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It's possible to separate the ear morph from the head morph using weight mapping magic, I know how to do it with morphs you import but I forget how to do it on a morph already there.. there's a video floating around about it somewhere though.
yes, as I thought, a hell of a lot of work compared to just fixing eye orientation in a figure shaping dial.
OK, so the one hairstyle sort of looks better with the Alien morph with the Alien dial reduced on the hair, however, now as an example, the hair is inside the figure cuz it is no longer following the shape of the figure. That was what I was first saying about an argument for making the ears separate, to begin with. Clearly, from the promos, Marcius never intended the alien figure to be used with hair. Again, the eyes on the Alien shaping dial, well, that really needs to be fixed, lol.
The eye orientation, I'm guessing is a simple find and remove the lines changing the bone orientations in the dial duf/dsf/whatever-file (rotations, not transits), or it is a checkbox somewhere in the ERC freeze window. Both sound like an easier fix for the PA that has the original stuff to do that with. And, only the PA that made the thing, can share that fix with everyone that purchased the product, lol.
And yes, very nice maps to work with in 3delight, thanks. Just a simple mask overlay in gimp to combine the Iray tattoo maps with the Diffuse maps, and wah-lah.
Here's a relatively simple method of splitting morphs (thankfully not a video):
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/233501/customizing-morphs-using-morph-loader-pro#latest
May be trickier to select the ears than larger bodyparts, but other than that, works well.
ugh, the flood of odd unrelated stuff the past few days, lol. I looked through that PDF for the first few pages, and didn't notice anything that looked too odd to me. I did not that the PDF is explicitly written for generation 7 (G3F), and other generations have different dials that should be zeroed out for working with and creating morphs. Overall what was able to read so far looked ok. I should probably go through that, and just point out the differences for other generations, don't need lots of gut-punch morphs, lol. I just have two other things in the works at the moment, lol.
A slight few notes on some of the stuff I've teased in renders. I am sure the fictional FWSA Sandi would really enjoy the impossible to build PC, as much many others in the 3D community could use such a system for real.
There is a lot tho that tends to make me think that such a system would actually be more of a hindrance to itself performance wise, than many lesser expensive systems with broader capabilities. Let's start with the Promise of 128 lanes on the dual EPYC systems, vs what they actually are available with today. 128 lanes divvied up to 16x PCIe slots is no less than 8 full speed PCIe slots, yet most server boards I've seen so far have four or fewer slots of any lane width, and only one has more than 4 slots.
In all honesty, I just don’t see anything close to the unicorn 128 lanes of expedition slots, and sadly, many Threadripper boards offer far better 16x slot card options than most Dual socket EPYC systems, lol. That’s not even looking at how EPYC is kind of like a locomotive engine with it's lower clocks and massive core counts, it can haul some serious weight but it takes bloody ages to get up to speed, and it will never win a drag race against a smaller faster clocking CPU. Speaking of massive core counts, I still need to dig a bit further into the Ludicrous Tesla V render card idea, lol. As of now, the only thing that makes the Tesla V remotely attractive for Iray, is the 32GB of memory for the scene, compared to the more Meger 16GB Quadro or lesser cards. I don't even know yet if the Tesla V has Iray drivers or is even capable of anything CUDA capable, compared to the ten times less expensive Quadros and Titans, lol. And given the stupidity of late over Nand prices, none of it is truly worth the cost over what we already have. And CUDA compute cards are not the only thing that I can think of that would need lots of expansion slots with lots of lanes.
I've seen PCI cards that have M.2 slots on them, and I've seen SATA control cards with lots of plugs, I have not seen both used together on the same card to save space and to get the M.2 away from the hot exhaust of the GPU cards. A 16x slot should have plenty of bandwidth for two M.2 drives and at least eight SATA ports. And the chips to do that have been around for some time now, it's just a matter of someone putting the stuff on a single card.
To do this today with what is available for cards, it would take at least 4 M.2 expedition cards, plus 4 SATA 8 port cards, plus the two CUDA compute and dedicated Display card. Nothing has that many PCIe slots, nothing. And to add some salt on that, we now have CLC pumps, RGB light controllers and other stuff that require internal USB plugs, yet motherboards have had less and less internal USB plugs put on them over the past few years.
Hi, let me know in which circunstances you have the eye orientation problem, I tried to replicate, but for me everything is working fine, so plese give me more detail about. Thanks a lot.
ah, with the Alien figure dial not quite at 100%, from say 25% to 75% is the worst. And then using the G8F Pose controls for the eyes in the parameters tab.
