Daz Anti-Aliasing Help

[diggem]

Save me technical people!

I've been banging my head against the wall trying to figure a way to render Daz characters flat with a small amount of shading so I can easily cut them apart and use them in RenPy for a Layered Image. E.g. - a series of left or right arms that can be changed easily to achieve a desired gesture. I'm trying to be able to go into an image editor (Photoshop or Clip Studio) and just select the portion I want as a selection mask of sorts. I decided to color different parts of the body.

So far I've gone into ZBrush with a G8F, polygrouped her out the whazoo, put MULTIPLE edgeloops on the polygroups (too prevent bleeding when I SubDivide), SubDivide like 5 or 6 times, and then hit Polypaint from Polygroups. After plenty of trial and error I managed to get the textures to export without any blending between the color groups.

In Daz, I've applied the color blocked textures to the ambient channel and turned down everything else but opacity. HOWEVER! When I render in Daz, the colors blend making a wand selection in an image editor pointless! I'm having trouble with anti-aliasing as far as I can tell. I've tried rendering in all the different renderers, messing with all the settings, lowering the mesh SubD, turning up the mesh SubD, turning off the AA settings on my GPU- everything I can think of! How do I get an image WITHOUT AA!?

Please help!

Here's a small version of the ambient torso texture and a close up of what it's rendering. The render is of the character turned about 20 degrees away from the camera, close up of the collarbone area.

 

[anne O'nymous]

I've been banging my head against the wall trying to figure a way to render Daz characters flat with a small amount of shading so I can easily cut them apart and use them in RenPy for a Layered Image. E.g. - a series of left or right arms that can be changed easily to achieve a desired gesture.

Have you tried it before, just to have a look at the result ?
[By using the free hand selection tool for the body/body separation, and the magic wand one for the body/background separation.]

I ask because I'm half convinced that using 3D renders for puppets models, like you want to do, will not looks as good as you imagine. The main issue isn't necessarily the lighting (that give most of the 3D effect) that will looks weird, but the lack of superposed parts.
Basically speaking, take a sheet of paper, draw a long rectangle to figure one leg, a big rectangle for the body, then cut everything and play around like you would do with layered images. You'll immediately see that they don't join correctly, leaving holes between the two body parts. Then you'll see that placing them in order to remove those holes drastically reduce the size of the leg.
This can possibly be dealt with but cutting more largely the body parts (in a round shape for the superposed parts), but would probably still lead to a weird result because the size of the jointing parts would change depending of the result. And obviously this time the lighting while also play its role in the weird look.
Again it can possibly be dealt with, but by manually redrawing the jointing parts, what would be a really complex task if you've to do it with 3D renders.


This being said, for your issue I'm almost certain that the solution is not at all to rely on a colored texture, but on materials. Go to the surface tab, select each material one by one, and give a different color to all of them. It would still need a little more adjustment for the legs and arms, that would be single parts in place of two (if not three, thighs, knee, calves, for the legs), but it would already reduce the manual works needed to create the masks.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

How do I get an image WITHOUT AA!?

Tried to turn pixel filter off (0) ?

 

[diggem]

Have you tried it before, just to have a look at the result ?
[By using the free hand selection tool for the body/body separation, and the magic wand one for the body/background separation.]

I ask because I'm half convinced that using 3D renders for puppets models, like you want to do, will not looks as good as you imagine. The main issue isn't necessarily the lighting (that give most of the 3D effect) that will looks weird, but the lack of superposed parts.
Basically speaking, take a sheet of paper, draw a long rectangle to figure one leg, a big rectangle for the body, then cut everything and play around like you would do with layered images. You'll immediately see that they don't join correctly, leaving holes between the two body parts. Then you'll see that placing them in order to remove those holes drastically reduce the size of the leg.
This can possibly be dealt with but cutting more largely the body parts (in a round shape for the superposed parts), but would probably still lead to a weird result because the size of the jointing parts would change depending of the result. And obviously this time the lighting while also play its role in the weird look.
Again it can possibly be dealt with, but by manually redrawing the jointing parts, what would be a really complex task if you've to do it with 3D renders.


This being said, for your issue I'm almost certain that the solution is not at all to rely on a colored texture, but on materials. Go to the surface tab, select each material one by one, and give a different color to all of them. It would still need a little more adjustment for the legs and arms, that would be single parts in place of two (if not three, thighs, knee, calves, for the legs), but it would already reduce the manual works needed to create the masks.

No I haven't tried it with just the free hand selection. I think just by itself, no it's not going to line up right, it will definitely need some manual editing. But I do also think that it will be faster to edit several rendered images than to draw by hand every pose I'm want and clothing etc. Not to mention reduce the storage needed. It will absolutely need a base/ background image to to cover the areas where the seams don't meet properly. Maybe it'll turn out terribly, but I'd like to see.

Regarding your solution, I've tried that! (Great minds, am I right? ) As you rightfully pointed out, the divisions are not in the right places and aren't quite plentiful enough, but beyond that the AA problem persists :-( . I also tried opacity materials to essentially mask out body parts in Daz, but Daz doesn't have a way to cull backfaces, so you end up seeing the inside of the mesh, making wand selections, again, kind of pointless. Don't remember how the AA was for that.

Tried to turn pixel filter off (0) ?

View attachment 1599827

I have tried that, it helped, but didn't get all the way there.

Thank you both for your replies! I'll experiment so more and reply if I come across anything worthwhile.

 

[diggem]

Well, I still haven't figured out the AA issue, but the best I've been able to do is a lot of wand select/ expand by X/ wand unselect the parts I don't want to change. But all in all I think it looks pretty good! Again, I'll have to slap a background where the seams are, but check it out!

 

[Fatalmasterpiece]

Sorry I'm a little confused on what you're trying to do... but it sounds like you could achieve what you're trying to with a transparent background and exporting as a PNG? This saves the background as completely transparent. I do this ALOT with the spot render tool to have a sequence of poses and gestures without having to re-render the entire image. Make sure the dome and ground are turned off in the render environment settings.

 

[diggem]

Sorry I'm a little confused on what you're trying to do... but it sounds like you could achieve what you're trying to with a transparent background and exporting as a PNG? This saves the background as completely transparent. I do this ALOT with the spot render tool to have a sequence of poses and gestures without having to re-render the entire image. Make sure the dome and ground are turned off in the render environment settings.

What I'm trying to do is cut it in the same place for every gesture, so I'm using blocks of color so I can simply select this part or that part with a wand selection. The issue is that where the different colors meet there is a blending (caused by what I understand to be anti-aliasing) , only 2 or 3 pixels wide, but it's enough to poopoo my grand idea of only having to use a wand selection. Thanks for taking a look though. I'm starting to think there's no real way to get it done in Daz.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I really doubt it, but compression could make some pixel bleed a bit on low/mid res. This should send textures uncompressed into Vram. Worth nothing giving a shot.