Some advice to PAs, new and old alike

johndoe_36eb90b0

I have a list of pet peeves when it comes to 3D assets for Daz Studio be it Daz Store or 3rd party.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, nor it is meant as a criticism directed at any specific PA -- consider it just as a list of "do's and don'ts" when making your first (or next) product.

1. Custom characters should always be properly rigged (I've seen quite a few that aren't).
2. Please do not paint brows on the face texture unless you also provide a "no brows" face texture (not a LIE overlay to hide them).
3. Please use guides positioned according to the UV map in your texture painting program when painting nipples so they end up where they should be.
4. Please do not paint genitalia or genital hair on the torso / body texture, either provide proper anatomical element textures or nothing so that people can use 3rd party geografts without the need to edit torso textures.
5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.
6. Please provide fibermesh brows with your character if you can, they look much better than painted ones.
7. When creating poses, please for the love of God do not position characters in the scene using their hip bone coordinates, because those poses are broken for any character not using default height, leg, and torso length.
8. When creating material color options, please don't name them Color 01, Color, 02, Color 03, etc, but use actual color names so that people with accessibility issues can use them too.
9. When you go out of your way to make a detailed house or an apartment, please make the toilet seat movable.
10. When making interiors, please provide an easy way to control the built-in lights either via material presets or ON / OFF switches.

Thank you very much for reading this and I hope it helps you create even better products in the future.

Richard Haseltine

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

I have a list of pet peeves when it comes to 3D assets for Daz Studio be it Daz Store or 3rd party.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, nor it is meant as a criticism directed at any specific PA -- consider it just as a list of "do's and don'ts" when making your first (or next) product.

1. Custom characters should always be properly rigged (I've seen quite a few that aren't).
2. Please do not paint brows on the face texture unless you also provide a "no brows" face texture (not a LIE overlay to hide them).
3. Please use guides positioned according to the UV map in your texture painting program when painting nipples so they end up where they should be.
4. Please do not paint genitalia or genital hair on the torso / body texture, either provide proper anatomical element textures or nothing so that people can use 3rd party geografts without the need to edit torso textures.
5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.

Recent versions of Daz Studio, at least in the Public Builds, have added a setting in Edit>Preferences (Daz Studio>Preferences for Mac) in the Interface tab - using the slider for layered Images:Compression you can, at the expense of disc space, greatly speed the processing of Layered Images. They do have considerable advantages, speed aside.

6. Please provide fibermesh brows with your character if you can, they look much better than painted ones.

That is a matter of taste - in principle I would agree, but not everyone does and mesh brows can look unnatural.

7. When creating poses, please for the love of God do not position characters in the scene using their hip bone coordinates, because those poses are broken for any character not using default height, leg, and torso length.

Products from Daz should already do this for scene placement - if they don't, please report them. For interaction with other figure or keeping feet on the floor using the hip is correct, and will work for at least some users - if you have characters with non-default proportions then any kind of interactive pose is going to need adjusting anyway.

8. When creating material color options, please don't name them Color 01, Color, 02, Color 03, etc, but use actual color names so that people with accessibility issues can use them too.
9. When you go out of your way to make a detailed house or an apartment, please make the toilet seat movable.

There is a whole thread on this.

10. When making interiors, please provide an easy way to control the built-in lights either via material presets or ON / OFF switches.

Thank you very much for reading this and I hope it helps you create even better products in the future.

lilweep

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.

how else are they supposed to do it though...

7. When creating poses, please for the love of God do not position characters in the scene using their hip bone coordinates, because those poses are broken for any character not using default height, leg, and torso length.

What's even worse is when they move eye bones and add facial expressions with a body pose. 

PerttiA

lilweep said:

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.

how else are they supposed to do it though...

I prefer LIE, as it allows the makeup to be used on other characters also. One can bake the LIE if it bothers. 

Gordig

lilweep said:

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.

how else are they supposed to do it though...

The PBRSkin shader has a slot for makeup that takes a separate weight/opacity map.

richardandtracy

7) Hip bone positioning. Hmm. Don't agree, particularly for couples poses. When trying to position couples for a consumer of the pose, the simplest way of positioning the individuals relative to each other is to have the same global X, Y and Z co-ordinate for both characters and the pose specific relative positions done with the hip bone offsets. To do it any other way would mean the character's global X, Y & Z would be defined by the person creating the pose. And how are they to know if the couple are on a balcony 100 floors up or at the origin? Not helpful for the consumer to apply the pose and find the character shoots off to the origin when they're not meant to. Regards, Richard.

FSMCDesigns

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

I have a list of pet peeves when it comes to 3D assets for Daz Studio be it Daz Store or 3rd party.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, nor it is meant as a criticism directed at any specific PA -- consider it just as a list of "do's and don'ts" when making your first (or next) product.

