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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Rainy day, long post. Experimented with Gaia in various lights.
Second impressions: A-team.
Notes...
Compared her with Mousso's Ginny 8.1 to get a better feel for the PBRSkin parameters.
Looking good, especially in closeup.
One weakness: Gaia skin suffers in hard sunlight; remarkably harsh shadow terminator artifacts on the head. With higher res there is still an unnaturally hard line separating light and shadow areas. Ginny skin deals with this remarkably well.
Workaround 1: don't use hard sunlight or cover with hair/clothes.
Workaround 2 / hack: disable Bump and Details, increase roughness to compensate. When not in closeup, the change is minor, but the shadow issue is much less in-your-face.
Last render:
Gaia vs. Miriam (both with a bit of 'model' dialed in - thinner face, BJ likes 'em rounder. Is Amira in outoftouch promos tweaked or std?).
UV maps:
changed my mind on this. Would prefer a 'standard' 8.1 for future models, even though my 8GB card is perma-drowning.
Reason: an important perk of the BJ skins is that you can put them on other figures with lesser textures.
Since Gaia is a hybrid, you can't reuse the skin on 8.0 or 8.1. Haven't figured out yet how to put it on 8.0 figures, DAZ never maps the the 'torso'.
Too much fiddling just to save a 2k map or 3.
Promos:
> "Been one of my goals to make promos that aren't so magic sauce you can't hope to replicate them. It's really just a simple background, some HDR and bunch of spotlights and little to no post work. Maybe that's the wrong approach for maximizing sales though. Need to wow people more maybe."
From a customer perspective I think yes, absolutely.
I like the 'studio' renders for showing me precisely what to expect. I can also appreciate a neutral, clean style. But flash attracts eyeballs, and neutral tends to be bland. In the past, your promos had some attractive/interesting scenes, but Gaia didn't. And you, of all PAs, should always show off one real close closeup. All just IMO of course.
Show me something I wish I could render, something that would get upvotes in the gallery. I'm a rather rational guy, but "oooh nice" occasionally gets my money without second thought.
(personal favorites: I look at everything from Linday and iSourceTexture just for the cool renders)
@pixelsploiting: nice!
In that case, I am glad that I have not read the book. The movie was enough interesting for me without previous knowledge of the story behind it.
Sometimes too much knowledge can spoil enojoyment - not worth it in my opinion.
Ensley - Dandy Girl
https://www.daz3d.com/ensley-hd--expressions-hd-for-genesis-8-female
I've already converted 8.0 torsos to 8.1 as well as the reverse. It can certainly be done.
What visual difference such conversion do?
Could you please post some examples. Thanks.
All 8 work very well on 8.1.
I like the expressions so only use 8.1 now, but I only buy 8.1 UV characters at less than 50% off because I want a few to get a feel for how the new UVs work.
I'm not convinced Daz are drinking their own coolaid on the 8.1 UV thing considering how they're avoiding having it mentioned or otherwise. Surprising really, considering how great the one that exist are.
Hopefull they will start specifying.
I haven't bought BJ's latest character yet as its not got 8.1 UVs. It hasn't stopped my buying 3/8 characters, but I just don't need many more; they need to be different - and they need to be NOT merchant resource textures.
There is no visual difference. It is just a matter of making the items compatible with each other. If you are talking about PBR Skin, this can be applied to any surface, so you can use it on anything. If you match the material settings there will be no difference.
If you are wondering how, you can do this all inside Daz itself by baking the textures. When I did this, the resulting renders for Gaia look exactly the same with the new 8.1 converted textures as they do with her out of the box textures.
There is a tutorial somewhere in the forums, but here are highlights for those who don't know, and tailored to this specific task:
1- Load a basic 8.1 figure
2- Load your Genesis 8 material preset. Before going further, double check your default templates that everything is in place and note what surfaces are under which template. Since this is just for the torso, it is pretty easy.
3- Go to the surfaces tab. Locate the menu, the triangle with lines at the top left or right depending on where your surface tab is docked.
4- From this menu, locate Map Transfer. You will see two fields here. On the left there is Templates, and this will be blank. On the right you have Surfaces. Hover your mouse over the Templates field and right click. Pick the option to create a new template.
5- Template 1 is for the face and related textures. You can leave this blank because there is no change between 8 and 8.1. Template 2 is for the new Head texture. Template 3 is for most of the old torso texture. If this is all you want, you can stop creating templates right here. If you wish to try baking the eye, you can go further to the template for them. However I don't see a point in doing that. All you do is click on the surface and drag it to the template it goes to. You will notice that the surface you dragged is now missing from the surfaces section. That means you are doing it right.
6- To get going, you need to highlight the Default Templates. We want the torso, so we highlight BOTH templates 2 and 3. Doing this will allow us to continue. If you do not highlight the templates, you cannot proceed. Do not highlight the surfaces! You will see the target template is 8.1, and the source is "current". This is what we want. You can select where to save. Saving in the same location as the original textures makes sense, but you can do whatever you want here as long as you can find them.
7- I suggest keeping the file types the same, Gaia has JPGs. Crank the baking quality up to the max of 10. Hardware Cutoff was already maxed, I changed the bleed factor down a bit.
8- Then just hit accept.
9- Your new textures will have generic names. So it is a good idea if you do this a lot to save in new locations to not overwite previous convertions. This is where saving new files in the location of the original folder probably works better. All textures associated with Templates you chose are converted.