I've tried the other dials, even locked them at zero, and that one 'alien' dial by it' self causes the eyes to go wild. the other dials don't do it.
just did that from an empty scene with just Rapha Alien. It's like the eyes bones are being rotated by the dial so that up (Z or Y) is sideways or down or something weird like that. Oh, downloaded and installed via dim, not sure if that makes a dif at all.
I just backed off that alien shaping dial a tad, and when I went to pose the eyes, it was doing that odd stuff.
That is exactly what is happening, the Alien shaping dial is rotating the eyes. I'm guessing that was a checkbox somewhere that was mistakenly not ticked or un-ticked.
Thanks for looking into it.
(EDIT Aug 8th) It has been 3 months to the day, and I have heard nothing regarding this figure. I do not know if Marcius never fixed this, or if daz never sent the fix out threw DIM. And apparently, no one else that has ordered this uses hair or the eye pose control dials. I have therefore asked daz to remove this from my collection, and they have. I will not know if it ever gets fixed, and I don't care at this point. it is out of my life, and I am moving on.
You could hunt down these unwanted rotation values of the eyes in the Property Hirarchy pane and delete them from the original character morph - maybe its something in Rapha Head.
First select the character morph in the Parameters pane, right-click change to edit mode, then right-click the morph and select "Show in Property Hirarchy".
Next expand the Sub-Components and look if the character morph is split up in head and body. By the right-click menu can jump between the "Show in Property Hirarchy" and "Show in Paramenters" until you reach the head morph, where the "adjusted rigging" bone joint corrections are saved. Maybe you can find the Left Right Eye rotations with the Text search field. In common there should only be start- and edpoints and no rotations been saved I think.
Otherwise you could change to the Joint Editor pane and use right-click on viewport Edit>Adjust Rig to Shape. In the dialogue there is this bottom setting Adjust Orientation uncheck this. Then go to the Property Hirarchy pane with the selected character morph and delete all Sub-Components. Next you can right-click again in the Property Hirarchy and select ERC-Freeze to save the new Rig Adjustments to the character morph.
To save the changes to the library you could overwrite the original character morph with saving the morph asset in the original place I think.
ok, if that is intended for Marcius and any other PA that has happened to have messed up eyes in the past, cool cool.
I do hope to someday understand what I just read, lol. OK, I think I know where some of them tabs windows and leavers are, the rest well, ah (looks for that "Property Hierarchy pane" tab)
ok, blindly clicking I think I found this. If I'm not completely lost yet, I guess that indicates the dial that is rotating the eye. (Ah, I need to find a "You Are Here map" for that second paragraph, brb) This I will guess is where I can break things really badly, so I have considerable hesitation messing with any of them settings in this Property Hierarchy thing.
(edit) Wouldnt it be easier to open the dsf file in notepad++, search for the eye rotations, and edit it out that way? or is that stuff encrypted
? and the same thing is there for the right eye z orientation as well.
"adjusted rigging" ok, completely lost I am, sorry. (sobbing) I don't know what that stuff is.
I have to chuckle at myself a little bit, because I'm trying to figure out what this stuff is, and I bet Marcius has already found it, fixed it, and so on, because he probably knows what all they things are and where the tabs are for it, lol. Some of this stuff I know is their somewhere and just never needed to use it, and haven't even looked at it before, lol.
ah,
, I thought the alien dial was one single morph, single z-brush shape, for the entire figure head to toe.
Is that an ERC (doohicky) for an Alien head and Alien body as separate shaping dials somewhere in the luminiferous ether, or am I that completely lost at this point? Cuz there is a regular head and body dial as well, and just the one alien dial in the shaping tab?
Na, that has to be something mistaken there, cuz 'Rapha Alien' is the name of the product, and after the ':' thing is the other thing the dial is controlling. so regular head, regular body, and just one alien shape for head to toe. and the eye orientations got mistakenly saved into the controlling dial, coz none of the other dials do that eye thing. Or is it in the hidden "Rapha Alien Morph" erc deltaAdd thing as indicated by the Property Hierarchy tab.
Ah, X Y and Z all have orientations listed for "Rapha Alien Morph" erc deltaAdd thing as indicated by the Property Hierarchy tab.
Now I'm not even sure if that is just G8F stuff following the shaping dial, or if that is the dial stuff. This had to be a mistaken unchecked or checked checkbox somewhere, if that isn't just some kind of always there like thing for any active morph.
