How do you use templates? - Yes, I know, I'm a newb

mike_42547761

Okay, so I went a little crazy and downloaded tons of free content online to play with in Daz. I got a bunch of templates. They appear to be jpgs. No idea how to use them or what to use them for. Can they be installed as character skins? or would I take them into a modeling program and use them to make a new item? Some of them are really cool, but I'm totally not proficient at modeling yet, so if there's a way to use them as a skin or texture that'd be wicked. Any tips?

Chohole

Templates are the image of the 3d mesh as laid out by UV coordinates, which you need if you wish to make new textures for the model in question.

mike_42547761

So in this case let's say I have a template of a superman costume? What can I do with it? It won't work as a skin or material, right?

mike_42547761

Chohole said:

Templates are the image of the 3d mesh as laid out by UV coordinates, which you need if you wish to make new textures for the model in question.

Ive got another character that has a file that says textures, but appears to only have .jpg images in it. Does that make sense?

Chohole

if you look at the template in a paint prgram you will find it looks something like this

mike_42547761

mike_42547761 said:

Chohole said:

Templates are the image of the 3d mesh as laid out by UV coordinates, which you need if you wish to make new textures for the model in question.

Ive got another character that has a file that says textures, but appears to only have .jpg images in it. Does that make sense?

So in this most resent example though, if theres a third partytexture I want to use, should there be more than just a jpg file?

Chohole

It's a template.  You use the template to make your own textures.   Like this.    http://chohole.ovbi.org/texture_tutorial.htm

 

JPG images in the texture folder are for applying to the model that the textures came with.

 

Chohole

So can you show us exactly what it is that you have so we can talk you through this.

sriesch

If you are using a template (with the grid lines, per Chohole's example above) you are using that as a guide to paint a new material in the correct spot on your blank canvas.  You can use the template as a second layer while painting on the first layer, or you could of course just paint over the top of a copy of the template under certain circumstances.  And yes, you could apply the template as if it were a material if you for some reason wanted the effect of having those grid lines as your material for some special effect, although probably you aren't trying to do that.

If you have actual materials that somebody else has created without the corresponding files that load them onto the product (just .jpgs and no other files for example), you could go into the Parameters tab (if you are using DAZ Studio) and click on the diffuse parameter's image thumbnail to change the diffuse image used to your file.  Note that this could be as simple as this or extremely labor intensive if you have many surfaces with many different images, and it is possible whomever made the images has one for the diffuse image, one for transparency(opacity), one for a bump map, one for displacement, one for ambient, etc. so if you are going this route, let us know and provide an example and ask more questions.

If you have purchased a "standard" product it would probably just be content that you clicked on in your content library to apply all the appropriate materials to your selected object and you would not much care about the individual files normally.   I'm assuming this isn't what you have or you wouldn't be asking about this though.

mike_42547761

So for one example I downloaded a bunch of stuff from the links on the ultimate superhero freebie thread on here. I was excited cuz I thought I’d be able to just use and install them easily as clothing textures on my models.  Trying to figure out if they are useable and how to install them.

here are some examples:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e5fn3in9c3t68nx/cap_canuck_goldenage_by_hiram67-d7ubfge.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mdbvc7scq5jm2mn/cap_canuck_m4_by_hiram67-d7ubfwu.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y9j0txn02cn23fv/batman_classic_textures_4_goldenage_suit_by_hiram67-d722xax.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fuzyc0t6ophvf4n/the_punisher_2nd_skin_textures_4_m4_by_hiram67-d72pgof.zip?dl=0

How do I use these?  Any ideas?

mike_42547761

Chohole said:

So can you show us exactly what it is that you have so we can talk you through this.

So with the files above I’ve unzipped and they are just .jpg. Trying to figure out where to put them or what folder in the directory, data, people, runtime, something else?

 

Chohole

mike_42547761 said:

Chohole said:

So can you show us exactly what it is that you have so we can talk you through this.

So with the files above I’ve unzipped and they are just .jpg. Trying to figure out where to put them or what folder in the directory, data, people, runtime, something else?

 

Did you see what sriesch said above and try working through that.

Chohole

saw this in another thread,  and thought it would fit here as well

A seasonal way of explaining UV mapping

mike_42547761

Chohole said:

mike_42547761 said:

Chohole said:

So can you show us exactly what it is that you have so we can talk you through this.

