[DAZ] Hair polygons; skin texturing

[Selek]

I've been slowly building my own unique characters in Daz, using morphs and Fibermesh hair I'm creating in ZBrush, with a view to making my own short VN as a starter project. I'll probably buy clothing and environment assets, though I could create some basic clothing and props in ZBrush. I don't own Marvelous Designer and I don't care for Blender. I have a couple questions about hair and skin.

1. How "big" is typical Daz hair for games here, polygon-wise? I'm getting better at Fibermesh, but my best results come with pretty big poly counts -- half a million or more. This slows down Daz quite a bit, of course, although choosing lower display options (or hiding hair) helps. I can get a decent render in a few minutes, but that's with just the naked character and her hair, and a visible skydome, using a GTX 980 (4G VRAM only). Will I drive myself crazy trying to work with characters with hair this resource-heavy? In particular, will rendering it be a non-starter given my creaky old GPU? (Yes, a GPU upgrade might be in my future, but I want to see if I like this process first.)

2. Is it feasible to edit skin textures manually, using ZBrush to polypaint and/or Photoshop to tweak? My first efforts have been discouraging, but I don't love the freebie skins I've tried, and I'm reluctant to invest money in skin textures when I have texturing software ready to use. I don't have a lot of experience making textures, and I'm wondering if it's a huge time sink that's not worth my time. But I do like the satisfaction of making stuff myself, and I want my characters to look unique.

Edit: Also, I don't see a prefix for Daz in the prefix menu. Apologies if I missed it somehow.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[Egglock]

How big? I personally wouldn't go beyond 1-20k poly for hairs. If I really need that extra bump I'd push it to 30k, but even then that's really pushing the limit for hair. I personally wouldn't use that kind of workflow for my hair. My process would be using hair cards.

1. I'd bake those strands onto a texture
2. Create hair cards (planes sub-divided a few times)
3. Place those hair cards onto the scalp
4. Map baked textures to hair cards.

My reason, for not liking that workflow is the performance impact it has for little gain. For sure it's a lot easier to setup, but that comes at the cost of performance, while hair cards are more of a tedious setup, but more performant. So I suppose it's a pick and choose here. Either way the above method is what I would opt in for.

Below is a link, not sure how much it applies to you but hopefully should get you going. Other wise, doing a search for "hair cards" should net you more than enough information to give you a basic understanding of the process.

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If you still want to use fibermesh, another suggestion I have is render in 2 steps. Render your character first, than the hair, and composite them in a image editor.

2. Yes after all it's just a texture being mapped onto a UV set. This process however is very dependent on your own artistic skills. I don't know how Daz3d handles it's material setup, so I can't give any pointers in that aspect.

 

[Selek]

Egglock , thank you for taking the time to reply; I appreciate it. I have indeed read about hair cards being used for games with lots of animation and such. And I suppose eventually I might want to animate frames, in which case fibermesh hair would be a real drag. So maybe I should give the cards a try. Also, I hadn't thought about a two-step process for rendering the character and the hair separately.

Thanks also for the advice on texturing. I have lots of experience with 2D art; in fact mostly I paint and draw in the "real world," not on the PC. But I'm not sure how well that translates into painting a skin texture, since they all look like bear rugs to me, lol. I guess I can keep trying. Is it better to paint on a 3D model (say in ZBrush) and then explode it and map it to UVs? Or better just to paint directly on the 2D textures themselves?

 

[Synx]

Rendering both the hair and the rest seperatly requires a lot of post processing though. You not only got to combine them in every single render, but most likely got to fix shadows etc.

For making skin textures it depends on how you are making them. If you are altering existing ones altering them in 2D is properly easier. You could maybe look for scanned faces and lay them on top of the existing texture and warp it in place. Unfortunately a displacement map would elivate a skin texture the most, and most Daz textures don't have one to start with it (or a super basic one).

If you are making them from scratch drawing them in 3D is the way to go (for the face atleast). Personally I wouldn't use zbrush for it, as it's texture drawing options aren't amazing, especially compared to specialized programs like Mari, mudflat or substance painter.

A workflow I have been playing around with, using maps from scanned faces, is to lay them over the UV map in photoshop and put everything where it somewhat belongs, import it into a 3D texture drawing software (Substance painter for me) as a base map, and fix the parts around the nudges on the face, like the nose, eyes, mouth, etc. I just started this method and have only done a displacement map so far, but it works decently.

For the skin color I will most likely use a scanned in face as a basic map do the same principal as above, and then paint several layers over it to change the skin a fair amount. For the other maps that are much less noticeable and doesn't have to be so precise (like subsurface scattering map, roughness map etc.), I will just bring the color map into photoshop make it grayscale change the levels, import it back and adjust here and there.

I hope to finish the maps for the face this weekend and could upload the result if you want.

 

[mickydoo]

I make my own skins, it's not really hard but it is time-consuming. You need to find large images of people looking straight ahead, my two prefered methods is getting torrented picture packs of met art girls or similar, but sometimes you can get 100 pics, not one of them she is looking at the camera, or sure as shit when she is she is pulling a stupid face. You need them not grinning from ear to ear too. Or I use Getty images and search for female close up and the likes, you can save the image from the page, they are usually good enough, sometimes the watermark is on side of her face but that doesn't matter I only use one side anyway.

I then load default gen8 model in DAZ, browse to the skin and drag it into photoshop, and drag in the face I downloaded, and you skin graft it bit by bit onto the DAZ skin using the warp tool a lot. You start on the bit between the eyes and nose and just go from there, overlapping a bit, using a soft eraser to soften out the joins, and merging them down and use the healing brush. You do it for one side of the face only and copy it over, and then clone out any moles, freckles that are mirrored cos it looks stupid.

I used to make skins back in the sims2 days, mod the sims had a tut for this method on their site, that's where I learned it from, so I have no idea if it's the best way but it works for me. If you like making pretty women in DAZ it's well worth it, and when I mean like, I mean really like, I can do it all day and then toss it cos it ain't working (which happens).

It's time consuming and takes practice, but like everything, it was easy everyone would be doing it.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Unfortunately a displacement map would elivate a skin texture the most, and most Daz textures don't have one to start with it (or a super basic one).

Because most Daz skins displacement details are exported as high subD morphs, not baked as displacement map.

Is it better to paint on a 3D model (say in ZBrush) and then explode it and map it to UVs? Or better just to paint directly on the 2D textures themselves?

I don't make skin from scratch, but I export to Substance painter for 3D paint (mostly base texture & normal) and use PS to polish details. For greyscale maps (specular/bump/SSS) I use materialize as I can iterate real quick with it.

Oh, and refresh textures is Ctrl+i in Daz, don't be like me

 

[Selek]

I hope to finish the maps for the face this weekend and could upload the result if you want.

That would be awesome! Please do, but only if it's not too much trouble. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

You need to find large images of people looking straight ahead

Thanks for your reply; very helpful. A few days ago I ran across a site with a huge database of people in such poses, for a fee. Now, thanks to your post, I have a better understanding of the purpose of the site. Also, your game sounds impressive.

I don't make skin from scratch, but I export to Substance painter for 3D paint (mostly base texture & normal) and use PS to polish details.

Thanks for your comments. I like the pricing structure for Materialize; I'll have to try it. Substance Painter looks really powerful, and $20/month is reasonable for an indie license. Still, as I mentioned, I already own ZBrush, and while it's apparently not as good a paint program as Substance Painter, I'm inclined to give ZBrush's polypainting tools a spin before I spend more money on another application. Although I see SP has a free trial...