'Immortal Heroes Huli Jing' bugged on Kota 8.1 tail?

Aethyr

Hi there,

Not sure if anyone else is running into this issue, but for me using this product on Kota 8.1's tail makes it look thin, like it's missing a part of the model; this does not happen with the regular Iray materials, and occurs even with the density set to max. It doesn't look like it does in the promos, and all I can think is maybe there's a bug somewhere.

I've filed a bug report as well but I thought I'd post here in case anyone else had experienced the same issue. I haven't tested it with Kiko 8.1 to see if the problem occurs with her tail as well.

--A

Gordig

Are you talking about full renders, Iray preview, or just the viewport?

Aethyr

Full renders. I know Iray Preview (and the viewport, for that matter) can be a bit weird with hair/fur at times. [Edit: It does also look like there's something missing in Iray Preview and the viewport, compared to the standard Iray materials that come with Kota, for however much that counts.]

I've tried deleting and reapplying the tail and the Huli Jing presets in case I'd messed up a setting somewhere, but the result is the same.

Gordig

Looks like the product uses the older dual-lobe shader, so it can't be an issue with OmniHair. The best guess that I can offer is that one of the presets somehow deactivated PR hairs, which you can check in the Parameters pane with the hair itself selected.

nemesis10

I tried it, altered the red color a tiny bit for a better picture, it worked so, let me know which preset you tried

Aethyr

Okay, posting examples which will hopefully clarify the issue I'm having. Very quick, low-convergence renders just to explain the point.

1st image is the original Iray materials that come with Kota. As you can see, the tail looks full and thick.

2nd image is the Huli Jing materials, this is with the orange preset but it doesn't seem to make any difference which one I use. The PR hairs are enabled so it isn't that. You can see that the tail looks much more thin and wispy, which is not what is shown in the product promo images and clearly not what is intended.

As mentioned I tried loading a new instance of the tail and applying the Huli Jing presets to that, just in case I had somehow made an error in the prior setup of the scene.

In testing this, I spotted that, for some reason, the Huli Jing presets make the tail itself (not the tail fur) invisible in the render, which I initially thought was causing the thinness issue.

I tested Kiko, and the same thing happens where the tail (not the fur) becomes invisible in the render, but it still transfers the maps to the tail itself, which doesn't happen with Kota. Also, the tail looks thick and full even with only the tail fur visible on Kiko (3rd image), which leads back to my initial suspicion that Kota's presets are bugged somehow. I did try copying the shader from Kiko's tail onto Kota's, which seemed to work (4th image), but it seems like a lot of faff for something that should have just worked properly in the first place.

The tails even look different in the viewport when the correct version of the shader is present; I tried to troubleshoot exactly what was different, but that shader has so many parameters that it would have taken me forever to A/B them all. Unfortunately this means that the only way, for Kota at least, to achieve the look in the promo images is with a workaround, with the most effective method I found to be copying the shader settings from Kiko's tail fur, as it doesn't look like that 'out of the box'. It's just a pain to have to load G8F and Kiko's tail in order to copy the shader.

I also tried using the Genesis 8 Cross-Figure Resource Kit to make Kiko's tail fit to Kota, thus saving a few steps, but that didn't seem to want to play nice. I don't think the tail is a geograft so it should work, but that's another issue entirely.

The ear fur presets, however, seem to work flawlessly on both characters without any tweaking needed, so at least there's that.

Canary3d

Hi! I'm the creator of this product and I'm sorry it's behaving badly for you - it definitely should not be doing this! Just checking: do you have the tail fit to a Genesis 8.1 male figure (either Kota or another 8.1 guy)? For an G8M figure the presets don't load correctly because they are hierarchical presets that are looking for G8_1M.  Next question: when you use a preset that isn't orange, does the color of the tail fur change? I just want to determine if the issue is that it's leaving the original setting on there and making the tail invisible, or if it's loading the color without loading the fur-generation part of the preset. Can you try a blue or a purple one?  Thanks! Meanwhile, I'll download the store installer and test it in a fresh library and see if I can duplicate the problem on my end. 

 

Canary3d

Hi again @Aethyr, I tried it out and I think it's just that it's rendering with low density initially--unfortunately in order to be useable for the widest group of customers, I was required to keep the density low for the main presets. But there's a preset to increase the fur density that you can apply after you've picked your color and style to get a lush look. (If Kiko's presets have a higher initial density, that is probably the "mistake," but I won't modify that unless there are complaints!)  The preset is a non-hierarchical material so you have to select the "tail fur" figure before applying it.  Also, Kota loads with the inner tail only, you have to load the fur yourself (as I can see you already discovered) - and loading the fur onto the tail sets the inner tail to be invisible at render time, which makes everything look thinner. That behavior is built into the original Kota product. If you go the parameters of the inner tail and set it to be visible, that provides a base that is color-matched to the fur, which can help it look more filled-in if you want to get a better result with the lower-resource version of the fur.  But for your system, which seems to render fur without a problem, I think the high-density preset is what you want. 

Aethyr

Hi there @Canary3d, thanks for getting back to me on this. I will post some examples with the different colours and the different density - this is with the violet preset at high density. I am using Kota 8.1 but I will bear in mind that it's looking for G8.1M rather than G8M for future projects.

Apologies if I sounded overly frustrated with this, at the point of the post it felt like I'd been banging my head against the wall for a few hours trying to get the thing to work. It does looks like the density preset is what was causing the issue, but I think I must have been trying to apply it to the tail rather than the tail fur, not realising it wasn't a hierarchical preset. It definitely seems that Kiko's presets apply at either medium or high density by default, though; I don't know if this is something that needs to be corrected.

At least we've got to the bottom of this and I won't need to do the annoying workaround of loading G8.1F and copying the materials :)

Canary3d

No worries, I totally understand your frustration! I know the mix of hierarchical and non-hierarchical presets can  be confusing - for reference, if the preset has "hMAT" in the name it is hierarchical, and if it has "MAT" without an h it's not hierarchical. The challenge as a creator is that with a regular material, you can save just the specific settings you want (density, for example), whereas a hierarchical material saves the entire preset including color and other settings. That's why the set has a combination of things. 

Thanks for the heads up about Kiko. I'm inclined to leave her presets alone unless someone reports having a problem loading them.