DS mats.... duf? dsa? dsf?

jakiblue

i think i'm getting confused.

what's the difference between .duf, .dsf and .dsa when it comes to DS mats?

If you're doing textures for a genesis clothing piece that is in duf format, do the mats HAVE to also be in .duf format?

Whoa, I am so lost.

fixmypcmike

They don't have to be .duf, unless they make use of the surface sets feature. .duf presets will also load the object if desired if nothing is selected in the scene.

Lissa_xyz

I'll just paste Richard's explanation from here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3491/#44317

.dsf (.duf in DAZ Studio 4.5) is just data, and is the officially supported format going forward. .dsa (and .dsb, .ds and .dse) are scripts - they actually have the instructions for asking for options and for making changes - and they have been deprecated, no long the officially supported method. .dsf/.duf will not work in older versions of DS, but being data they will work in other applications such as Carrara (or even Poser and other third-party applications) once importers are available, unlike the scripts which require the DS scripting engine. On the other hand because they are code scripts can be hacked to do things that the dsf reader isn’t set to do.

jakiblue

wow, that's a lot of info to take in. I'm still confused tho.

Backwards compatibility with earlier DS versions doesn't really matter here, I don't think, as the textures are for a pair of Genesis shoes. And Genesis didn't work in earlier versions - tha'ts correct?

So if I saved the mats as .dsa, they'd work for any DS version that uses Genesis? Is that correct?

jakiblue

..or save as both .dsa AND .dsf to cover all bases?

Bejaymac

If the product uses a DUF file to load it into DS then it's only compatible with DS4.5+, so there is no real point in saving material presets for it in anything other than DUF.