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@TabascoJack Thanks, TJ! Quite a milestone yourself!
Next month will be 36 years with my husband.
It's so wonderful to see so much marriage longevity here. We've all beaten the odds! Congratulations to everyone!
Before my grandmother died (when I was 12 and now 43) She ws married to my Gpa for 48 yrs!!! I thought that was amazing at the time due to all the divorces and people just living together at the time.
Happy Anniversary! The 31st of August is my daughters birthday lol. We have been married for 28 years and together 31. He still makes my heart speed up when he walks through the door lol.
30th anniversary last spring, the twins are building a pillow fort. My dad passed away in July; my parents had been married 61 years.
Congratulations knittingmommy and everyone, celebrating an anniversary. My wife and I will be celebrating 15 years next week. Apparently 3D Art leads to marital bliss and longevity.
Thanks, FB! Congratualtions yourself! 15 years next week. That's a nice accomplished number to have under your marital belt. :)
Oh, I am late for congratualtions, so here they are, delivered lately
, we will have 14 years in Oktober
fitting the ocasion:
Thanks, Linwelly! I do love that image! And, 14 years is a great milestone. As my husband would say, that 7 year itch has been resisted twice now! :)
"Marriage. This great institution that lets two people together solve problems they otherwise would never have."
But I say it's usually more fun to solve a problem together with someone than being alone with nothing to do. Great seeing so many long marriages here and congratulations all anniversary celebrationists! It must be some kind of world record with most people in a long marriage gathered in the same forum thread.
Its us artistic types. We are all creative and apparently that helps keep our marriages together? lol either that or my husband at least is a saint for putting up with me. Although I will say staying home and doing art keeps me out of trouble for sure.
My wife gives me life and strength.
Which is good, considering how much the kids drain ... ;)
Okay, guys, I have been studying and researching and I think I have figured out what I have been doing wrong and I'm now ready to FINALLY finish the last installment to Jaguar Sadie's new fur coat. I've been playing around with the 3D Paint and the brush and I'm ready to give her face a try. Will post tomorrow evening when I have all of the screenshots done.
I don't know about a world record, but it is nice to see a lot of long lasting marriages around. I like that quote. It does kind of fit marriage. :)
Well, I know mine should be a saint for putting up with me. I have to admit to not being the easiest person with which to be in a relationship. We balance each other out fairly well, though.
I can imagine!
Jaguar Sadie Update. I thought I had figured out what I was doing with the density maps. Unfortunately, I still missed something because I couldn't figure out how to grow the hair. So, the last step in the tutorial didn't get done today. I did research instead. Turns out that the one step I was missing, that I didn't do, was so basic that I am now kicking myself for being, well, dense!
Turns out you actually need to GROW the hair BEFORE starting the steps that fine tune the density maps. Now, I feel kind of like an idiot. I should, however, be able to finish this walkthrough up quite quickly in the morning as there really isn't all that much left to do. It just took me extra time to figure it out because I had no idea what I was doing. At least, if I'm going through all of the headaches, I will, hopefully, be saving all of you headaches when you start your projects.
I'm sorry for the delay. Barring any accidents, this will definitely go up first thing in the morning after I get up.
Jaguar Sadie Final Installment
Open up your save file, inside DAZ Studio, of the character with which you have been working. Select you figure in the Scene Tab then use Create>New 'Look at my Hair' obj to bring up the LAMH plugin. Once loaded, click on the little icon of the open folder to open and retrieve your saved preset. Add a new shavegroup by clicking on the '+' symbol next to the dropdown box. Highlight that new shavegroup and then open the Select by Surfaces box by left clicking on the button in the Follicles box that looks like a partially filled grid, the middle icon. In my case, I'm selecting JS's SkinHead and SkinFace. In the Styling box, for length and points, I'm using 2 and 5.
Now, I kept getting confused because I didn't understand that you had to grow the hair follicles BEFORE you went into the 3D Paint to start working on the density. You have no idea how many videos or how many times I watched AM's videos before it dawned on my that was the step I was missing. But, now, I know. You need to grow the hair before you can start working on how much or how little there is of it.