So with the files above I’ve unzipped and they are just .jpg. Trying to figure out where to put them or what folder in the directory, data, people, runtime, something else?

 

Did you see what sriesch said above and try working through that.

 

Chohole said:

saw this in another thread,  and thought it would fit here as well

A seasonal way of explaining UV mapping

Lol that is hilarious. I u destabilize d how UV mapping works, I just don’t know how to properly use the files I’ve downloaded from the freebie thread.

 

BTW thank you both for the time you’re taking to help me with this. I really do appreciate it. ????

scorpio

If they are textures you need to have the figure/outfit/prop or whatever the textures are created for

mike_42547761

I have the figures, I just don't know where to install textures. A lot of freebies have loose files and no data, people, runtime, folders etc, so I don't know where to copy the files to. 

mike_42547761

Maybe I've overcomplicated my question? Maybe I should have said: I have a free texture file, where do I put it/install it, so it's available to use in DAZ?

Chohole

If you were using Poser I could define a runtime to you stage by stage.  I can't do that with DS as I don 't use it and have never used it. 

Can some one define the equivalent of a runtime for this user.

Runtime
            Geometries
            Libraries      (character/lights/poses/materials/Props etc)            
            Textures      

The textures images go in the folder called textures.

What is the folder structure in DS.

 

 

mike_42547761

The DAZ structure is very similar, I've been exploring my directories and I think I've about got it figured out. Thank you for all of your time!

sriesch

In the case of your first zip file, which contains nothing but 4 jpgs, those appear to be actual materials (not just templates).  They will not show up in your content library since they don't have any of the supporting files that DAZ Studio uses to identify content, however you are free to import them as I described above, then you can save that as a material preset for later use into one of your mapped DAZ Studio format content paths and that saved version will show up in your content library.  However, there is one catch (at least back in DAZ Studio 4.8, not sure if anything has changed in version 4.9) where DAZ Studio starts looking through ALL your mapped content path folders (should you have more than one) and the first time it sees a matching filename, regardless of path prior to that mapped location, it assumes it found it. Therefore, either all your images must be uniquely named, or the subfolder+filename below that point must be uniquely named to prevent the file from unexpectedly swapping to a different one with the same name.  Your mapped folder(s) can be found in the Content Library pane > menu in upper corner > Content Directory Manager, then expand the DAZ Studio format.  Yours will be different than mine, but to illustrate, pretend I have two mapped:

C:\thing1

C:\thing2

If I put the file "cap.jpg" that's say the material for a hat into C:\thing2 and start using it in DAZ Studio, everything works great.  5 years later I have a completely unrelated image file also called "cap.jpg" that's the material for a truck camper in C:\thing1, then when you open that scene file with the hat it'll suddenly try to map the truck part onto it instead of the hat.  Less likely with a file called "cap canuck suitA.jpg" but still possible.  You can use whatever trick you want to avoid this.  If you have only a single mapped content folder then you won't encounter the problem, but I think there might be several by default (or at least were across past versions of DAZ Studio).  I avoid it procedurally by creating an extra file with the name of the mapped folder in it so I can't duplicate, such as

C:\thing1\thing1CustomMaterials

C:\thing2\thing2CustomMaterials

and only the "C:\thing1" and "C:\thing2" are mapped, but the images are one level deeper in their respective subfolders C:\thing1\thing1CustomMaterials and C:\thing2\thing2CustomMaterials, so DS sees "\thing1CustomMaterials\cap.jpg" and "\thing2CustomMaterials\cap.jpg" which are different and it doesn't mix them up.

Confusing, awkward, you may not encounter it, but best that you know right away before you decide where you personally want to store those files to avoid possible problems later.  Took me years before I encountered this, but quite a bit of effort to figure out why my image edits stopped working (I actually had two versions of the same image in use, so rather than suddenly finding something completely unrelated and obvious, I was actually looking at an earlier version of the exact same file.  Very hard to track down.)

mike_42547761

Thanks for this, that's a big help too

jestmart

You need to place the textures in a sub-folder of...  /Runtime/Textures/  ...of a known Studio library so that they will have relative addressing in any preset or scene file you save from Studio.

mike_42547761

Okay, thank you, now that I'm getting more familiar with the file structure, that makes sense.