- Jul 2, 2017
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Most of the images hidden beneath the spoilers aren't working anymore. Could it be that the recent changes on F95 messed them up?
- Oct 1, 2018
- 29
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About Tatoos and their locations
a good way to put a tatoo on your favorite skin is to use an UV map or Seam maps, like the one provided by DAZ or... Snow Sultan here is a link for the G3F skin ( for what I understand it could be used for V8 )
simply open it with an image editor in GIMP or Photoshop, play with the size until it match your favorite skin size, copy it on said skin texture, set the seam layer at a nice transparency level, and position yours tatoo layers above as you wish, when you are satisfied, delete the seam layer, flatten the picture and save... under a new name
Faded Tatoo
tricks that was teached to me by a tatoo artist (sorry I only know how to do it in Photshop, GIMP can probably do the same thing, no idea on how... )
- set the tatoo on a layer above the skin
- set the layer to multiply at 75-80 % opacity
- duplicate it
- the old layer ( not the brand new copy) is set to 25-35%
- the old layer is then selected and a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 5 pixel is selected and applied
- flatten the picture and save under a new name
that give a faded look that old tatoo tend to have
for newer tatoo the old layer may have it's opacity reducted to 10-15 % and the copy it's opacity raised to 80-90%
a good way to put a tatoo on your favorite skin is to use an UV map or Seam maps, like the one provided by DAZ or... Snow Sultan here is a link for the G3F skin ( for what I understand it could be used for V8 )
You must be registered to see the links
simply open it with an image editor in GIMP or Photoshop, play with the size until it match your favorite skin size, copy it on said skin texture, set the seam layer at a nice transparency level, and position yours tatoo layers above as you wish, when you are satisfied, delete the seam layer, flatten the picture and save... under a new name
Faded Tatoo
tricks that was teached to me by a tatoo artist (sorry I only know how to do it in Photshop, GIMP can probably do the same thing, no idea on how... )
- set the tatoo on a layer above the skin
- set the layer to multiply at 75-80 % opacity
- duplicate it
- the old layer ( not the brand new copy) is set to 25-35%
- the old layer is then selected and a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 5 pixel is selected and applied
- flatten the picture and save under a new name
that give a faded look that old tatoo tend to have
for newer tatoo the old layer may have it's opacity reducted to 10-15 % and the copy it's opacity raised to 80-90%
Thanks for the heads up, however the images seem to be working fine for me. If someone else is experiencing problems with images loading, let me know.
- Jul 2, 2017
- 1,217
- 4,480
In the DAZ Art thread, it was told, that there were some hiccups with the images today. I guess I ran into that.
Rendering in Layers:
In many of my recent renders I have been creating images with high complexity and a large quantity of background characters. If I was to attempt to render this all in 1 step it would severely tax my hardware and also take an excessive amount of time to converge to an acceptable level. To give you a flavour of what can be achieved please find the image below. If I was to do this in 1 pass it would take about 4 hours on my hardware.
There are a few specific instances where rendering in layers is highly advantageous:
1) When your hardware cannot handle the scene complexity.
2) Where you using a common background for a number of images and only adjusting the foreground.
3) Where you wish to tailor the lighting for each layer.
4) You simply wish to reduce the total overall render time.
To give you an explanation of how this achieved this, I will break down the image above into it's components and explain how to establish the scene. If you wish, you can also download the images yourself and re-composite the final image using an image editor that supports layers
Background Image (Render Time 2 hours):
- Create the full scene will all of the lighting in place.
- Establish the camera that will be used to render all of the image layers.
- Make sure all items are placed in appropriate groups in order to make hiding components easier.
- Remove all relevant components that will be created in subsequent images.
Overlay Layers:
Background (3 minutes):
Middle Ground (10 minutes):
Foreground (10 minutes):
- Remove all of the components other than the main items to appear in the background.
- Adjust the lighting to suit render the specific items for each layer and turn of rendering of any HDRI's.
- Render with the exact same camera as was used for the background image and render as a PNG such that the image layer has transparency.
