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Yea, I was migrating my 'runtime' folders from the Stack of parts chair over to the single object bone rigged one, and removing old object stuff in the Data path I didn't think were necessary. I discovered almost instantly that the mat presets were demanding the old part data paths. I fixed that and asked, why. If it is just the surface zone names that matter, why dose it need the UV maps.
In that exchange Fisty had mentioned it also happens with shaders if there not saved from a Studio Primitive. The shader folder was on my to-do list, I was just in the middle of making bones and rigging at the time (and morphs). And that's why it was not discovered till this morning regarding the shader presets for this chair. I do find it rather odd that a shader of all things would need a UV map for something it is Not going on, lol.
So, this was the preliminary render idea I was looking at when I discovered that the movement of the chair around the scene was all messed up (a serious case of orientation sickness, lol).
File names, yea. The rest of the universe, "recognize underscore as an alternate to space" with file names. Spaces in file names, Rains Havoc, on many different systems, and has been for a few decades a "Never do that" Physical Law. While some may be able to bend or break the law of the land, whenever you attempt to bend the Physical Laws it will always come back to bite you painfully, lol. So yea, I've been using Underscore as a word separator for a, very, long time. And now Studio wants me to perform a cardinal sin, and put spaces in my file names, lol.
And I did not totally miss this one from the former page, lol.
Yea, I'll need to go threw each one to see where a good limit is. the numbers mentioned are there by default (I did not enter them), and I do recall how annoying some things are when you need to move many different dials over the limit that was set way to low by some one else.
The high patterned cloth still needs some work on the maps (I didn't get rid of all the moire interference yet).
That was one of the things I was going to address this morning before all that other stuff cropped up, lol. It's still on the to-do list, along with dial limits.
Thanks for letting me know the mesh/cloth is having distortion issues, I had not discovered that.
It's only with 'extreme' values on the morphs that it gets distorted...partially because the morphs are really pushing things. Around 200% seems to be the 'break' point on most of the morphs. So keeping the limits below that should prevent most texture distortion, too.
Also check the placement of the Specular strength maps...while it may not matter for the Default shader, having them in the Specular Color slot as opposed the the Strength slot can do odd things with other shaders (in the default, the way it's calculated really doesn't matter where they are). As some shaders, will transfer the maps when applied, having them in the proper slot is best to avoid problems down the road.
And this one is more of the map used than anything else...but some of the joints on the arms are near impossibilities, from a woodworking view...the grain/figure patterns don't line up properly, unless the arms are cut from plywood and veneer. It's more noticeable on the 'blond' wood than the dark. It's all that straight grain that throws some of the corners/edges off. Also the front of the arms should have the texture rotated 90 degrees...
I will look at that, spec location, it's not that difficult for me to move them between surface zone locations. 150% or 200% was about what I was contemplating for a beginning limit on all the dials.
As for rotating that one 'Face', that is a problem. I looked at it a few weeks ago when I was making the UV maps for the chair OBJ files (Before anything became a chair). I looked at a few different ways to put the end caps on the arms. Because of the 45s all the way around that part, it just didn't look right no mater how I welded them in, lol. The grain of the dark wood goes the other way, and it looked better that way then the other.
In Headus, it would not be so difficult to do that, tho it would undo everything else (the bone rigging, Morphs, etc).
It would be easier to rotate that one map, then to go back to ground zero and remake the entire chair from scratch again.
You know you can change UV mapping on a figure/prop..
Because Headus is incapable of mapping zones to a full map independent of other zones. I figured I had to re-map the part in Headus, then rebuild the char from the parts again.
Is there another (less painful) way?
not sure exactly what you mean.. but you should be able to open the current obj up in uvlayout, select that part, hold space bar, and left click (i think) and drag to rotate it. If you need to cut a piece off you can use the "c" command in the uv view, it won't resize or otherwise mess up the rest of the mapping, just seperate it. It might nudge one of the resulting islands a bit, experiment with which side you have your pointer hovering over when you press enter, usually one side moves and the other doesn't.
I know Headus is all keyboard based, tho I still have a very limited understanding of all the key codes. When I open up the final chair (no back) into Headus, this is what I get.
Mind you, all that overlapping junk, is completely different zones all jumbled together. and I have yet to fugue out what that 'Material' thing is for (clicking dose nothing there).
