Retired

Catherine3678ab

Retired

atoxic

Thanks.

Catherine3678ab

nm

mindsong

What a neat way to address this problem - clever!

I'm gonna go play with this.

As ever, Thanks!

--ms

Catherine3678ab

nm

mindsong

That's an interesting task - migrating the extreme morphs/ERCs from a more sophisticated figure to our custom 'conforming' add-ons (contact-lenses, etc.).

I'm poking at your contact lenses and the tutorials, and still (uv)wrapping my mind around your steps to get ahold of the 'big ideas' and the specific techniques, so I'll get back to you as I progress.

As I do so and think about all of this, I'm wondering if I'm making it more difficult than needed, and perhaps using a geoshell of the pupil with the diffuse map and mask might not work too.

That said, I want to be able to do what you're describing, and I have a good project here, so I will persist!

cheers,

--ms

Catherine3678ab

nm

mindsong

Catherine3678ab said:

Hexagon does not like geoshells - and I was trying to make something to also show how to change uvmaps with.

Geoshells in D/S, unless I missed something, involves the entire figure. I know some products make good use of geoshells but I'm not a huge fan of them, possibly because I can't do anything with them in Hexagon.

They are also fairly limited to DS, best I can tell (cannot export them to interchange formats like FBX, etc.).

Good to accomplish certain effects in DS, and you can limit a geoshell influence to limited/certain areas of a mesh/figure (like just the pupil), but I'm liking the contact idea a lot more, given its more general appproach to this problem.

Question: Philw's product 'conforms' to fairly radical changes in figure morphs (e.g. Hitomi or the A3 legacy morph) - where the eyes and other internal mesh elements distort/warp along with the surface meshes. Does the act of 'fit-to' and/or 'conforming' and/or 'parenting' naturally imply this kind of 'shrink-wrap' adhesion of the added mesh to the existing mesh, or are there explicit steps required to 'help' with this binding?

Said another way, to get these contact lenses to 'conform' to any figure-morphed eyeball changes, is there an explicit 'conforming' step required? - e.g. morph-loader-pro, etc., such that the needed dsf and other resources are written that will ensure that this behavior is reliably bound to the contact lens mesh, etc.?

Does this make sense as a question?

cheers,

--ms

Catherine3678ab

nm

mindsong

Catherine3678ab said:

Is Phil's product an entire or almost entire sphere? or does it only cover the Cornea/Iris/Pupil area?

Normally [i.e. for clothing] the normal steps taken for making the item 'fit to' work fine - within reason. For a few areas, such as the crotch for G8M, there are jcms that have to be dealt with, matched, or somehow addressed. Extreme morphs may require an additional morph for the clothing to fit over any peculiar areas - or to smooth them or whatever. [extreme meaning for morphs like Gorilla, Freak, child size, etc.]

Sometimes there still is value for to have/use skin clothing.

Sometimes it boils down to how much time does one want to spend making something. And how concerned one might be for messing up the rigging of valuable purchases.

Daz Studio has many features, some of which I have not yet investigated. There is one for transferring active morphs. However clothing usually 'picks up' any morphs applied to the figure and it is not necessary to be adding to the storage folders all the additional morphs.

No there are no additional steps for 'binding' one mesh to the other ... save that the closer the mesh is to the figure the more likely it is to work well. That being said, there is an issue with Iray and that eyesurface layer of the G8 figures ... away from the 0,0,0 position it tends to render black. So with my contacts for reflections I was trying to have it [hopefully] far enough away from the rest of the eye to avoid that but not so far as to be intersecting with the rest of the face.

Some ideas work better than others ;-)

In the upcoming tutorial notes, I'll be showing of the various morphs which apparently come into play with Hitomi's eyes. Trying to keep my work flow on the simplier side, decided it would be better to simply make a new lens for Hitomi.

Hello Catherine3678ab!

I'm sorry for mixing my messages/projects here.