1. Custom characters should always be properly rigged (I've seen quite a few that aren't).
2. Please do not paint brows on the face texture unless you also provide a "no brows" face texture (not a LIE overlay to hide them).
3. Please use guides positioned according to the UV map in your texture painting program when painting nipples so they end up where they should be.
4. Please do not paint genitalia or genital hair on the torso / body texture, either provide proper anatomical element textures or nothing so that people can use 3rd party geografts without the need to edit torso textures.
5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.
6. Please provide fibermesh brows with your character if you can, they look much better than painted ones.
7. When creating poses, please for the love of God do not position characters in the scene using their hip bone coordinates, because those poses are broken for any character not using default height, leg, and torso length.
8. When creating material color options, please don't name them Color 01, Color, 02, Color 03, etc, but use actual color names so that people with accessibility issues can use them too.
9. When you go out of your way to make a detailed house or an apartment, please make the toilet seat movable.
10. When making interiors, please provide an easy way to control the built-in lights either via material presets or ON / OFF switches.

Thank you very much for reading this and I hope it helps you create even better products in the future.1.

1. While I agree, I haven't come across any that haven't and if you do, then report them to CS so it can be fixed.

2. I agree, a character should have both options

3. I agree, but it is an easy fix in photoshop or GIMP and should also be reported so they can fix it.

4. Totally agree, but again, it can be fixed in an image editor, do it all the time.

5. disagree, I prefer LIE makeup

6. Agree, but not every PA has the talent or software to do this, so as long as they include a browless texture, i am good.

7. Agree! I have deleted poses that do this in the past.

8. I so agree!

9. Not something that affeects me or my projects in any way.

10. Doesn't matter to me as it's easy to do either way.

johndoe_36eb90b0

lilweep said:

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

5. Please do not use LIE texture maps for makeup, they are horribly slow to apply even on fastest of computers.

how else are they supposed to do it though...

By having separate face textures for different makeups of course (like say Charlotte 8, Babina 8, etc).

It's a bit more work for them to bake the LIE, but a single face texture will always load much faster than any LIE preset.

johndoe_36eb90b0

PerttiA said:

I prefer LIE, as it allows the makeup to be used on other characters also. One can bake the LIE if it bothers. 

There are already separate makeup products that can be used on different characters.

I don't want to have to bake LIE for every character that uses them before I can use it -- I have better things to do than sit and wait for LIE to apply, and even if I didn't how do you suggest I save the result so I can have them if I need to reinstall the product?

johndoe_36eb90b0

Richard Haseltine said:

Recent versions of Daz Studio, at least in the Public Builds, have added a setting in Edit>Preferences (Daz Studio>Preferences for Mac) in the Interface tab - using the slider for layered Images:Compression you can, at the expense of disc space, greatly speed the processing of Layered Images. They do have considerable advantages, speed aside.

Thanks for letting me know, I wasn't aware of that but I seriously doubt it can help with the issue I am having. If I want to see how makeups look on the character in the specific lighting conditions I have to apply each of them and wait for the LIE processing to be finished then undo and apply the next one. So it is not a matter of whether they will load faster from say a disk cache next time I use them -- it's the first use I have a problem with. If the processing was done using GPU (OpenCL or CUDA) and if Daz Studio interface wasn't frozen for the duration of LIE processing then it wouldn't be such a big deal.

Products from Daz should already do this for scene placement - if they don't, please report them. For interaction with other figure or keeping feet on the floor using the hip is correct, and will work for at least some users - if you have characters with non-default proportions then any kind of interactive pose is going to need adjusting anyway.

Sorry, but using hip translation is never correct. Check the attached image, both figures are positioned using hip translation (-100X, +100Z for the left G8F with a morph and +100X, +100Z for the right default G8F). As you can see the one using a morph doesn't end up on -100X, +100 on the grid (the plane below them is 4x4 m for your reference).

johndoe_36eb90b0

richardandtracy said:

7) Hip bone positioning. Hmm. Don't agree, particularly for couples poses. When trying to position couples for a consumer of the pose, the simplest way of positioning the individuals relative to each other is to have the same global X, Y and Z co-ordinate for both characters and the pose specific relative positions done with the hip bone offsets. To do it any other way would mean the character's global X, Y & Z would be defined by the person creating the pose. And how are they to know if the couple are on a balcony 100 floors up or at the origin? Not helpful for the consumer to apply the pose and find the character shoots off to the origin when they're not meant to. Regards, Richard.

See the attached screenshot to understand why using hip translation doesn't work. When you move the scaled or morphed character using hip translation by 100 cm, they will move by less than 100 cm -- let's use 80 cm as an extreme example. Now imagine you want the couple to be posed at 5000 cm from center of the scene. The scaled or morphed character will end up at 4000 cm, the other one at 5000 cm and the further you move from the center the larger the positioning error is going to be.

So no -- the proper approach for the couple poses is to position them relatively to each other using global coordinates at the scene center (or for goto poses at some specific coordinates needed for the product they are part of), and if you want the couple in a different spot in the scene, you just put them in a group and move the group thus keeping their relative positions.