OK
I'm calling it at this point, I don't even know what to click to do any of the stuff described. I am just assuming clicking them triangles isn't breaking anything, because I have gotten a blue screen of death yet and G8F hasn't turned into a pretzel-gon. I just hope posting the screencaps of them tabs isn't violating any TOS somewhere, cuz I genuinely have no clue what I'm looking at.
My apologies for not looking further into the eye thing, I just ran into a wall of no info from Google of what the stuff was. It also wasn't my only detraction into stuff I had not attempted before. I started making something in Hex for a background prop, and someone handed me the original CAD files for the thing. If it could have worked, it would have been super nice, however, CAD programs do not produce mesh files that are friendly to 3D rendering engines to say the least.
So, I was faced with the gargantuan task of manually adjusting the mesh on the 3MB cad file to work, or go back to making it again from scratch. If it wasn’t so complex for each of the three of the props, it would easily be less than a day's work probably, lol.
So I decided to spend the day looking at various remeshers that could work with STL files, and well, none of them really panned out. Either they turned the 3MB OBJ into a 50+MB OBJ file with stupid mesh density mostly at the edges...
, or they outright failed to keep the shape of the prop.
It is in a way fair I guess to point out that all the tools I've seen are explicitly for cleaning up CAD files for 3D printing, not 3D rendering, lol. So I guess there is still a great divide between the world of minimal points to define an edge with multiple converging lines to save processing power, and the world of mesh quad density to maintain the surface shading on an object.
I have wasted a full day and change just fussing with remesh filters with no good results at all, I have a lot of stuff I need to do, so I am moving on. At least I have a very nice 3D stencil to make my crude prop from as a shape outline, I will say thanks for that. I may actually be able to use some of the parts from the CAD files, so not a complete loss, I just wasted a day trying silly stuff with the cad files.
Huge improvement working with actual dimensions instead of guessing from photos, lol.
I could probably force z-brush's remesher to get better results out of those things, but it takes some prep work.. to keep hard edges really nicely and maintain lines for material zones and stuff I cut apart the pieces in uvlayout into seperate islands and then set up poygroups from uv in z-brush and tell z-remesher to keep those polygroup edges. It's a bit of a pain but it's easier than fixing the mess afterwards... still have some fixing to do anyways, it's never perfect, but it's a lot less.
yeah, some fussing with reflection index angle can sort of fix some of that, other stuff is still a tad off, lol. Been putzing around with some of the smaller parts
Much to do still.
Thanks for the help, I was sort of hoping z-brush could help for the larger bits.
Yeah, was worth a try, but it's just too much of a mess.
Yeah messy topology is a common issue with the various free stuff geometry you can download all over the internet, no matter what file format. Somehow most of it is triangulated.
I find Blender very useful for fixing these geometry issues. I've downloaded a free electrical outlet or wall socket or how you call it and I got good results in converting this to quads.
Wall Socked Album @ imgbb.co
In screenshot "Wall_Socked_16" I was pressing space and entered 'quad' to get to the Tris to Quads function. The next one shows the options in the bottom left. The first two angel values can limit the effect of collapsing triangles and the second interesting settings are Compare UVs / Seam. I've used it to keep the hard edge between the two UV islands that I first selected and projected the UV map from orthographic view, like you can see in screenshot Wall_Socked_09 and 11. Then in Wall_Socked_15 I used Seams From Islands from the UV-Image Editor menu to create the seams in 3D space that you can see as highligted red lines.
Its basicaly the same method of splitting the the flat surfaces as UV islands and then use it to have Tris to Quads respect the UV seams.
Something tells me, that 'Projection' thing really would only work with simple 2D items, and that mesh has more to work with that just points where edges change direction like what I'm dealing with. The results do look a lot better with that then the mess I ended up with from my former attempts of using Blender filters. It looks like someone already added a quad sub-d like filter that thing, and it does sort of already looks really clean, to begin with. That's probably a model the 44-degree angle surface shader trick would be just fine on.
Sometimes I guess you can clean up bad mesh, other times, it's just better to make it again from scratch, with the mesh density you need for your work for the various feature sizes, lol. Thanks for the screen caps, I will try to figure out how to do that, and maybe it will help on some of the parts that don't have a million quads crammed into a mm of the object, lol.
And by scratch, I mean, start with a cylinder or cube, and extrude out and slice from there, lol.
