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Comments
At about 0:52 of this video intro we see Dart walking toward the camera. It might not be easy to see - as he gets closer to the camera his veins stick out. He's gonna give a monster a whooping!
I mention the technique in my Character Design video, but it's as simple as this:
Using the usual bump maps for the skin shaders, I go to each and use the Operators > Add function and load in a vein map (There were quite a few of these found in various M4 products I collected). Then I had to increase the bump channel intensity a little to make them pop.
The magic of Carrara over Daz Studio, is that I can key frame the brightness of the vein map over time. So I started with a brightness of zero and cranked it to full as he continued his walk.
These sorts of things are great for animating muscle flexing. Instead of leaving it all to the morphs, we can add (and then remove) some musculature details and/or veins to help pronounce things along the way.
Hmm, I admit I always thought vein maps had to go into displacement for some odd reason. I hadn't even thought of putting them in the bump channel, but it makes perfect sense (why kill render speed with displacement when we don't really have to? And especially since Carrara bump is so sensitive... just throw in an add operator and add it to the bump, simply a matter of playing with the brightness of the shaders as well as the overall bump amplitude, all very do-able). Thanks Dart, you've opened my eyes. :) And I can definitely see the veins on the Dart in the video btw.
Oh, I had another thought regarding the seams issue. I forgot that I'm using not the regular V4 UV that comes with Carrara, but the Corrected V4 UVs for Genesis that apparently isn't sold anymore in the Daz store (shame it's gone; glad I bought it back when). So that might make the difference in seams. Or maybe it's just bugs in the machine, or gremlins. :)
I bet that's it. I don't have that product. But fixing the normal maps will be easy. I just have to go and do it, is all. For now I'm just not using them. Distant shots anyway so I don't even need them.