Then there is the matter of getting all the Morphs and rigging from the old chair onto the new UV mapped OBJ. I looked briefly, and after reading a few posts, managed to give myself a headache from trying to translate one post.
You can change the UV map for a figure that's already made.. you may have noticed Genesis 1,2,3 have MANY of them, for some reason Daz feels it necesary to have a new one for every character they make. You can save it out and leave it as is, or you can do some code hacking and make it the new default which I've had to do a few times. Since you're setting it up to use shaders you'd need to make it the dafault 'cause applying a shader sets it back to default unless the shader's specifically set to call the new one, in which case it might do weird things if applied to other items.
But all that's rather advanced stuff I don't have time to walk you through right now... Burl wood is good. /nod
Also you can create another material zone for the ends...and then just do something different with them.
I did think of that as well, and then adding the new zone to all the mat-presets would not be to difficult. Using that brush in studio is the difficult thing, and Hex loves loosing UV maps, lol.
I just looked at the test render further up, Now I remember what my thinking was. It is three parts (Tip, middle, bottom) with the grain going different ways for added strength, not a single block of wood. The wood grain map for the Blond is going the wrong way (needs to be vertical not horizontal in the image file).
(EDIT)
Another option is doing up a map in GIMP using the UV maps (the UV maps are in that zip). It's a thought.
Like I said...it's fine for plywood or I guess a built up block. But a wood texture with less parallel lines, more like the burl, would probably be much easier to deal with, all around. Try some flame, figured, curly or birds-eye maple.
That's what I kind of did. I set a vertical on the back, horizontal on the arms, and Burl on the base.
I'm also still working on the cloth texture.
hence all them almost duplicate bump files (I'm not just doing the bump).
And I have Headus working on a "Possibility", lol. The one thing I don't have, if I zoned it up more, is a map looking down at the top of a cut off tree stump (end grain), and I'm not sure it would help much given the limits of UV mapping all them concave edges together.
That looks good by the way. I didn't get a chance to do a set of lacquered wood mats yet (I did make one scene with it in there already).
Here's another one...this is an elm burl (and it's not as seamless as I thought it was...
)
That 'Elm Burl' actually looked more like fossilized stromatolites, lol. (Image for reference only)
I agree it dose look really cool, and I had thought about stone. Tho I got nudged to do something different, and I already have some stone lying around, lol..
Stone you say?
That looks completely and utterly uncomfortable, lol. It also doesn't look like a chair any more, possibly a flower stand or garden decoration (I can see that).
My lack of progress while I was sleeping, lol.
I know it dose not look like much, tho that is a good thing this time, lol.
Minimal progress with reducing file sizes and adding a few wood grain options. It's like trying to compress the incompressible, and every time I try something to a wood grain file it explodes to over ten megs in size.
Also the Mahogany only has a straight grain option, so no Burl of that, sorry.
Well, I'm off to monkey with the shader presets some more. And then all the Mat presets that also need to be fixed after the image file changes, lol.
It's not that. GIMP is insistent on saving 48bit PNG files for only a thousand unique colors or so. Most of them don't even have 256 colors (8bit per pixel) in them, lol.
The five above do what I need, and some. Also I swapped out some JPG files for PNG ones as there smaller (in MB, not pixels), and that broke most of the other stuff, lol.
A great 'insider look' into content development =)
Oh BTW - I don't know how well Iray texture built-in optimiser works, but with 3Delight, texture size doesn't matter that much: the tdlmake utility creates mipmapped files, and the renderer intelligently chooses the right mip level for the shot, and texture management is very efficient overall. So no real need to carefully pre-optimise manually.
I did not know that. I was looking at a total ZIP size that was getting out of hand, lol. I have the original PNG files that are not that bad, tho I added some contrast and brightness to them... and all Mega-size happened to them. Then I figured the 'Lossy' nature of JPG would at least make things a little better, and the Megs just kept increasing (it also added more colors in the form of JPG noise), lol.
Now honestly, I was also looking at my cloth files and asking if I really needed all that color depth for something containing nine colors, lol. Attached is that '56 color' Mahogany map that I'm playing with the shader settings as of now.
(EDIT) And as for "Insider stuff", lol. Some fun can be found when trying to decide what to call some things, like this color.
Mud, gold, mustard, orange, bla, lol. 192R 128G 32B, whatever it is called, lol.