- Also leave the resolution exactly the same as the base render. Whilst this image will create a large amount of transparent area, you don't have to position the overlay in the image editor and it doesn't increase file size / render time anyway. For example the background overlay achieve about 500 iterations in 3 minutes (base image was ~120 iterations in 2 hours).
Re-Composite:
- Load the background image in the image editor.
- Load up all of the PNG's as layers in the editor and stack in the correct order.
- Export the final image result.
Specific Tips:
- For the VN I am working on I created a total of 29 images within the strip club. These used a total of 7 different backgrounds and a large number of partial overlay renders. Total rendering time was about 30 hours. If I was to render as 29 separate full scenes it would have taken 120 hours and I believe the result would have been worse (less iterations on main character renders and sub-optimal lighting).
- For the background renders I used 4 main emissive spheres positioned just below the roof (emissive are good at evenly lighting scenes).
- The layer renders used two emissive spheres (main + fill) and the emissive surfaces of the stripping discs (highlight). I would usually use spotlights, however reflections off the metal stripper pole was creating fire fly's on the darker surfaces of the character.
- I specifically tailored the camera angle such that the background layer could be placed directly over the base image. Hence I had to ensure that the seated office did not obscure the back stripper pole disc.
- I also ensured that the camera pointed slightly downwards such that the yellow emissive discs on the layers did not obscure the white emissive bases when overlaid.
- The use of emissives for the stripper platforms was also done to hide any shadows that much be thrown by the objects.
Some additional images produced utilising the same method as above.
In many of my recent renders I have been creating images with high complexity and a large quantity of background characters. If I was to attempt to render this all in 1 step it would severely tax my hardware and also take an excessive amount of time to converge to an acceptable level. To give you a flavour of what can be achieved please find the image below. If I was to do this in 1 pass it would take about 4 hours on my hardware.
There are a few specific instances where rendering in layers is highly advantageous:
1) When your hardware cannot handle the scene complexity.
2) Where you using a common background for a number of images and only adjusting the foreground.
3) Where you wish to tailor the lighting for each layer.
4) You simply wish to reduce the total overall render time.
To give you an explanation of how this achieved this, I will break down the image above into it's components and explain how to establish the scene. If you wish, you can also download the images yourself and re-composite the final image using an image editor that supports layers
Background Image (Render Time 2 hours):
- Create the full scene will all of the lighting in place.
- Establish the camera that will be used to render all of the image layers.
- Make sure all items are placed in appropriate groups in order to make hiding components easier.
- Remove all relevant components that will be created in subsequent images.
Overlay Layers:
Background (3 minutes):
Middle Ground (10 minutes):
Foreground (10 minutes):
- Remove all of the components other than the main items to appear in the background.
- Adjust the lighting to suit render the specific items for each layer and turn of rendering of any HDRI's.
- Render with the exact same camera as was used for the background image and render as a PNG such that the image layer has transparency.
- Also leave the resolution exactly the same as the base render. Whilst this image will create a large amount of transparent area, you don't have to position the overlay in the image editor and it doesn't increase file size / render time anyway. For example the background overlay achieve about 500 iterations in 3 minutes (base image was ~120 iterations in 2 hours).
Re-Composite:
- Load the background image in the image editor.
- Load up all of the PNG's as layers in the editor and stack in the correct order.
- Export the final image result.
Specific Tips:
- For the VN I am working on I created a total of 29 images within the strip club. These used a total of 7 different backgrounds and a large number of partial overlay renders. Total rendering time was about 30 hours. If I was to render as 29 separate full scenes it would have taken 120 hours and I believe the result would have been worse (less iterations on main character renders and sub-optimal lighting).
- For the background renders I used 4 main emissive spheres positioned just below the roof (emissive are good at evenly lighting scenes).
- The layer renders used two emissive spheres (main + fill) and the emissive surfaces of the stripping discs (highlight). I would usually use spotlights, however reflections off the metal stripper pole was creating fire fly's on the darker surfaces of the character.
- I specifically tailored the camera angle such that the background layer could be placed directly over the base image. Hence I had to ensure that the seated office did not obscure the back stripper pole disc.
- I also ensured that the camera pointed slightly downwards such that the yellow emissive discs on the layers did not obscure the white emissive bases when overlaid.
