Texture Creation

Nathan314631

Hi D3Ders, 

What would be the best way to export textures for editing? Back in the day of pre-Genesis, there were tools that extracted and flattened the mesh which could be edited and then be reimported to Daz. I see most of those tools have since gone and unsupported. Any idea what a Mac user can use now? 
 

Thanking you :)

felis

The textures are in your runtime/textures folder.

If you open the surface tab and select a surface, you can see the textures used as small icons. If you right-click those you can browse to the file location.

You can take the textures into an image editing program and modify it. Save it with a new name, and then you can load it in Das Studio.

To modify one surface, you will often want to modify a number of textures for the best effect.

McGyver

There are lots of tools and plugins I haven't noticed or have been aware of over the years, but on first impressions when you say "tools that extracted and flattened the mesh which could be edited and then be reimported to Daz" that sounds like you are talking about a UV mapping program.

Technically a "texture" can several different things... it can be an image applied to a mesh (say a seamless photo of concrete applied to a wall section), a procedural shader (a mathematically created 2D representation of a natural material such as marble or wood for example), or even straight up colors painted onto the mesh using a 3D painting program that allows the artist to paint the desired effect... but in general, for best results one really needs to have UV mapped the surface first... that's where using a mapping program one cuts apart, or creates appropriate seams to create a 2D map of the 3D mesh so it is easier to texture in a 2D program like photoshop, or 3D paint in a 3D painting program like Substance, 3D Coat, or even Blender... the mapping can be done automatically in some cases or manually seamed, but either way the goal is to flatten the model with the least distortion.
Depending on the item being mapped that can be very simple like unfolding a Box Map for a very simple hard geometric shape or a more complicated Pelt Map for say a organic hippopotamus form (of a hippopotamus)...(there is no Hippopotamus Mapping)... (unless you are mapping a hippopotamus)...

There are probably some DAZ plugins that act like a UV mapping tool, but in general back in the day (the early Genesis days), most people who stayed within the DAZ environment tended to use the DAZ modeling program Hexagon to unwrap, map and flatten their hippopotamus models (hippopotamuses were hugely popular back in the early Genesis era, in fact Michael 5's mesh is actually derived from a hippopotamus*).

However, years later there are more UV mapping options available, and some actually allow for fairly decent automatic seam creation, saving one lots of time... although, in general it's best to lay out the seams yourself once you know what is best, because the automatic functions generally do a lot of "best guess" and it's not always beautiful. But in generally any talk of mesh flattening was related to UV mapping, so I'm wondering is that was what you meant or were looking to do.

So, sorry if you already knew all that and I was not actually adding anything of value by clarifying the concept of texturing, forgive my intrusion and attempts at hippopotamus based humor.

 

 

 

*I made that up, Michael 5 was not based on a Hippopotamus mesh, traditionally hippopotamuses have never been a big part of DAZ content, it was in fact based on the Millennium Penguin 3, another classic DAZ mesh that never existed.

richardandtracy

There is no hippopotamus based humour any more. It's all Capybara based these days, similarly waterborne but less cumbersome. Look for 'UVMapper' or 'Ultimate Unwrap 3d', UVMapper has a basic free version too. Very good VFM. Regards, Richard.