Bringing textures, materials, bumpmaps into DS?

Chiza.alba

I asked this in the Sculptris forum and didn't get any answers so far, so I figured I'd ask it here. Is it possible to sculpt and paint a model in Sculptris and bring it into Daz Studio for rigging and posing, all while retaining the textures, materials and bumpmaps from Sculptris? Sculptris has the ability to export texmaps, material maps, normal maps and bump maps... but I don't know how to get those into Daz Studio once I've imported my Sculptris OBJ to rig in DS. I'd appreciate any help! Thank you.

Staffa24

It should be possible just like with any OBJ file, regardless of the origin.

You will need to put the texture files created by Sculptris into a directory under My Library\Runtime\textures
and the files should not have spaces in the names (rename if necessary)
Then import your obj and in the Surfaces tab attach your textures to the appropriate areas of your model.

Chiza.alba

So that should work for the texture file... do you know if that would work for material maps and bump maps too? I'll experiment with it later, but I'm at work right now so I figure might as well ask.

Syndaryl

Chiza.alba said:

So that should work for the texture file... do you know if that would work for material maps and bump maps too? I'll experiment with it later, but I'm at work right now so I figure might as well ask.

If the maps don't automatically apply themselves when you import the OBJ, you can assign them manually on the Surfaces tab.

SpottedKitty

Chiza.alba said:

So that should work for the texture file... do you know if that would work for material maps and bump maps too?

A texture file is a texture file — the same method is used for any Surfaces parameter that calls up an image file, whether it's controlling diffuse texture, bump/displacement, specularity, reflection, opacity, or anything else. This includes advanced shaders such as Ubersurface or HSS (Human Surface Shader), which have a stack of extra parameters not found in standard D|S materials.

Chiza.alba

I probably should have prefaced this by mentioning that I'm an utter noob.

I created a directory for my Sculptris textures under "My Library\Runtime\textures" and imported my OBJ. So now how do I "attach" my textures? I don't see my files in the Presets. When I go to Editor and try to assign the maps where I think they might be appropriate, (for example, I go to "Normal Map," browse to and select my Sculptris normal map) nothing happens to the OBJ in my viewport. Same for assigning a bump map, and I don't even see a similar option for assigning a tex map or mat map. What am I not getting/what am I doing wrong?

For those who don't use Sculptris, it might help to know that the materials and such work a bit differently than DS. I don't really understand it, but FYI the bump maps it exports are a TIF extension, and the material, texture and normal maps are all PNG. Does that have something to do with why this isn't working?

SpottedKitty

Chiza.alba said:

When I go to Editor and try to assign the maps where I think they might be appropriate, (for example, I go to "Normal Map," browse to and select my Sculptris normal map) nothing happens to the OBJ in my viewport. Same for assigning a bump map, and I don't even see a similar option for assigning a tex map or mat map.

You are probably actually doing it right, but Normals, Bump, Reflection and some other parameters only show when you render, not in the Viewport preview. Try a render and see what (if anything) happens.

As for "tex map and mat map", in D|S they're different ways of saying the same thing. What do they do in Sculptris? One is probably the equivalent of Diffuse in D|S, applying a coloured image to the object.

BTW, as for not seeing your texture files in the presets, what you see there are D|S scripts that apply the parameters to the surfaces of your object — you never see the texture files themselves, unless you're browsing to apply an image file to one of your surface parameters.

Chiza.alba

Thanks for your reply, SpottedKitty. I guess I don't understand what the point is of putting the textures in a Daz directory when I'm just going to browse to the files to apply them manually anyway. Seems to me the files could be sitting on my desktop and it wouldn't matter?

After a bit of experimentation with my maps, applying them in different places and doing a lot of renders, I finally figured out which textures go where. The tex map goes in diffuse, and the mat map goes in glossiness (I think). Thanks a lot for your help!

SpottedKitty

Chiza.alba said:

I guess I don't understand what the point is of putting the textures in a Daz directory when I'm just going to browse to the files to apply them manually anyway. Seems to me the files could be sitting on my desktop and it wouldn't matter?

Actually it matters a lot — those applied textures don't become part of your scene, when you save the scene what gets saved is pointers to the folder containing those texture files. When you re-load the scene, the program goes to where the pointers... erm, point, and expects to find the texture files there. These pointers to other files are generally not absolute folder paths, they're relative to wherever your content library is stored. This simplifies the process of adding new textures: simply drop them into a folder in your Textures folder, AND DO NOT MOVE THEM LATER. Now you can go into D|S, load your object, and in the Surfaces tab browse to the proper folder as you've already learned to do. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Chiza.alba

Thanks so much! This was so helpful.