Now you can click on the 3D Paint box and your figure will turn a solid big red ALL OVER! And, your hair Follicles all disappeared. Scary! Don't worry, we are still only working with the shavegroup that is selected and the hair Follicles are still there, just not seen. Zoom in on where you plan to work on your figure. In 3D Paint, the cursor still works the same as in the other way of selecting follicles. Clicking the left mouse button (LMB) will paint your shavegroup red and SHIFT + LMB will paint your shavegroup white. In LAMH density maps, Red means hair and White means no hair. Areas that have a light color of red will have fewer hairs and an area with dark red will have a high amount of hair. Since the default seems to be to start out Red, we need to use the SHIFT key and LMB to paint those areas we don't want hair White. There are two ways of adjusting your brush (the circle thingy that you use to move around in the viewport). You can use the sliders under the two arrow buttons. Thanks to Timmins.William, I now know that these are the Undo and Redo buttons. They only seem to work in Styling, though, as I couldn't get them to work with 3D Paint. The other way to modify the brush is to push and hold the SPACEBAR to bring up a dialog box for the brush. You can change the size of the brush and the intensity. You can change whether the brush is Linear or Smooth, too, but I don't know what those do yet.
First, for JS, I'm going to get rid of a lot of the hair inside her ear. Cats don't have all that much hair in their ears. The hair is mostly on the edges around the inside of the ear. NOTE: I did not notice that there was a Symmetry Button! It probably would have saved me some work on the ears. In the Follicle box, under the length, points, there is a button that looks like a rectangle covering half the button. That is the Symmetry Button. Maybe in the next workshop we'll actually use that and figure out how it works. Feel free to play with it now that you know what it is.
You can check to see how the hair looks by clicking on that button that looks like it has an eye on it. That is the hair Preview button. Click on that button and hair should pop out of your figure's head or which body part with which you are working. You should have hair everywhere there is Red and no hair everywhere there is White. You can zoom in with the mouse, but I've found to really zoom in precisely where you want, use the Zoom button underneath the little lock. I will mention this lock later when talking about grooming as it is very useful to use then. Zooming in on the area with which you are working can be really useful for fine tuning those areas that you can't seem to get rid of unwanted hairs. I've found that it does help to have the hair preview on, at times, to find out where stray unwanted hairs are popping up.
Now, I'll work around JS's eyes. It's hard working around those eyelashes and I had to get into some very strange positions to get rid of some of those unwanted red sections.
I think I did pretty good with her. The rest is all mostly grooming to get the hair to look like it is going in the right direction. When you are done with 3D Paint, go back to the Styling section. All of the Red will disappear and your green FiberHairs will reappear.
Now I can groom JS. I'll have to use the brush to groom her. One note. I mentioned the Lock button earlier. When you are moving the brush around your figure, sometimes, the whole figure will move because your brush is also your cursor for moving around the workspace. If you are grooming a section and you don't want your figure to accidentally move, click on the Lock button so that it turns yellow. This will keep your figure in place and you won't accidentally move it. When done, unlock it to move figure into the position you want for the next bit of grooming.
That's it. I have plans to show of Jaguar Sadie once she is done with her photo shoot. Next step is to export her back into DS. No, I didn't forget that step. Exporting is fairly easy. Make sure you save!!! Click the big blue FiberHair button and a dialog box will open up. You need to tell it how many hairs you want. I'm actually not sure how many will look good on JS yet. It will be one of those "Pick a number and see" things. I have found that you need to pick a really large number for the hair to look good. When I have a more definitive, "This is how many hairs I chose." I will update and let you know. Once you choose how many hairs, click okay. You may have to click okay several times depending on how many shavegroups you have. Shavegroups start counting at 0 so you'll end up with 0 - 4 if you have the same number of shave groups I have.
If you have any questions for anything I forgot to cover, please ask. If I don't know the answer, I'll try to find out or maybe one of the more knowledgeable forumites will know the answer. Good luck with your project and if you did an animal or other figure while playing along, I'd love to see it. Just post here in the thread if you like.
Edit: Fixed a mistake with the mouse buttons. Originally, I said right mouse button when I meant left mouse button. I think I fixed all of those errors. If anyone sees any glaring mistakes, please let me know so I can fix them.