- The use of emissives for the stripper platforms was also done to hide any shadows that much be thrown by the objects.
Some additional images produced utilising the same method as above.
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- Oct 1, 2018
- 29
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I use and used an almost similar way to do things, setting the whole static parts first (surrounding and furnitures) and the camera, before grouping characters by 3 or 4 in differents "parts" of the screen, after rendering each "groups", using a graphic editor, I added each render to the final image, erasing the not needed parts of a render.
An artist or two I have seen were working in a somewhat different way.
They set the scene in layer, first the one that was going to be the farthest of the camera, once the render was done, they used the picture freshly rendered as a backddrop image and constructed the next "layer", render using the new picture as a backdrop, repeat and rince until you have the last layer the one which is the closer of the camera, for the final picture.
For what I remember there was a problems with the ground shadow and unless you used very spécific views points or lighting, you have "to fake" the shadow or do some kinds of double "layer"render, one with the whole scene for the shadows and an other with only the characters, each layer needing to be reconstructed before beeing used as a backdrop image.
This last "trick" can be usefull if you have only 3 layers and a very well thinked surrounding to allow very little ground shadow / envirnemental shadows interactions for exemples.
An other tricks for multiples characters scene is turning characters once they are posed into .obj [for exemple] (it may some time need a retexturing ), character or part of the characters... if you do a shake a hand scene, you only need the hand(and maybe the forearm) of one characters on scene to do a "half render", adding both characters under an image éditor... a character converted in .obj the right way with each parts wielded "weight less" than a normal characters.
The last trick is to design the whole scene and save it as one "object" (obj.), that one need to be very carefull, check each morph, redo the textures(usually), but this one allow you to set the camera and lights after the posing, as you want and to do multiples shots on various parts of the scene as you wish. I have seen it used mostly to change render engine, like passing from DAZ to Cinema 4D, Bryce and so on...
When doing a multiple characters render, you may want to reduct the textures size, 4K textures are nice, but when you do a 1250 x 1250 pictures, you will see very little différence between a 4K and a 3K picture one screen , unless you do a close up, haed will have a size of 100 pixel by 100 pixel for exemple, and between 4K textures and 3K textures, your eyes will not see a différence, but your computer will do the difference with render time and ressource use, specially if you have a small config.
An artist or two I have seen were working in a somewhat different way.
They set the scene in layer, first the one that was going to be the farthest of the camera, once the render was done, they used the picture freshly rendered as a backddrop image and constructed the next "layer", render using the new picture as a backdrop, repeat and rince until you have the last layer the one which is the closer of the camera, for the final picture.
For what I remember there was a problems with the ground shadow and unless you used very spécific views points or lighting, you have "to fake" the shadow or do some kinds of double "layer"render, one with the whole scene for the shadows and an other with only the characters, each layer needing to be reconstructed before beeing used as a backdrop image.
This last "trick" can be usefull if you have only 3 layers and a very well thinked surrounding to allow very little ground shadow / envirnemental shadows interactions for exemples.
An other tricks for multiples characters scene is turning characters once they are posed into .obj [for exemple] (it may some time need a retexturing ), character or part of the characters... if you do a shake a hand scene, you only need the hand(and maybe the forearm) of one characters on scene to do a "half render", adding both characters under an image éditor... a character converted in .obj the right way with each parts wielded "weight less" than a normal characters.
The last trick is to design the whole scene and save it as one "object" (obj.), that one need to be very carefull, check each morph, redo the textures(usually), but this one allow you to set the camera and lights after the posing, as you want and to do multiples shots on various parts of the scene as you wish. I have seen it used mostly to change render engine, like passing from DAZ to Cinema 4D, Bryce and so on...
When doing a multiple characters render, you may want to reduct the textures size, 4K textures are nice, but when you do a 1250 x 1250 pictures, you will see very little différence between a 4K and a 3K picture one screen , unless you do a close up, haed will have a size of 100 pixel by 100 pixel for exemple, and between 4K textures and 3K textures, your eyes will not see a différence, but your computer will do the difference with render time and ressource use, specially if you have a small config.
