Question about Lisa's Botanicals Tropicals

vwrangler

I was wondering if anyone else had had any issues with Lisa's Botanicals - Tropicals (Palm Bushes and Papyrus).

The problem I'm having is that none of the MAT poses work properly. Not the poser ones or the DS-specific ones, not on the papyrus or the palm bushes. I put the plants into the scene, and the palm bushes come in with invisible leaves. They're clearly there -- they get highlighted when I move the cursor over them. Surface opacity and diffuse are set to 100%. Textures are in all the normal channels. At first, I thought it just needed me to apply one of the materials files, but every single materials file has the same result: plants with invisible leaves and/or no color but black.

There's a transmap in the opacity channel, and I tried removing it, and while that makes the leaves visible, it also makes them black. I've tried it in both DS3 and DS4. (Using the Materials in DS3 makes the entire scene go black. That was ... interesting.) The papyrus doesn't have invisible leaves -- or, you know, any leaves -- but it never does anything but be black.

Is there a trick to this? Something I'm missing? It was a PC club buy, so I'm not hugely exercised about it -- although if I had paid full price, I'd be some cheesed off -- but it would be good to get it working properly.

Any help would be appreciated.

fixmypcmike

Are you loading the DAZ versions? Some of the older items from the versions of DAZ Studio before 1.0 don't work properly in DS3 and DS4, with the results you describe. Try loading the Poser versions and applying the DS mats to them.

vwrangler

fixmypcmike said:

Are you loading the DAZ versions? Some of the older items from the versions of DAZ Studio before 1.0 don't work properly in DS3 and DS4, with the results you describe. Try loading the Poser versions and applying the DS mats to them.

That seems to be more or less what's going on, combined with an installation gone weird. Your solution worked, but only after I reinstalled the items. (Using the actual Daz Studio props file just gets you a stick with invisible leaves.) Weird thing is, according to the installers, the item was updated to TRX format -- apparently, in this case, all that means is adding metadata. I get why they'd do it, but if the item actually hasn't been updated to Triax in some meaningful way, I wish they wouldn't mislead with the installers like that. And for something like this, I wonder why they didn't just include the materials files with the poser files anyway.

Thanks for the help!

fixmypcmike

Strange, usually if they are putting it in a new installer with metadata it's because they were fixing another issue, like those pre-DS1 .daz files. Sounds like they accidentally put the old files in by mistake.

ETA: I'd put in a bug report, using Content Issues as the Project in the upper right corner.

vwrangler

fixmypcmike said:

Strange, usually if they are putting it in a new installer with metadata it's because they were fixing another issue, like those pre-DS1 .daz files. Sounds like they accidentally put the old files in by mistake.

ETA: I'd put in a bug report, using Content Issues as the Project in the upper right corner.

Done.

Also, for the sheer hell of it, I edited the MC6 files into PZ2 files, then copied the Studio materials files into that directory to work as a "sidecar". And for the first time ever, it actually worked! (I've tried it a couple of times before, and it almost invariably ends up with the sidecar and pose file somehow deactivating each other, so that clicking on them results in absolutely nothing happening.) I suppose it's possible that it's only applying the Poser materials, but if that's the case, I don't want to know. They're bushy and green, and not black. I can work with that.

EDIT: The product was updated recently enough to have the Readme online. According to that, this is what happened most recently: "2012-07-25 - Added Metadata, and DAZ Studio files." So until they updated it, the Daz Studio files didn't even exist in the product. Weird.

fixmypcmike

That description is weird, as I have old installers which have the same pre-DS1 .daz files that don't work anymore.

SpottedKitty

This is a problem with a lot of the older Lisa's Botanicals sets — the ones new enough to have D|S files, but old enough to predate D|S2. I've been fixing them by loading each bit into D|S2 and resaving the MAT scripts, but if there are updates with proper modern D|S files, that would be a lot easier.

Does anyone know if these new files will work in D|S3, or are they locked to D|S4-or-later? It's really too soon to drop D|S3 support for MAT scripts that don't need it, a lot of people (including me) still use it.

vwrangler

SpottedKitty said:

Does anyone know if these new files will work in D|S3, or are they locked to D|S4-or-later? It's really too soon to drop D|S3 support for MAT scripts that don't need it, a lot of people (including me) still use it.

I can tell you from experience that they do NOT work in DS3 as intended. I keep DS3 around because it's useful with older characters with geometry switching -- the G2 Poser characters and some of the Sixus1Media characters, for example. I thought that maybe this was one of those DS3/DS4 mismatches -- I didn't know the product was that old -- but the Studio props files for the Palm Bushes/Papyrus item, at least, didn't work in DS3. In fact, it was worse; the Studio Materials for the props turned the entire scene black.

The Studio-specific props also do not work as intended in DS4; however, the Poser version can be made to work.

fixmypcmike

The ones that have been fixed work in DS3.

Skiriki

Yeah, I had similar problem in the past, and I reported them, then got notified to re-download and bam, fixed. :) So, just report if you get any problematic ones, and they will be updated. :)