Did you want me to resave soemthing for ya then? Photoshop has a really good save for web option with lots of perameters.
Sent you the zip with the 'map folder' as I didn't want us to be duplicating work. If PS can find a kB or two without changing file types, I would be impressed. Everything else I tried either made the maps junk, or larger, lol.
I just finished fixing all the shader presets and the chair wood ones, and am now plugging away at the leather ones.
Morning. So I have another really good example of ridiculous file format waste, tho this one is not TDL-make and I doubt it matters that much in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure Studio will like any other 'container bit-per-pixel' size for icons or not.
So, I made the Dial icons in MS Paint, and then I used GIMP to place the icon in a 39x39 pixel transparent canvas. The original BMP was 24bpp (24 bits per pixel), and GIMP decided it would use a 32bpp format for the grandiose four colors in the image, lol.
Now this is a rather ridiculous example, tho the file info shows plainly what I was dealing with on the much larger texture map images. As for this example weighing in at a whapping 225 bytes, the disk allocation unit size is the limiting factor with these icons, lol. (in fact, the 256 color look-up-table in a 8bit color image file is larger, lol.)
Totals. Data (morphs and geometry) 2.52MB. Props folder (DUF files and icons) 5.59MB. Runtime Textures (texture image files) 15.5MB. The 'zExtras' folders, I could probably cut down that 1.26MB, tho GIMP did let me know that it is unwilling to do many things to images that are not RGB (at least 24bit), so I'm good with that.
What Fisty did to the Texture file MB sizes is incredible. That folder with the added Burl textures had climbed to over 30MB (for just the texture files), and I had managed to back it off to around 25MB. Fisty puled out the keyboard skeletons and candles and managed to nock that down to around 15MB.
Oh, and a little funny why I'm so worried about the zip size (aside from ShareCG policies), My Dropbox filled up. I started out with 1.7GB of stuff in shared work folders on the second of this month. And then I uploaded this chair to my Drop box. Somehow I ate up 300MB, and I don't know where it went, lol.
I don't even know yet, IF, I have 20MB there to upload this new zip. Yes, I actually filled a Dropbox with a Chair, lol.
(I did find the more detailed sizes used after some digging at there site.) I have room.
I've been following your thread for a long while. I have to say You have some awesome cheats and work around. very helpful , thank you for sharing them :)
Thank you Ivy, and I am behind on checking out the past few weeks of renders you put up on 'G'. The ones I've had a chance to check out are incredible.
At this time, I'm going threw some of the morphs, and making sure I didn't set the limits to low.
There is nothing more annoying for a user (been there myself), when you need to click a dozen things on multiple dials just to get the thing to do what you need for a scene. A good example is a shader (AoA or Omni, can't remember what one at this instant), where the tiling limit is set to ten by default. When you have a forty by forty foot room to put one foot tiles on the floor, it gets incredibly obnoxious to click threw a dozen things just to set the tiling to 40 x 40, lol.
So, from the looks of it, 200% was a good limit for most of it, Thanks MJC. I am finding the order of the dials in the shaping tab, is not as intuitive as I had hoped it would order them.
It orders them by label name, characters, numbers, then letters.. so if you have one thing you really want at the top put a " ! " in front of it. If you want everything in a specific order number them 01 to 30 or whatever in front of the morph's label (don't change "name" field, as mentioned before, that's the back end file and you'll end up with duplicates.)
That's the other thing, I'm not sure what order is best for the morphs. I'm still rolling that around in my mind.
I guess in a way, it doesn't matter, given the dial names, and the little icons that show where each one is.
I know, how did I get that really cool color
Time for a little silliness after the past few days of grinding away at making this chair. Dose the chair work with figures other then Generation 7 figures, lol.
Well, judging by Sabby-Carlene for Victoria 6 (Fw Eve ears), and ArchaeopteryxDR, I would say this chair is compatible with most figures that work in Daz Studio. I make no promise or guarantee that dresses or skirts will cooperate at all with sit poses, lol.
I also have no clue what is up with the AoA rocks in the back ground. Every time I do a spot render of them, there broken in a different way...
Second render in Progress. Whatever, throwing that rock thing in the waste bin and moving on.
I think this one came out much better
, Higher res ver in progress for DA (when done rendering).