I've never used InstantMeshes for hard surface retopo... but it doesn't hurt to try if you haven't yet: https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes // scroll down for Win binaries //
Then I don't remember if there's any surface snap in Hex... but in Silo, there is, though it's finicky, and it works for manual retopo (but this definitely takes a while because it's essentially building from scratch poly by poly, just with the help of the original hi-poly mess as a template)
That's about what I've been doing to an extent, lol. load up the modeling in hex, then resize/move the new mesh to fit as I go, lol.
And that sort of what I was doing in hex with a photo before getting the cad files with exact dimensions, lol.
It's just a really complex mess, and there is three of them with multiple parts
So I've been doing a part at a time in the hopes to eventually get there, lol. Knowing full well that I will need to make other props to go with the three items in a scene, lol.
Oh, and there has been a lot of thought, thinking, choices, over do I really need to line that up to the exact tenth or hundredth of a mm for such a tiny part of the thing, lol. (The hole in the center of that part, is only 2.5mm across, lol)
This is the kind of command decision I'm making for my 3D rendering version of the thing. do I want a 120 sided cylinder for small tiny part, Not really. Can I get away with 48 ridges on the nut instead of the 60 the cad model has, Given this is for 3D rendering not making add-on parts for the thing, lol.
I think I can, and it will make life a lot easier for me as well, .given most of the nut will be the beginning of three different parts, not just the nut. I guess some inspiration from Camren's reverse filming vs the texture of the water from a sprinkler system (from the film Aliens). It should 'look' fine cuz the texture is still there and it is a minor detail compared to everything else, lol.
Yeah, close enough for the ridgcount, lol. It's still 9mm by 7mm, so will due fine for 3D rendering.
There is point snapping, somewhat useful in very few situations and sometimes just refuses to work, wrong moon phase or something..
also, there is a nifty thing in the top right corner in hex, XYZ numbers for the selected item. It is not impossible with hex to note the XYZ of a point on the original item, and enter them XYZ numbers into the corasponding point on the new mesh. The downside is if the third digit after the decimal is not a 0, there is a 50/50 chance hex will move the point off flat if you attempt to move multiple points at the same time with one point not being x.xx0 at the start.
Two things happened yesterday at the same time, and I decided that after the windows update let me have the comp back, I would spend some time with Glenn who has been recovering the past month and then get some rest.
It was good to see the host of Starwars Reading Club doing well, and I am back at it this morning. BTW, them MoBo mounts, have the same exact number of ridges around the circumference, lol. There were 4 verts at the peak of each ridge plus one down in the trough between each ridge on the cad model, I really don't need that much detail for submillimeter stuff in 3D renders on a prop tens of centimeters in size, lol.
And thanks richiec77 in GN discord for the extra close up pics for the texture.
Ah, do I count 9 ridges on a quarter round of that nut, instead of the 15 the cad model has, hmmm. Oh well, lol.
8 ridges on a quarter round of that nut, after further ridge counting, that makes life so much easier. Guess them pics maybe even more useful
. P,S, that texture may be best to do with a normal map, as bump and displacement get blurred down in res really hard at reduced render scaling. I was just going to do my own costume color tho for the ones I end up using in renders (grin). What would Adam Savage say to himself at this point as he starts to make the prop from photographic refs that show the actual details, lol.
I just hit delete on the end of the numbers like 5 or 6 times to get rid of the extra digits it doesn't think I care about so doesn't show me.. it's a habit now.
Good tip, I think I've done similar when entering in numbers manually
OK, today's goal is to get more parts in front of this coffee cup, and to stop just staring at what I've already done, lol.
Since you render with 3DL mostly you could probably do most of that knurling with displacement.. though probably would end up being more work to get it right.
lol, I was thinking normal would be better for that, tho, cutting the vertex count down by a factor to ten on some parts is a significant part in it'self.
ugh, ok. I guess it's time to look at the next slightly larger part. I'm thinking of tackling bits of it and then piecing it together akin to a lego-like creation, lol. Make one bolt hole, then past it in where they go kind of thing. I'm not sure how many days it will take to get all the bits made before plunking it all together. Today has gone a lot faster than I expected it to go, probably cuz I stopped letting myself be distracted with the thought of just using the cad model, and actually got some good time in with hex.
And a thought to think about I guess, do I really 'need' to uv map then nuts and screws, or can I get away with just uv mapping the other parts?
oh, that one part is kind of a glamour part, it has to have threads, the rest won't really be visible, and I still managed to keep the vertex count down on that, lol.
