Basically, I want to create a new material (texture) for a wardrobe item myself, Ive tampered around a bit but really wanted to do it properly. Sorry if this is covered elsewhere.
Well, there's a lot
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. But the question is more can you effectively do it ?
I mean, you said yourself that you tried to reverse engineer a duf file to understand how it is done. What mean that you never really goes further than the really basis of Daz Studio. Would you have tried to "save as", that you would have seen the "preset material" option, and tried it, at least out of curiosity since it's name seem to match what you want to do. And would you have took a curious look at the "surface" panel, that you would have know that you can manually select the texture to apply. Those two steps would have give you the answer to your question.
Plus, the fact that you need to ask mean that you probably don't have the starts of a clue regarding what bump maps, normal maps, and so on can be. While you can just replace the diffuse texture by itself, and use original the maps and values, this would just give a generic looks to your newly textured figure, when not a weird one if the diffuse have shadows that will not match the relief provided by the normal map.
Creating a new texture is something that need way more than some drawing knowledge. At least if you want something that will not looks too bad once rendered. So, you should probably starts by learning how texturing works, and what are the texture options available for the IRay engine. Or, better, use shaders packs if you want to retexture something.
