[Released] dForce Thicket for Daz Dog 8
Oso3D
Posts: 15,011
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-thicket-for-daz-dog-8
Another in my Thicket series!
Create dogs of leaves or bramble, smoke and water.
Better yet, swap materials with Thicket for Genesis 8 Male for even more possibilities!
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Comments
At first I was on the fence, but looking through the promo renders, the smoke and water ones really sold me on the utility of the set. Being able to render 'ghost dogs', etc. added another element to just the bramble and leaves settings.
Moddey dhooooooooooooo! Looks great.
I wonder if with some shader work, he couldn't also pass as a decent Irish Wolfhound?
I am debating on buying it. On the one hand, I love both the original concept and its variations, on the other, I've yet to successfully render Furo without any crashes and I don't even know what the problem is.
I would expect Thicket products to be much safer to render, since the hair density is far, far lower than something like Furo, meaning (at least as far as I understand it) that there’s less processing required to render it
First, Uthgard, are you simulating Furo before the crashes? If so, try rendering without a sim. (I've had... weird luck with various dense fur figures crashing after simulating)
Second, what Gordig said; thicket has a hair count MUCH lower than other stuff. My machine isn't exactly cutting edge (I have two video cards! ... yeah, GTX 970s), and I've found thicket G8M and Dog waaaay easier to work with.
And remember, you can always return it within a month if it isn't working out. I absolutely won't take it personally.
Jonny: It seems like a bit of a stretch, though I've actually considered fiddling with the ghost effect for a cartoon-style dog; if the 'strands' can pass for 'clumps of fur,' it might work, and end up with a fairly fast running effect.
I've experimented a little with PWToon and something like this, though I've run into a few issues (namely, the base of the strands end up sketched around). Still... something to play with.
Thanks to you both, Gordig and Will, I am really tempted to just go ahead with it and add the Thicket Man just to mess around with the dog's more ethereal effects. As to Furo, I haven't even tried to simulate it, just loaded it with the default lighting and hit render to test things out. My graphics card shouldn't be a bottleneck in this instance, as I've got a GTX 1080, but maybe my CPU is insufficient for the task at hand? Well, back to pondering how much ramen I can stomach this month...
Maybe attempt to lower the hair density. Though that’s odd since I think my machine is weaker.
1) Solved the problem with Furo: with hair density 10, the hair used far too much memory (more than thirty GB, which completely filled my disk drive--digital hoarding, I know).
2) The Thicket Dog is as much fun as I'd hoped. Just the water effect combined with the more monstrous morphs for the dog should have my water elemental needs covered for the years to come. Everything else also works wonderfully, and I love the shadow/wraith effect. Also, seeing how many animals are being covered by the Daz Horse 2, any chance we will see the Thicket Horse?
Glad to hear you figured out the furo! If you were wondering why there’s a geoshell and the hair, that’s a big effort to cut down on the need for hairs. The base fur fuzzy shell can look reasonably, well, fuzzy while the hair helps create a fur silhouette and add hopefully just enough pop of ‘oh that’s fur’.
Doing the fur 100% ‘right’ would otherwise require 10-50x as many hairs and most people, including myself, don’t have machines that can manage that.
As for thicket horse... definitely. I was debating whether to do dog or horse first. (Though I have another thicket product in testing, and another I’m poking around with)
Embarrassingly enough, I battled with the geoshell for a bit when testing things out with the wingless geograft, as I didn't even register its presence nor function. Obvious in hindsight and all that, and I do appreciate the effort to save on resources.
Also, great to hear about the Thicket horde expanding. At this rate, I'll need to do a campaign full of druids to justify the expense.
Edit: It occurs to me that, with similar trickery to the shader used for the shadow dog, it may be possible to make a glowing, dbz/anime style aura. That would be occasion for celebration, it at all feasible.
Edit 2 - Edit Harder: Scratch that, just changing the colors, adding emission and lowering the hair count to make the underlying figure more visible and here we have... Super Bully! Unfortunate naming aside, I quite like the effect for a quick test render. Can certainly imagine a few cases where it may come in handy.
Thicket for G8M has a glowing hair option, shown in the promo. Also, since the hairs are UV mapped in a straightforward way, you can play around with your own patterns/styles.
By the way, if you want to use thicket materials for any random item, you can do a number of weird things.
Let's say some random hair piece; I'd make a duplicate, then create a thicket figure. Make sure HairPiece is render tessellation 3 for branches, 2 for leaves. Copy thicket surface, paste to the hair.
Filter surface by 'surface groups' and make sure the hair piece's surfaces are set to what they should be. (Like, if they were originally set to Default or Face or whatever, set them back to that because it was copied over)
You might want to copy the original hair's scale or density maps, depending on the effect you want. Tweak hair density, too.
Note if you are generally messing around with branches, the effect works best with rounded corners. This is a special iray shader element that generates normals to, well, smooth out the appearance of edges. This really helps keep the hair complexity low while not looking weirdly blocky. (Of course, if you want weirdly blocky... set it to 0!)
Finally, if you really have the stamina for it, you can mostly apply the shaders to strand hair. For Strand hair, the editor contains many of the parameters that dForce Hair has in its surface settings. My advice is to jot down things like line width, scale and density and their maps, scraggle and frizz in either Notepad or a sheet of paper. You can enter them into the strand editor.
This can be handy for things that are unlikely to ever have dForce hair, like, oh, Oso Ammonoids (heh).
Right, and I like the effect for what it is, but it doesn't give the same flame-like, volumetric effect that the shadow shader gives. Also, the thick wisps that willow or stream around the figure really sell the illusion of something alive and writhing to me (even if imperfectly), which helps with an aura, something that should be responsive and dynamic. The glowing presets in the Thicket Man, I would rather use to show an otherworldly creature instead of a human manifesting a supernatural phenomenon.
Once you have the geometry for Thicket Man, you can do a lot of things with shader work. I'm sure the same would be true for the dog. On the left is the default Thicket Man. In the middle, I used Mattymanx's MMX Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader Kit with a fade from dark brown to red. Then on the right, just for grins, I loaded one of his psychadelic color maps.
dForce Thicket for Daz Dog 8 lists 'dforce hair' and 'daz studio 4.12' as Compatible Software.
Is "dforce hair" a separate product I have to buy before I can use this?
No, it's a feature of DS 4.11+ - the Daz Studio reference is always to the current version, so 4.12, but dForce hair or cloth also get listed as theya re real restrictions on which version you can use.