The good news is I was able to complete "phase 1" of creating and adding a 'Genesis1' UV map for Philw's product, basd on your great hex notes in your tutorial thread. I didn't follow them exactly, but the ideas were plenty complete to guide me along with my Hex skills/gaps and it works - I have a new dsf file with a working alternate UV-map! Yay and thanks! I'm curious how the tutorials you are working on will read now that I've sloppily hacked my way through a method and now have a frame-of-reference. Maybe an 'ah-ha!' or two awaits me!

Philw's product looks like an exact blend of the Gn1 5_Sclera and 5_Cornea mesh surface sections, with an added expansion or offset morph like you mentioned was needed for the contact black-eye problem in IRAY. When parented/fit-to'd the Gn1 Eyeball, his mesh seems to 'do the right thing' with the more extreme eyeball morphs available to the Genesis1 figure.

While I will soon try to make a G2 version of the UV map - maybe I'll wait for your pending tutorial and take the smart way...) - I am equally (if not more) interested in doing the same with your contact lens mesh - which is why I was asking about the 'conform' capabilities when adding meshes to a figure like we're doing. (this is the project "mixing" I mentioned - same result, different approaches).

Bottom line, I think I can create alternate UV maps for existing products now - maybe badly, but I understand the ideas, thanks!

Moving forward, I'm now curious if we can (or even need to) tweak the contact lens mesh save/export scheme to allow it to follow the various Gn1 figure morphs automatically and correctly. It may do this already, so I suppose I should go try it on a Gn1 and add the Hitomi morph and see what it does.

The geoshell concept was mostly for discussion/feedback/... as a point of possibilities and interest. (zillion ways to skin cats, etc.)

FWIW, I've attached some images of the philw product and the original/alternate UVs I was able to make:

Orig Gn1 Sclera mesh (note empty cornea in front):

 

 

 

 

 

Philw's mesh - ~= Gn1 Sclera + Gn1 Cornea meshes

Original EyeSurface Product UVs (don't overlap w existing Genesis reflection images):

Newly created UV maps (now overlapping the existing Gn1 UV Sclera and Cornea maps - mostly):

(I've included these images for you and anyone who is wondering what the heck we are talking about here... :)

 

cheers and thanks. This is very useful/interesting!

--ms

Catherine3678ab

nm

mindsong

Catherine3678ab said:

mindsong said:

Catherine3678ab said:

Is Phil's product an entire or almost entire sphere? or does it only cover the Cornea/Iris/Pupil area?

Normally [i.e. for clothing] the normal steps taken for making the item 'fit to' work fine - within reason. For a few areas, such as the crotch for G8M, there are jcms that have to be dealt with, matched, or somehow addressed. Extreme morphs may require an additional morph for the clothing to fit over any peculiar areas - or to smooth them or whatever. [extreme meaning for morphs like Gorilla, Freak, child size, etc.]

Sometimes there still is value for to have/use skin clothing.

Sometimes it boils down to how much time does one want to spend making something. And how concerned one might be for messing up the rigging of valuable purchases.

Daz Studio has many features, some of which I have not yet investigated. There is one for transferring active morphs. However clothing usually 'picks up' any morphs applied to the figure and it is not necessary to be adding to the storage folders all the additional morphs.

No there are no additional steps for 'binding' one mesh to the other ... save that the closer the mesh is to the figure the more likely it is to work well. That being said, there is an issue with Iray and that eyesurface layer of the G8 figures ... away from the 0,0,0 position it tends to render black. So with my contacts for reflections I was trying to have it [hopefully] far enough away from the rest of the eye to avoid that but not so far as to be intersecting with the rest of the face.

Some ideas work better than others ;-)

In the upcoming tutorial notes, I'll be showing of the various morphs which apparently come into play with Hitomi's eyes. Trying to keep my work flow on the simplier side, decided it would be better to simply make a new lens for Hitomi.

Hello Catherine3678ab!

I'm sorry for mixing my messages/projects here.

