "shader preset." In the left-hand pane, keep that surface selected like you have it, then brows to a shader and apply it. Or, even better, browse to the material preset you used on the rest of the figure and apply that. You can try it with the lana texture by looking under "people/genesis/materials" in your content library.

I think maybe the Bot set comes with a skin shader as well, so it may have a preset already set up for this, too.

corrose

Perfect! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much!

Canary3d

Hooray! Nice render!