I guess I should see what that drops to without the CAD mesh parts in the scene, lol.
Almost 29 Megs worth of geometry
(That stuff didn't have any texture maps at all, it's not even UV mapped, it's pure geometry, lol)
Ok, That's worth the effort right there, lol.
About 2 megs for my stuff in that scene I guess, lol. 2 megs vs almost 29 megs, for nuts and bolts, lol. Absolutely worth it for not just making it look better. OK, enough self-flattery, the most difficult grueling tedious part is yet to be done.
Yep, It's going to be one of them kind of Sundays... (Oh, and that cup size is much better than some of the shot-glass sized coffee cups I've seen in the past. It was absolutely one of them Need a Big Cup Of Coffee days)
and it turned out to be just that, lol. My day started out cleaning the coffee grounds off the kitchen floor after the trash bin decided to tip over and empty itself on the floor. Turned into a cleaning day and nothing else really got done on the Daz front.
After cleaning up the mess, and getting some coffee, I discovered a hard drive had dropped off the face of the world, lol. Yet another bad SATA power cable. As much as people complain about the knock-off 4 pin sloppy pin Molex HDD plug is for connecting stuff, I have never had one just go bad and lose the ability to make an electrical connection within only a few months like I've had with SATA plugs. Proper Molex/AMP 4-pin HDD power plugs, do not have sloppy pins that make it impossible to get them lined up to plug in, unlike the knock-offs I've had to put up with for the past ten years and change.
So I decided to clean out the comp as I was already dissecting the comp to find the bad power plug, and once I got the comp back together, well. There are some sounds, that when you hear them, you just know it's really bad, and the Bios stopped at the CPU fan warning, lol. As if the over 70dba sound of exploded ball bearing ball grinding and scrapping away wasn't a clue, lol.
So, Silverstone made a fan back in the day that actually lasted a few years, a lot of years. Lucas Oil additive can't help the fan anymore, 2005-2018, RIP. In the rush of things, the Only spare fan I had laying around I could toss in the comp was an NZXT AER F that is wilfully inadequate for the needs.
At full tilt it is ok, yet when the FX8350 goes under load, well, this is the first time in many years I've seen the CPU go over 50c
That will NOT due at all. 63CFM at a top RPM of 1.5k RPM max is just wilfully inadequate for the top end on this thing. I had to just go with it tho, as I had other things I had to do yesterday, and time was up at that point. I'll need to get another 120+ CFM 120mm fan to toss in there, after I make some TNC fan control circuits to replace the discontinued A2029 (with built-in Thermistor plug) fans.
About 20 min into the render, I thought about putting something on one of the shirts, oh well. Boys will be boys.
Hmm, ok, guess things shifted around a tad, in any case. "Boys in the Sun Outfit" on "Brothers’ Bundle", I don't have anything else at this time. And you will forgive me if I don't waste a week of my time trying to get the skydome and sun to happen at the same time in Iray, I have other stuff to do than wast months of my life with Iray settings for a single render, lol.
The render time wasn't that bad, it's just that trying to set up surfaces and such from scratch in Iray is a major PITA with the face plant time (the diving board) and I never totally bothered to figure out the environment thing for Iray (For Earth only, No Vulcan, No Othala SG1, And definitely no planet in Sextans A or B, lol). I will say, about 32 minutes is a lot better than over twenty hours on an FX8350, lol.
The making of, well, that was a bit of a learning experience, as dForce can be a bit finicky with moving the figure bones after a sim, so I could not just flip them over at the hip (that would have been to easy, lol). Using a null at about hip height with the figures parented to the null, got around that dForce oddity, and I was able to sim one thing, flip them over using the null, and then sim the other with ease, after that.
I assumed that the shirt would be more affected by the air movement then the shorts, so it was necessary to sim the shorts with them in there final orientation, then freeze the sim on the shorts to do the shirt separately.
Oh, and this was a sim starting at the final pose, not a memorized pose, so that one thing was set in the sim tab.
so, after simming the shorts, flipping them over to sim the shirt, using gravity to fake an uprush of air, they were flipped back over, and that was about it.
And that was about it. one trick to get over the dForce direction oddity, and freezing one thing while simming the other.
Oh, and do NOT clear the sim with that "Clear" button in the simulation tab, even stuff set to not be simmed with that other button, will get cleared out, and you will need to start from scratch simming Everything in the scene again.
LOL You're crazy man, I love it.