The good news is I was able to complete "phase 1" of creating and adding a 'Genesis1' UV map for Philw's product, basd on your great hex notes in your tutorial thread. I didn't follow them exactly, but the ideas were plenty complete to guide me along with my Hex skills/gaps and it works - I have a new dsf file with a working alternate UV-map! Yay and thanks! I'm curious how the tutorials you are working on will read now that I've sloppily hacked my way through a method and now have a frame-of-reference. Maybe an 'ah-ha!' or two awaits me!

Philw's product looks like an exact blend of the Gn1 5_Sclera and 5_Cornea mesh surface sections, with an added expansion or offset morph like you mentioned was needed for the contact black-eye problem in IRAY. When parented/fit-to'd the Gn1 Eyeball, his mesh seems to 'do the right thing' with the more extreme eyeball morphs available to the Genesis1 figure.

While I will soon try to make a G2 version of the UV map - maybe I'll wait for your pending tutorial and take the smart way...) - I am equally (if not more) interested in doing the same with your contact lens mesh - which is why I was asking about the 'conform' capabilities when adding meshes to a figure like we're doing. (this is the project "mixing" I mentioned - same result, different approaches).

Bottom line, I think I can create alternate UV maps for existing products now - maybe badly, but I understand the ideas, thanks!

Moving forward, I'm now curious if we can (or even need to) tweak the contact lens mesh save/export scheme to allow it to follow the various Gn1 figure morphs automatically and correctly. It may do this already, so I suppose I should go try it on a Gn1 and add the Hitomi morph and see what it does.

The geoshell concept was mostly for discussion/feedback/... as a point of possibilities and interest. (zillion ways to skin cats, etc.)

FWIW, I've attached some images of the philw product and the original/alternate UVs I was able to make:

Orig Gn1 Sclera mesh (note empty cornea in front):

 

 

 

 

 

Philw's mesh - ~= Gn1 Sclera + Gn1 Cornea meshes

Original EyeSurface Product UVs (don't overlap w existing Genesis reflection images):

Newly created UV maps (now overlapping the existing Gn1 UV Sclera and Cornea maps - mostly):

(I've included these images for you and anyone who is wondering what the heck we are talking about here... :)

 

cheers and thanks. This is very useful/interesting!

--ms

Wonderful! Happy to hear that you got something working for you :-)

I have a good mentor here!

Catherine3678ab said:

Phil's mesh has more of the sphere than mine does - maybe that's the way I should have made it too lol ...

For reflections, I can't see there being a need for any more than what you did.

Catherine3678ab said:

I am interested in what your discoveries might be for the contact lens and Hitomi {or any other extreme morph}. I have been trying to work on possibly too many projects at once. BUT I have edited all the images for the next tutorial. Next comes an attempt to proof read them and package them into a .pdf.

Here's another something I'm working on. A bit of a face morph which will hopefully get a skin set too. Shown with Dante's DMC5 Stubble and Bentley's Brows.

Seems like a rather approachable friendly fellow! ("he" looks like another very believable - not too perfect - figure/character). Fun to see that magic as it occurs.

Don't rush on the tutorial. Of course, I'm more curious than before, having had a success to compare, and anyone going down this path later will be certain to appreciate your approach, so it will be great when you get it done, but no pressure.

Nice job on your new character!

cheers,

--ms

Catherine3678ab

nm

Catherine3678ab

nm

mindsong

There's a hidden gem. Had this product, but missed that tidbit.

I believe I thanked you for the tutorial somewhere in here - maybe over your dedicated tutorial thread, I think - but wanted to acknowledge that I got this and am quite pleased for the workflow and Hexagon tips that you detailed.

(to anyone that uses Hexagon for projects like this - even if not related to the contact lenses, the workflow and clever tricks for getting Hexagon to do a few tricky things are worth (way more than the) price of admission! :)

cheers,

--ms

Catherine3678ab

nm

Catherine3678ab

nm