- Jun 10, 2018
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- 22,754
For characters further away you can also remove every texture and work with only the base color. If you get the color right you won't see any difference and save a shitload of texture memory.
- Jul 24, 2018
- 241
- 125
Hey, I don't know if the thread is appropriate for this so just tell me and I'll delete my comment.
Like there's so much stuff on daz3d.com, I don't even know where to look and I'm kinda lost.
I think that I'm about to get some genesis 8 morph kits but I heard about the "genesis 8 face modifier" that I can't find anywhere.
So I was wondering what it is that I should look for and how I can modify and personalize faces...
Like there's so much stuff on daz3d.com, I don't even know where to look and I'm kinda lost.
I think that I'm about to get some genesis 8 morph kits but I heard about the "genesis 8 face modifier" that I can't find anywhere.
So I was wondering what it is that I should look for and how I can modify and personalize faces...
- Jul 2, 2017
- 1,217
- 4,480
So you wanna start at the beginning?
If so, don't overwhelm yourself. What you want is the Genesis 8 or Genesis 3 Base model. Male and Female alike. Genesis 8 is the most recent iteration but lacks a lot of fringe stuff compared to Genesis 3. But if you are willing to learn and do manual labour then you can convert everything from Genesis 3 to Genesis 8. So it is really a question of taste. I tell you what I recommend, I can't do anything else.
Do every single interactive lesson of DAZ studio. They will show you the ropes.
Get the free Genesis 8 Base Figure, male and female. As well as those 4 products:
You will lack different skins but that is okay for the beginning. Those 4 Products allow you to create literally every SFW character you want as long as it didn't differ too much from a human.
For NSFW characters you will also need Genitals. There are different on the market for Genesis 8. Be aware that the original anatomical elements from DAZ, will always need extra textures and probably additional morph products for functionality.
Another thing are the expressions. I recommend:
This should be all, that you need, to keep you occupied for next months.
Oh and give the new user challenges in the DAZ Forums a try. The community is very helpful as long as you keep everything SFW.
If so, don't overwhelm yourself. What you want is the Genesis 8 or Genesis 3 Base model. Male and Female alike. Genesis 8 is the most recent iteration but lacks a lot of fringe stuff compared to Genesis 3. But if you are willing to learn and do manual labour then you can convert everything from Genesis 3 to Genesis 8. So it is really a question of taste. I tell you what I recommend, I can't do anything else.
Do every single interactive lesson of DAZ studio. They will show you the ropes.
Get the free Genesis 8 Base Figure, male and female. As well as those 4 products:
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You will lack different skins but that is okay for the beginning. Those 4 Products allow you to create literally every SFW character you want as long as it didn't differ too much from a human.
For NSFW characters you will also need Genitals. There are different on the market for Genesis 8. Be aware that the original anatomical elements from DAZ, will always need extra textures and probably additional morph products for functionality.
Another thing are the expressions. I recommend:
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
This should be all, that you need, to keep you occupied for next months.
Oh and give the new user challenges in the DAZ Forums a try. The community is very helpful as long as you keep everything SFW.
- Jul 24, 2018
- 241
- 125
Thanks a lot!So you wanna start at the beginning?
If so, don't overwhelm yourself. What you want is the Genesis 8 or Genesis 3 Base model. Male and Female alike. Genesis 8 is the most recent iteration but lacks a lot of fringe stuff compared to Genesis 3. But if you are willing to learn and do manual labour then you can convert everything from Genesis 3 to Genesis 8. So it is really a question of taste. I tell you what I recommend, I can't do anything else.
Do every single interactive lesson of DAZ studio. They will show you the ropes.
Get the free Genesis 8 Base Figure, male and female. As well as those 4 products:
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You will lack different skins but that is okay for the beginning. Those 4 Products allow you to create literally every SFW character you want as long as it didn't differ too much from a human.
For NSFW characters you will also need Genitals. There are different on the market for Genesis 8. Be aware that the original anatomical elements from DAZ, will always need extra textures and probably additional morph products for functionality.
Another thing are the expressions. I recommend:
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
This should be all, that you need, to keep you occupied for next months.
