genesis2
laverdet_943f1f7da1
Posts: 252
Hello!!! I know, it's a topic which has been abundantly covered... well, I used until now mainly the "old" v4 and m4 stuff, but I just try a charcater for genesis, Callie 6... After some problems, I have been able to get it in C 8,5 pro, and I ve buyed two hairs (razor cur hair and librarianhj pin up updo), and 2 clothes: hot pant outfit and sexy librarian... I also buy callie 6 fusion skin... For C 6 skin, the skin of the callie 6 puppet turn black, as soon as applied... doin't understand why... for the clothes, they are often bad suited, whith breast "outside" and so on.. In other words, it dosen"t at all works simply like V4 or M4... I have download the last version of c 8,5 pro, to be sure...
the install are via the daz inst(aller...
well, if anybody has comments, or hints, to use without pain these genesis 2 characters in carrara, i will be happy!!!
thank you, as usual, for your warm help!!!
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Callie 6 is for Genesis 2 Female, not the original Genesis. You should have the G2F Starter Essentials already.
yes, I have the G2 starter essentialos already installed... In fact, I ahve problems with the clothes, or hair, not with the puppet of callie by itself!
Try what has been suggested to work in this thread. It is a collection of experiences while working with G and G2 what worked and what didn't
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/best-practices-using-genesis-and-genesis-2-content-in-carrara/p1
To quickly and easily fix (dial away) poke thru problems withGenesis 2, Poke-Away 2 is a must have IMHO.
If you have the clothing parented to the Genesis 2 figure, unparent it and move it up to the same level - that can make a big difference with respect to poke through.
I know you said you already had experience with older figures, but I am going to do a quick tut for others who may come across this thread. I have some of the Callie 6 mentioned but not all, so we will start with that. Just a quick caveat. I generally avoid the smart content tab like the plague, so keep that in mind. Here I will just introduce the content browser, supergroups, the "fit to" function, adjusting Studio shaders that leave out maps, saving global shaders, and fixing minor poke through.
Part 1 - Loading Callie 6 and using "fit to"
- Find your stuff! Callie 6 is a character for the genesis 2 female. One place to find it is in the smart content tab in the products folder under the letter "C" for Callie 6.
- Click and drag Callie 6 from the browser to the instances tray (lower right) so that it loads at the center of the scene.
- Notice the file structure. The top level says "Callie 6", below that is "Genesis 2 Female" and below that is "actor" and "hip." I call the Callie 6 level the "supergroup." We will be loading the clothes and hair to the "Calle 6" supergroup level without "fit to" at the beginning. As a result, the clothes and hair file structures will be at the same level as "genesis 2 female."
- Under smart content, under products, under the letter "S" you will find the outfit for "sexy librarian." Click and drag the top to "Callie 6." Repeat for the skirt. Notice that in this case the clothes load higher than figure. That is because the Callie 6 character is shorter than the default Genesis 2 female.
(Aside - if using the "content tab" instead of "smart content," then Callie 6 is in People: Genesis 2 Female, Characters, Callie 6. We will illustrate this method when we get to the hair).
- Select the sublevel for the top and look in the properties tray (upper right). Click "fit to" and select Genesis 2 female from the drop down menu. Repeat for the skirt. There is some minor poke through that we will address later but the fit seems generally OK for the moment.
(Aside - If you try to apply Daz SSS shaders, you will probably be horrified. We will take a very brief look at shaders in Carrara later).
As mentioned, I personally never use the "smart content" tab so I will use the hair to show how to use the regular "content" tab.
Now we will go through the same steps for the hair, but we will use the "content tab" instead of the "smart content" tab.
The default insallation of Carrara creates folders for "My Daz3D Library Runtime" and "My Daz3D Lbrary" (note no "runtime" in title). The runtime folder has much of the CR2, PP2, and similar files for Poser, including the texture maps. In general, DO NOT TRY TO LOAD GENESIS CONTENT FROM THE "RUNTIME" FOLDER!!!!! The exception will be when we manually try to locate texture maps. In general, look for your genesis content in the "My Daz3D Library" (no runtime) folder. I did a custom installation, so my genesis content is in a folder called "Stuff for Studio." Don't let that confuse you. The important point is that the folder is NOT the runtime folder.
Adding Daz hair for the G2F - razor cut hair
- Find your stuff! The razor hair, along with other hair designed for G2F, can be found in the My Daz3D Library folder (or for me "Stuff for Studio) in the subfolder for People : Genesis 2 female : Hair : Razor Cut Hair.
- Materials for the hair are in a subfolder of that folder called Materials.
- This is a common structure of the "content tab." Find character, clothing, hair, poses, etc. for G2F in the genesis 2 female folder under the people folder.
- OK, click and drag the razor cut hair from the content browser to the "Callie 6" supergroup level. Notice it comes in too high again because Callie 6 is shorter than default G2F.
- Select the lower razor cut hair level and double click the color of hair that you want from the materials subfolder under the razor cut hair folder.