So, I do have to apologize to anyone anxiously waiting for this last installment. I wouldn't normally do a tutorial on the fly like this. I like having all the bits altogether and done before I start posting the tutorial. One reason I decided to do this first tutorial like this is that I have heard a lot of complaints about how hard it is to do a preset in LAMH hair, especially, if you haven't used it before. I've used LAMH a lot over the past several months for mostly styling purposes while working with the animals that have LAMH presets. However, I usually don't get further than styling the fur. I thought it was about time that I learned how to do a preset and I wanted to make sure that everyone could see all of the mistakes I was making along the way. There were a few things that were hard for me to figure out. Making this preset was a lot slower since I was also doing all of the screenshots and trying to figure out how to say things so that any readers could understand and follow my tutorial. Hopefully, I did a good job. I'd really like it if anyone who followed along would post their projects. If you have problems and can't figure out what you are doing, post a screenshot and ask. That's one of the reason why I started this thread. I didn't want to be the only one talking.
I'll probably never do another tutorial like this where I'm learning and posting installments as I go. But, doing it this way, hopefully, gave others a sense of how long it took me to figure out a few of the problems I had along the way. I'm also sorry I couldn't get this posted earlier this morning. Real life happened. About midway through I got an email from someone that really threw off my day. I got very upset with that person and I had to calm down before even spending the next hour and half coming up with a well thought out, civil reply to something that made me very angry. I was really having a great day up until that email. I have some pictures in the gallery that I'm really proud of that others seem to like, too. That letter caused me to lose my happy mood today. It took me some venting and, yes, even writing that letter in reply, before I got to the place where I could post the last installment of the tutorial.
So, my apologies for not getting it posted any earlier today. I really should have been able to get it posted earlier than I did.
Please don't apologize! I am going to give this a try with my fenris wolf for my world story and see if maybe I can get the whole thing done and saved. I think I am going to uninstall and reinstall LAMH first though since it was crashing so badly lastly tiime I tried. Although to be honest I am sure it was mostly user error.
You really should give it a go. I like how it looks so far. I'm still grooming her face a little bit. I had strange crashing issues with DS yesterday while working on a new girl to try out that Wet Boyfriend T-Shirt and Summer Wet Hair that I got. I never did get back to Jaguar Sadie once I got that all squared away. Once I get the lighting on this new image figured out and rendered, I'll working of finishing up JS's grooming and get her picture shoot done. I'm looking forward to having a new avatar picture. Then, I'm going to work on a proper hairstyle and maybe even a beard and mustache tutorial. However, I'm going to wait to post those until completely finished. After that. I'll try to tackle Garibaldi because I have that, too, and while I like LAMH better, I really should learn how to use the other one as well.
Of course, if you do, you have to post pictures here! I want to pictures!
I have Garibaldi as well. I like them both. I NEED to be able to use one or both for this story world or the life bonded wolves are going to be looking rather sad instead of imperious and elegant and wild lol
I've had LAMH hair for a long time now, and the only figure I've ever created hair for was Noodles. You've inspired me to want to do another!
- Greg
Ice Dragon Art Well, then this was timely! ;)
@algovincian Wow! That's such a nice complement! I've inspired someone! Yay! :) It's only fair considering how much you've inspired me in other areas! Go look in the NPR thread, Greg. Now, you have me doodling! I just posted a little Vampire over there. :)
Last week, I broke down and got Aiko 7. I swore I wasn't going to because I wasn't sure if I'd her better than Aiko 6. I thought Aiko 6 and Girl 6 were excellent characters and I really liked their look. I was not quite so impressed with Aiko 7 and Girl 7 so I decided not to get them. Then Girl 7 went on sale for a price I couldn't resist, meaning cheap!, and last week, Aiko 7 went down to about $3 for the base model after my PC+ coupon. So, I folded like cheap suit! That's right, I caved, big time! What happened after that was a little dial spun magic. As I said, I didn't entirely like how either of them looked. However, I found that they looked great mixed together. I managed to get character with a mixture of Aiko 7 and Girl 7 with just a touch of Bethany 7 because, well, frankly, Bethany 7 is my favorite Genesis 3 character. So, I came up with a cute little scene that I quite liked. I had intended on finishing this and putting it up in the PC+ weekly contest, but that didn't happen as I procrastinated and as usual managed to not finish before the deadline. I've managed to enter PC+ contests a total of 3 times, I think, in the 2 years I've been in the club. I have serious doubts it would have won as it would have been up against stiff competition and my favorite render for the week ended up winning so I'm not sad about that!
