How do I preserve surface groups?

bexley_ef3f70e572

I used the Ultra Bodysuit to create a uniform.  I saved it as a Shaping preset and it works very well!  I can apply it to either G2M or G2F and the fit is excellent.

I would like select various surfaces and group them to make texturing and customizing materials easier.

I used SURFACES Editor to select surfaces and used the Edit Surface Selection Sets(s) to group them (collar, collar trim, cuffs, belt, boots).  These groups now appear below Ultra Bodysuit.  The idea was to apply shaders and materials to each group.

However, I cannot figure out how to save the Bodysuit with the new surface grouping intact.  When I reload, the new surfaces groups are gone and I have to reselect everything.

Should I be saving as a materials preset, or a shaping preset, or what?

Any help would be appreciated.  DAZ 4.8 64bit

Also, is there some way of inverting the selection?

sriesch

You could save the modified object as a scene subset. (but maybe there's a better choice, not sure.)

 

bexley_ef3f70e572

I tried that and it worked fine (as it should) but how do I apply the Suit to other characters?  I saved out to Materials but when I reimport my custom groups are gone. :-(

Thanks for the reply!

sriesch

Select the suit, and in the parameters tab, click "All", then change the "Fit to" parameter dropdown to whatever other character you want to fit it to.

Note that when you save the suit as a scene subset, you want to save ONLY the suit, not the entire scene with the figure and the suit.

Bejaymac

 

sriesch said:

Note that when you save the suit as a scene subset, you want to save ONLY the suit, not the entire scene with the figure and the suit.

or he could just save it as a wearable preset, same idea but only the selected item gets saved.

bexley_ef3f70e572

Thank you for the helpful suggestions, guys!

The goal of the exercise was to make an object I could texture and modify easily in PS and then build a set of variations (MAT files) for the project I'm working on.

I just (yesterday) discovered Sculptris, and made more progress in 20 minutes than in a week of Photoshop!  You probably already know about it (newbie here) but this is an excellent tutorial.

https://vimeo.com/13982936

Again, many thanks for the feedback!

djigneo

I think that surface groups are saved as part of geometry information, so you would need to create a save file that stored that information in order to get it back when you load it from your library. (Material, Shaping, don't save the geometry information, they just save some property settings. This also explains why 'Scene subset' works, because the Scene subset saves everything about the object as a separate scene.)

[Save as > Support asset > Figure/prop asset] should do that. I would suggest using enabling 'Smart parenting' in the 'Figure/prop Assets Save Options' dialog if you go this route.