10- So for this character, I now have "Template2 Detail Normal Map", "Template2 Diffuse Color", "Template2 Normal Map", and "Template2 Specular Lobe Roughness". I also have these same maps for Template3. SInce the torso map for G8 already covers Template 3, there is no need to replace Template 3. You only need to go to Template 2 in your surface settings and replace the torso map with the equalivant texture you just created. Then go down the surface settings for the Head and change it to Base 8.1 Female.
11- You are done. You can do a test render to see if it looks ok. You can also save this as a material preset for future use. If you like messing with textures, you can now use your favorite blejaunte and other PA textures from 8.0 and mix them with native 8.1 textures.
12- Celebrate your bad self. WHOOO!
FYI this same process is also how you convert the unique UV maps from Victoria 7 and friends to standard Gensisis 3 (as well as Victoria 6 to Genesis 2.) So with this you can also convert any of the 7 series models that have unique UVs all the way to Genesis 8.1 by first converting them to Genesis 3. If you own the Gender swap UV product, then can also use this technique to convert textures from one sex to the other. This is how I cretaed a set of bluejaunte MALE textures. MWAHAHAHA!.
If you do see a seam, it is more likely do to the material settings using the new tiling feature in PBR Skin. How many times the tiles repeat can be adusted in the settings. This is a potential downside to using any kind of tiling for skin details if you like to do extreme close up pictures. But this is Gaia skin using newly converted head textures. There is no seam.
They wanted to be able to mix and match your Gaia (and other) 8.0 UV based textures with native 8.1 UV based textures. So after doing this they can use your Gaia specularity maps with Victoria 8.1 color maps if they wanted to. This is for the kit bashers out there.
I do the same. I will frequently use the gloss maps from certain characters with other characters, stuff like that. It helps make them cohesively blend together in scenes with multiple characters, and I just like them that way. And like I said in the post, I used this to create male textures from your girls. So I can use the gloss maps from bluejaunte characters on males.
So it very much has its uses.
It should also be possible to use this to go in reverse, to bake the 8.1 textures into good old 8.0 textures.
Ah you're going 8 to 8.1, gotcha.
That’s the best render of PBR skin I’ve seen! Great job! The only issue I have is with the lashes it comes with. The ends should be extra fine and they look like they were chopped off at the end. The lashes really ruin the realism which is too bad because the eyes look great. With different lashes, it would be one of the most photoreal images I’ve seen.
Oops.
Thanks a lot everyone, but I am specially gratefuf to outrider42, for the time to explain all of this.
That is what I am interested in, but did not know, how to ask for.
Thanks again for such a nice explanation.
Big fan of Bluejaunte's characters.
Until Daz can come up with a way to speed up character load time (I have a ton of characters/morphs), I have curtailed my new character purchases... unless something really adds to the gene pool of character kitbash dial spinning. I have had to cull a lot of characters out to keep my load times under what I consider reasonable, but I Never cull any of BJ's because they just seem to offer so much.
All that being said, I think it would be awesome if Bluejaunte could do an 8.1 character based off of an Amala body type. Again, these more "extreme" ends of the character-scape add a lot to the gene pool and fill a niche all on their own as stand alone.
oh, yeah, and try to sneak a genital morph through again ;)
Here is my attempt at Gaia
Misumi - https://www.daz3d.com/misumi-hd--signature-smile-hd-expression-for-genesis-8-female
with lights from: https://www.daz3d.com/md-portrait--basic-lights-auto-set-up-script
Warning! The downgrade for Gaia is already live. Don't download it if you haven't made a backup for the BJ Genitals morph.
I am a big fan of bluejaunte and was celebrating Gaia. Best 8.1 character so far and I would love to see more of bluejaunte's work coming up soon. Since I am using DAZ all of his characters are instant-buy's without even thinking.
But now I am very disappointed. I wasn't expecting a downgrade from and update. Why this had to happen? Is this some kind of violation of some DAZ rules? If so, this would really made me angry. There are plenty enough ways to make any character "lewd" but this smells like "you have to buy 8.1 pro for way too much money and we don't want you to get a cheap option!" Funny thing is, that this option was even a great way for additional morphing on others. Anyway.
thank you bluejaunte for your amazing work. Big fan here.
Honestly I'd appreciate if someone would be so kind to load this missing file up somewhere so I could at least load the stuff I've been working on again without an error message.
Caprica looks really great! And what a fierce looking in the main promo!
Misumi's skin looks extremely realistic to me here - bravo!
Yes, she does look to be another very photo-realistic from @bluejaunte. I particularly like her eyes/eyebrows.
- Greg
Bluejaunte's skin shaders look really great, but they just come out to dark. What is the best way to fix this?
How about Caprica?
Translucency Weight on the skin (and possibly nails). I would also consider re-looking at your scene lighting/tone mapping settings.
I will try the transucency weight. Lightning / tone mapping is useless, for it affects the whole scene, not just the skin.
I picked up a couple more bluejaunte ladies in the sale this morning. Ran a couple of tests with Gaia to see how she looked next to Catty.
And too many freckles
Wow. I had totally forgotten that. Not sure I ever saw any of the original programs as a brat (we were living in Germany at the time), but I do remember a book. That is a reminder of something I had lost from my conscious memories until reminded. Thanks.
Richard
Did a quick test render of Caprica. Great skin as always from bluejaunte.
Does anyone know why Noemi takes several times as long to load compared to any other G8F character? She also slows down the DAZ Studio shutdown - I have to wait several minutes until I can restart DAZ Studio.
Maybe the LIE freckles?
That could be it. Would that also delay the shutdown?
I think I used to have a way to bake the LIE overlays to the surface - I'll see if I can find the method.