Making mods to purchased products?

solarview

Hi All,
So I am using "V4 Creature Creator" to create wings for characters for a storyline. I want to be able to modify them to my own versions. Looking for feedback on what I can and can't do within the purchased content system.
To explain, I have already been playing around with creating new image maps and bump maps, etc, for the wing layout as it comes purchased. I changed colors initially and played with dials to find my limitations and then move on from there.
I am not 3D designer, but am very advanced in Photoshop. I originally created my wings there and now am trying to transfers them into a 3D modeling space for character posing for my scenes.
My personal-designed wing looks for my characters do load, and generally seems to be working fine with this approach. My issue comes at this point though in that the resolution is a little low. My wing designs are fairly detailed and I want that to be there. I notice that the image map layouts that came with the set are 4000x4000 pixel Jpegs. But the actual "wing images" take up a very small portion of that 4000px JPEG image. If I make my wings larger in their design, they are to big for the content templates and get cut off.
Is there a way to modify the embedded template to a larger, higher resolution size? Or is that breaking the rules of some kind?

Thanks.

- Sol

Chohole

Which wings are you actually using, as my V4 creature creator doesn't have any wings

solarview

chohole said:

Which wings are you actually using, as my V4 creature creator doesn't have any wings

Sorry, my mistake there. Looked at the wrong file title, it is the "V4 Creature Wings".
http://www.daz3d.com/v4-creature-wings
Essentially the maps seemed to be placed on 'primitive-planes, that are large enough for the image maps included in the set. But as explained, these are a bit lower resolution than I'm trying to work with, with my original designs for my characters.

Chohole

Again, which of the wings are you using, there are 4 different wings in that pack.

And yes a template for any model is just that, a sheet of paper on which to lay out your texture.

I am not seeing that any one of the templates has a lot of space on the UV map, really, with the possible exception of the arm wings.

scorpio

4000x4000 is pretty standard and considered high res, it might be your render settings that are the problem rather than the wing textures the higher the settings the better the detail.

solarview

chohole said:

Again, which of the wings are you using, there are 4 different wings in that pack.

And yes a template for any model is just that, a sheet of paper on which to lay out your texture.

I am not seeing that any one of the templates has a lot of space on the UV map, really, with the possible exception of the arm wings.

Again, I am a noob to this stuff. But I think maybe I see what's going on. I've included the "dragonfly wings" that are included in the set. As they are laid out on the Image map, there is a lot of real-estate to the middle of the page. But in looking at the "Butterfly wings" comparatively, it looks like maybe the butterfly wings are wrapping around the plane/mesh. Where as the dragonfly wings are one-sided as they are highly transparent.
So am I correct in seeing that the image layout of the dragonfly wing design is essentially 1000 px., and the dead space is simply that there is no second, wrapping side?
Not being an actual 3D designer, I assumed I could make it bigger to fill up that dead space.
Thanks for any extra clarification you can offer, guys.
- Sol

Edit: images were removed as these are part of a product you purchased and so, therefore, cannot be posted as file sharing is not allowed.

Chohole

Have you looked at the actual UV map. The Universal wings the UV map is like this

You can find the templates in your product library https://www.daz3d.com/downloader/customer/files#prod_9771

solarview

Yeah, that's how I came to the conclusion that the dragonfly wings are one-sided.
So although the file is indeed 4000 x 4000px the actual wing artwork is only 1000 px. I think I understand now.

So back to the other part of my original enquiries, is this content as a "purchased content" something that I can get into and edit. FTR, I'm already changing Image Maps and such as the DAZ Studio user guide discuss. But at a minimal level. Kind of don't know what I;m doing here. As you can tell by the initial question. I guess I'm wondering if I can play with the original file elements in D/S, or even Blender or something like that? Just trying to learn my way around this stuff and I figure seeing how it deconstructs would lend a fair bit of knowledge there. :).
Thought about just creating some primitive-planes and creating my own from scratch, but don't know near enough about rigging and all that. Such as getting the wings to locate and attach properly to DAZ Figures, and that kind of thing. As in the case of these wings, they attach with a click, I can change the stock colors with a click, and move there positioning as part of the content design. At the moment, way above my head. :)

Thanks.

- Sol

Chohole

Well apart from my Bryce renders I did used to do a lot of texturing. http://chohole.ovbi.org/ and I did make a fairly simplistic tutorial on texturing a dress. http://chohole.ovbi.org/texture_tutorial.htm

solarview

Thank you for the links. Still above my knowledge base at this point.

Design Anvil - Razor42

While you can't just make a part of the texture bigger theres no reason you can't save the whole texture at a higher resolution by keeping the proportions the same and saving at 8000x8000 you're basically doubling your pixel density and there would be no issue with the texture fitting correctly as long as it all still fits the scaled up template.