Carrara 8.5 Fast Mip Map DEGRADES all texture maps!

Kevin Sanderson

boojumbunn said:

Yes, it's almost like someone sat down and said "Hey, lets design a completely new standard for one of our products without even considering our other products." It's right up there with "Lets add some new export features and deliberately avoid the formats that our other products use." *sigh* I'm sorry, but for the last week I have gotten nothing accomplished because of things like this. I spend an hour last night hand loading in a base texture onto each part of the Genesis Super Suit, and I'm still only halfway through loading in the base texture onto the hundreds of locations. Then I get the joy of hand editting every single one of those textures to point to the texture maps stored in the Runtime/Textures folder... and then I get to do the same with the specular maps and the bump maps. It's going to take me days of work just to get supersuit working for my character and it's leaving me rather bitter.

Boojum

Hi Boojum, have you thought of trying Texture Atlas in DAZ Studio to cut down the number of textures? That's what some folks are using to get high texture counts reduced (Stonemason's stuff for example) for Octane Render with really good results. I'd link to one of Joel Gecko's renders but it's behind the customer area at the Otoy forum. He got a Stonemason scene and semi truck loaded with no problems reducing /combining textures with Texture Atlas so they would fit the texture limits of his video card and Octane.

Dartanbeck

DAZ_Spooky said:

Dartanbeck said:

So is Fast Mip Map the culprit or are the maps off slightly?

EDIT:
Well - not for it's intended purpose - I'm sure it looks great in DS - but someone should check - if they have DS installed.

If you set the shading rate to 1 or the default 2, the seams are at least as obvious in DS. So does that make it a 'product' issue then? Is this occurring with other characters as well?
I wish I could just check myself. My little daughter (well, she's 26) is laying here in the hospital with her Thyroids removed. I hope it does what we're all hoping it does... help. Even more so, I hope she gets over this damned pain soon. Poor kid is all too used to surgery :(

Boojum the brown bunny

Kevin Sanderson said:

Hi Boojum, have you thought of trying Texture Atlas in DAZ Studio to cut down the number of textures? That's what some folks are using to get high texture counts reduced (Stonemason's stuff for example) for Octane Render with really good results. I'd link to one of Joel Gecko's renders but it's behind the customer area at the Otoy forum. He got a Stonemason scene and semi truck loaded with no problems reducing /combining textures with Texture Atlas so they would fit the texture limits of his video card and Octane.

I don't think the Texture Atlas in Daz Studio will change the number of textures for the smart content that Carrara is loading. I know that GenX doesn't update morphs for the genesis figure that Carrara loads.

Boojum

Dartanbeck

DAZ_Spooky said:

Dartanbeck said:

Jonstark said:

DAZ_Spooky said:

The problem is there is no information in the shaders that tell you what material zone they are supposed to apply to. It is strictly an index, where the first Material Zone on the object gets the first sub-shader, etc..

So if the First Material zone, when you saved it was teeth, but the first material zone when it was applied the next time was face....

BTW there is a reason you don't have this fix with 8.5 and that is because we haven't figured a way to avoid the incompatibility.

What happens if there are more material zones on the original shader than on the new version (example, V4 and M4 have material zones for eye surface that Genesis doesn't have)? Do they just vanish, or is there must an extra material zone layer added that doesn't apply to anything? Personally even though it's a tough choice I would say just bite the bullet and go for it. Everyone who has a shader library for V4/M4 is already having to make new shader versions to fit with Genesis anyway, so the present is as good a time as any. Too bad they couldn't just organize them in the same order to begin with for all figures...

I'm fairly certain that, if the multi-shader being loaded has more shaders within that the receiving figure has zones, the extra shaders are added to the shader tab. Obviously, they do not get added to the figure.

You know, I personally wouldn't mind the "Go For It!" decision - simply because I have no difficulty using incompatible multi-shaders, and sorting them through on my own. This really is a tough call - but .... Argh!!!

The extra shaders, on the bottom of the list, are not added to the figure. I know... they cannot be. What I really do like, however, is that I believe they ARE still added to the shader list of the scene - until 'remove unused' or 'consolidate' are used. This means that we can still access the shaders within a multi-shader from the browser on incompatible figures - then just use the drop downs on each zone and select the appropriate shader until we have a working set. THEN consolidate and remove unused shaders. Then go in and tweak to desired effect.

One of my favorite aspects of Indigone's V4 Skin Shader Kit and Lights is that she doesn't give you a multi-shader. She gives you procedural shaders made in Carrara for each domain except the inner mouth stuff. Even the eyelashes are procedural.
But the idea of it, you simply drag the skin shader to the torso, limbs, and face. Each part of the eye to the appropriate spot. Really cool.

You know, the more i think about it, the more I'm agreeing with jonstark in that I am more on the "Go For It" team than any other - simply for the incredible amount of compatibility it would offer to anything sharing the same domain names. Either way:

LOL. Welcome to our world. :)I feel for ya...
You will get the blame either way! :)
Damned if you do, well... you know how it goes...

Dartanbeck

DAZ_Spooky said:

We have a dev looking at improving the performance on a wider range for Fast Mip-Map

Curiosity = 100
So, what does this mean? Would that optimize its bounds of color range, dis-allowing it to reach into the white part of the map?

Kevin Sanderson

boojumbunn said:

Kevin Sanderson said:

Hi Boojum, have you thought of trying Texture Atlas in DAZ Studio to cut down the number of textures? That's what some folks are using to get high texture counts reduced (Stonemason's stuff for example) for Octane Render with really good results. I'd link to one of Joel Gecko's renders but it's behind the customer area at the Otoy forum. He got a Stonemason scene and semi truck loaded with no problems reducing /combining textures with Texture Atlas so they would fit the texture limits of his video card and Octane.