Oh and give the new user challenges in the DAZ Forums a try. The community is very helpful as long as you keep everything SFW.
- Aug 23, 2018
- 1,080
- 2,053
Re: Rendering in Layers
I suspect there's no shortcut for this but I figured I'd ask anyway. Is there a way to maintain lighting from hidden layers beyond duplicating emissive surfaces and ghosting them? I find I lose a lot of colour information that would come from bounce lighting. Is it just a case of carefully rebuilding lighting for each render layer and faking bounce with invisible emissive planes?
Is there a good way to fake cast shadows from hidden layers? Maybe have a primitive out of the camera view with a light behind it? Would that be efficient?
Lighting feels like the more important thing to me for making a scene composited from different layers fit together well.
In short, just work hard to fake it or am I missing something (obvious or not) that can make this process smoother?
I suspect there's no shortcut for this but I figured I'd ask anyway. Is there a way to maintain lighting from hidden layers beyond duplicating emissive surfaces and ghosting them? I find I lose a lot of colour information that would come from bounce lighting. Is it just a case of carefully rebuilding lighting for each render layer and faking bounce with invisible emissive planes?
Is there a good way to fake cast shadows from hidden layers? Maybe have a primitive out of the camera view with a light behind it? Would that be efficient?
Lighting feels like the more important thing to me for making a scene composited from different layers fit together well.
In short, just work hard to fake it or am I missing something (obvious or not) that can make this process smoother?
When rendering in layers, you will never achieve the same light interaction that you will if it was a complete scene. Whilst you can approximate this light interaction by the methods you have described above (pretty much what I would do also), the end result will not live up to a complete render. One of the things I try to do when rendering in layers, is to set up the scene / camera angle such that these light interactions are not visible. As a simple example of this, don't show the floor / ground, hence shadows on the ground aren't a problem.
If you are running into problems with available RAM, then reducing texture detail on the background characters via scene optimiser will be a better option. Personally I am typically using rendering in layers for animations. Bit of a pain pasting the foreground on the background frame by fame, but it cuts my render time from about 2 hours per frame to 15 minutes or so.
PS: Even in the example scene I posted above, I did not have the reflection of the background dancer in the window. Hence have to settle for a little than you would get in a single full render.
- Aug 23, 2018
- 1,080
- 2,053
Yeah, I would avoid floor shadows and anything cast by characters into scenes. I asked about shadows because I recently ran a test render of a complete scene and then tried a go with it broken down into layers (before I found your tutorials) and I noticed that a pillar nearby was giving a lot of nice shadows on the character in the complete scene that I wasn't getting with it layered. I guess I should just experiment
Thanks.
- Jun 10, 2018
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- 22,754
Right-click on the asset file in your library and select "categorise"
There are a couple of different ways of viewing assets in Daz - 'Content Library' and 'Smart Content'. Adjusting the directories on your hard disk will change the way it displays in 'Content Library', however will not change where it displays in 'Smart Content'. If you wish to change how it displays in 'Smart Content' you have to change the attributes associated with the item as recreation suggests.
- Nov 17, 2019
- 126
- 213
Awesome tutorials! I am still new to DAZ and still dont get everything; but you helped me a lot to understand.
Thank you
Thank you
- Jul 2, 2017
- 1,217
- 4,480
There are quite a few out there. I prefer the Skinray materials from Digital Creation. ACSandy as an example
Another way would be to enhance some textures through Skinbuilder or postwork, to your likings.
The quality of a skin largely comes down to the capability of the Artist creating the asset. The best artists I have come across are
You must be registered to see the links
and
You must be registered to see the links
. You can then tweak these skins from the base asset.
90% of the work to create a character asset is the creation of the skin itself, so in reality you are really buying a skin rather than a character morph.
Typically when creating a character for my work, I select an asset skin first and then tweak it using skin builder 8 and Altern 8. I will then play with some of the skin settings to get the right hue, shininess etc. Following this I dial up a combination of character face / body morphs and then tweak these morphs with the separate body part morphs. When doing the final skin / morphs I do portrait test renders such that I can see the before / after tweaks renders to see whether the latest set of adjustments improved / detracted from the model.