I actually rendered this one with NPR in mind. A first for me. I've been getting into experimenting more with NPR type postworking and I have to say that I'm having a blast spreading my wings in that direction. So, here is my original image that I created:
I took that into Filter Forge and did a little magic until I got a mix that I really like and turned it into this:
Filters used: Foxxee's Moody Shadows; Comic Stylize +weirdness
While I was experimenting, I found that one thing I didn't like was that I didn't think I had enough contrast between lights and shadows in the original image. I ended up using this Foxxee's Moody Shadows on my original and then using it with the filter I finally ended using in my final image
.
Here are some of the other images that I got with my tinkering. While interesting, the one above is my favorite image. I like it even better than the original.
Filters used: Artification
Filter used: Artsy Illustration
And, lest anyone think that I've given up on rendering guys. I did this little fellow today. I was having problems with DS yesterday. It kept crashing no matter what I was doing. I went over to the Technical Help forum and Richard Haseltine helped me out. While he was having me try a few things, I ended up making this little guy. One things I had been doing when DS started giving me fits was creating a new character by spinning dials. I had just gotten her where I wanted her when everything just shut down before I could save. Since I didn't want to work on a character I would fall in love with only to lose it, I ended up picking 3D Universe's Toon Generations Base and went crazy with the morphs available. I love 3D Universe stuff! DS finally stopped crashing and we don't know why. We never figured out why it started. But, while trading message back and forth with Richard, I got this cute little character that I was able to save. I decided to go ahead and add some light and a skydome and render him out. Of course, I had to see what I could do with him in Filter Forge. I like my final result very much. I'm calling him Richard's Little Vampire in my gallery. Just a little thank you to Richard for taking the time to help me and so many others out with our DS problems.
Original, rendered in 3Delight:
Postworked version:
Filters used: Artification; Edges and Tones
Filters Used: Artification; Edges and Tones; Comic Stylize +weirdness:
Filter used: Edges and Tone
Filters used: Edges and Tones; Crosshatch Drawing
Obviously not everything I'm trying is a great look. But I have enjoyed seeing what happens and every so often, I hit on some combination that I really like.
Ah, I noticed, when I was uploading and then getting the links that I misspelled Artification in my file names. It is NOT Artrification. The links are correct so anyone wishing to try out the filters should be able to easily find them. I'll try to go back through the thread tomorrow and try to put in links to all of the filters I've used. People keep asking what I'm using so I figured adding the links would make it easier on those who wish to get them and do their own experiments.
Was very timely! I'm almost done loading everything I bought between the time I took the laptop in to the time I got it back. Should be done tomorrow then its back to being serious about rendering. I really really like the second image of the girl, I would hang that on a wall and I'm not even into the more comic book stylized renders. I really like what you are doing with them though and might one day explore that. But right now, too much else going on so I will just enjoy your stuff lol.
Thanks! I love how she turned out. I have been really surprised by the amount of attention that she has gotten in the gallery. NPR images like that don't usually get all that much attention. Yet, she is the second image I've done which has made it onto the banner in the gallery! I was so surprised that she kept getting so many likes and, while I knew she was close, I was seriously doubting that she would, in fact, make it there. Imagine my surprise when I discovered her on the banner this morning! She's probably going to get kicked off quickly, but I'm rather enjoying the fact that she's there now.. I've very happy that it happened with her. I'm on cloud 9 right now!
Not to say I told you so, but, uhm, I do believe I did tell you so...
Congratulations!
Your little vampire made me think of this . I believe I've showed you that before, but someone else might get a laugh out of it too, if they haven't seen it before.
Eh, hem! {cough} I do believe you may have mentioned that!
I always did like the count! Such a shame someone took exception to his counting! 
I still like the Aiko with the clear outline the best but that is just me.
And congrats for making it to the banner!