I don't think the Texture Atlas in Daz Studio will change the number of textures for the smart content that Carrara is loading. I know that GenX doesn't update morphs for the genesis figure that Carrara loads.

Boojum

Or is it Carrara being finicky again? There are character sets (sold at Rendo) that won't load properly in Carrara directly because something in the code is missing, but if you import from Poser, they are fine. But there are still issues with some morphs (correction sets for V4) making it over. Fenric talked about it a while ago and even his tool had issues getting some morphs into Carrara.

I'm wondering if you can use Texture Atlas to save out the textures and swap them in Carrara or won't that work. What Joel did was combine something like 30 textures into 3 to get them into Octane.

Dartanbeck

I'm really loving this range of thought, Kevin. I hope I remember (and find the time) to try this out when I get home. Hmmm... the GenX thing is unfortunate. I was planning to get that, too.

Boojum the brown bunny

Kevin Sanderson said:

Or is it Carrara being finicky again? There are character sets (sold at Rendo) that won't load properly in Carrara directly because something in the code is missing, but if you import from Poser, they are fine. But there are still issues with some morphs (correction sets for V4) making it over. Fenric talked about it a while ago and even his tool had issues getting some morphs into Carrara.

I'm wondering if you can use Texture Atlas to save out the textures and swap them in Carrara or won't that work. What Joel did was combine something like 30 textures into 3 to get them into Octane.

Daz Studio Materials don't work in Carrara. Carrara only loads Carrara Shaders and Poser Textures. They just updated Supersuit for use with DSON, but none of the textures have been updated for Poser or Carrara, just for Daz Studio.

The problem is that, when I load supersuit into Carrara, it has over 100 shader domains. So if you open the Texture Editor for Supersuit, there are over 100 entries on the right, all populated with a bright color. Before I can load a general shader in for the whole object, I have to clear out the 100 entries that are already there. There is no convenient "Clear all textures" button that I can find.

so right now I'm loading the same texture onto all 100 shader domains of the object. Then I can add the texture map to that one master shader and it should populate for all the shader domains on the object. Once that is done, I can save the whole thing off as a Carrara Shader and never have to do it again.

It isn't this one process that is bugging me, however.. it's all the slowdowns. It's finding the supersuit and applying it, then spending an hour looking for the shaders for it, then looking inside DIM for the product and finding out they don't exist for it, just texture maps, but no actual shaders... I don't want to be doing this. I want to be animating a video for my Star Citizen guild. But each step along the path to creating the video ends up taking an order of magnitude longer as I try to figure out what is going on. That's what has me sort of bummed out. I'm stuck doing repetetive instead of blocking out and smoothing my animations... I buy content so that I don't have to do the boring part of the job. :) Ah well, such is life.

Boojum the brown bunny

Boojum the brown bunny

Dartanbeck said:

I'm really loving this range of thought, Kevin. I hope I remember (and find the time) to try this out when I get home. Hmmm... the GenX thing is unfortunate. I was planning to get that, too.

I suspect that the Genesis I am using Genx on is not the genesis that Carrara is loading. I need to go see where the Carrara Starter content is getting put and see what Genesis figure it is looking for. Once I find that I may be able to load it into DazStudio and use GenX to load additional morphs. I'll let you know how that works.

Boojum the brown bunny

kakman

boojumbunn said:

Dartanbeck said:

I'm really loving this range of thought, Kevin. I hope I remember (and find the time) to try this out when I get home. Hmmm... the GenX thing is unfortunate. I was planning to get that, too.

I suspect that the Genesis I am using Genx on is not the genesis that Carrara is loading. I need to go see where the Carrara Starter content is getting put and see what Genesis figure it is looking for. Once I find that I may be able to load it into DazStudio and use GenX to load additional morphs. I'll let you know how that works.

Boojum the brown bunny

I have not yet tried GenX with the release version of C8.5.

I have used it with the Beta version of C8.5 and worked great. I did a complete "clean install" of Studio, C8.5 and all Genesis related content so I can not say that it works now - I will try it whan I get back to my computer (I am at a client site right now).

Did you ever try GenX with the Beta version oc C8.5?

Unless DAZ made some fundamental change (which is not unheard of) it should work easily and well.

In fact Jonstark recently posted that it has used it with the release version of C8.5 without any problems.

DAZ_Spooky

boojumbunn said:

I don't think the Texture Atlas in Daz Studio will change the number of textures for the smart content that Carrara is loading. I know that GenX doesn't update morphs for the genesis figure that Carrara loads.

Boojum

Yes it will, and Yes it does.

Oh and I picked those for testing because they are some of the more extreme shapes, and they all work just fine.

Fenric

It's been too long since I last teased you guys.

Kevin Sanderson

Cool! Alright Fenric!!

araneldon

Fenric said:

It's been too long since I last teased you guys.

Oh wow, it's like you read my mind. Or did I read yours? :P Either way, fabulous :)

PhilW

Looks good - can you include reflection amount as well, it seemed to be missing from the list?

3dOutlaw

Fenric said:

It's been too long since I last teased you guys.

Cool, be sure to re-post here when available! I don't visit the cafe too often...

...and if you can add the checkbox for "Will not crash when using Genesis with YaToon2", I would appreciate it. ;-)

kakman

3doutlaw said:

Fenric said:

It's been too long since I last teased you guys.

Cool, be sure to re-post here when available! I don't visit the cafe too often...

...and if you can add the checkbox for "Will not crash when using Genesis with YaToon2", I would appreciate it. ;-)

Looks great Fenric and I must say, again, that you are utterly fantastic.