- Select the appropriate razor cut hair level and then click "fit to" in the properties tray and choose genesis 2 female from the drop down menu. Note - many of the newer hair models are very complex from Carrara's perspective so it takes Carrara a very long time to calculate the morphs and project them to Callie or any other character. It may seem like Carrara has locked up. It probably has not. Unfortunately, must try to be patient.
- And here is a default render.
In general, the shaders that load with genesis and genesis 2 were designed for Studio and most people will want to adjust them in Carrara. I am not big on realism, so I am not going to be suggesting specific shader settings, but I can show some options and how to make changes and save them. The merchant usually includes more maps than Carrara loads on default. First, there are merchants who make shaders for specific characters so we'll look at that. Then we'll take a look at how to find the content, make changes, and save them for future use.
- The shaders for Genesis 2 female characters like Callie 6 are found on the "actor" level of the supergroup. Select "actor" in the lower right, then select the shading tab in the properties tray (upper right). Notice that there are shading domains for the legs, eyereflection, nostrils, and many more. In many cases, a single shader can be used for several of these domains so it is not as intimidating as it looks.
- For Callie 6, many of the shaders are named AoA_subsurface followed by a number like 1,2,3.... These will be adjusted. Eventually, we will be renaming some and copying them to other domains.
- Purchased carrara skin shaders - Very simple - hooray! -if you puchase a carrara skin shader for a specific character like Callie 6, then they will typically be found in the "shaders" tab in the content library. For example, Ringomonfort makes several skin shaders and many of his are installed to the subfolder for (skin : genesis 2 female : DP... ) You might use the DIM to find where it is if not there. I don't happen to have DP Callie 6 so I wll illustrate with DP Stephanie 6 (note - the uvmap for stephanie 6 may not match the uvmap for callie 6). If you have the DP Callie 6 shader, clck and drag it from the browser tray to the multicolored globe at the top of the properties tray (upper right). That is it. Hooray! Note - as I said, I am not going to be spending time on what a good skin shader setting is, so purchasing a few products like Ringomonfort's may help as a tutorial.
- Making your own adjustments - double click the shader for the legs (AoA_subsurface) to open the shader tree. The first thing to notice is that no maps loaded in the highlight, shininess, or bump channels. Yet, many Daz merchants create maps for specular and bump (even normal maps). Unfortunately,these often don't load on default and must be added.
- Where are the maps? OK, you can use DIM to find the files that came with your product, or remember where you custom installed, or... On the other hand, the diffuse (color) map almost always loads. So, we can find the other files by opening the color channel and hovering the cursor over the bottom name of the diffuse map. Carrara should display the map file location, which is where the other maps usually are.
- In the case of Callie 6, the maps are in (runtime\textures\Daz\Characters\genesis2\Callie6). In this case, Callie 6 does not seem to come with a bump map but it does come with a specular map.
- In comparison, I have opened the file loation for Olympia 6. See that this character also comes with bump maps and normal maps.
Time to take a (very) quick look at the shaders. Carrara has created a separate shader for each shading domain, even though many of these shaders are duplicates. I will show you how to edit a shader, add a map, and change the name so that it can make some sense as a duplicate.
- start with the shader for the legs, which on Callie 6 will be the top shading domain and is named A0Asubsurface.
- select the AoAsubsurface shader in the bottom right so that you can change the name. You will see the slot to change the name in the upper right. For legs, I like the name"Limbs" because I will copy it to the forearms, hands, etc.
- return to the actor level and enter the texture room to see the shading domains. select the legs to edit its tree.
- check the color channel. There is typically a map loaded (the diffuse map). It is not uncommon for people to use a multiply operator or a mixer operator with the diffuse map. Just make sure it is what you want. For example, V4 loads with the diffuse multiplied by a light blue. You can change the color from blue to white to elimnate the effect. Callie 6 does not have such a function, so don't worry about it. Or, you can change it so that there is a multiply, and then use white for the multiply color. That way you can make changes later if you want.
- for the highlight channel, create an operator and choose multiply. Two slots will appear. In one slot, load the Callie6 specular map from the folder found above. This will likely be way too strong. In the other slot, choose value and then set it to something small like 0.2.
- you may also want to make changes to the settings for shininess, reflection, refraction, and subsurface scattering. Realistic skin is beyond the scope ef this tutorial, but I will copy a link to a post that has some suggestions by Jonstark on suggested settings. I also suggest tutorials by PhilW and others, including buying some of Ringo's products and checking out how he does what he does.
- OK, now that you have your customized legs shader, make sure to change its name to limbs. Use control-click to copy the limb shader to the forearms, shoulders, hands, feet, etc.
- Repeat the general process for the torso, face, and eyes. For example, double click on the face to open its tree and note its name. Use the shader list in the lower right to change the name to Face. Load the specular map as part of a multiplier in the highlight channel. Make any other changes. Copy the map to the nostrils, etc.
- When you have a complete shader that you like, click and drag the globe to you shader browser. It will save all of your changes for all of the domains.
- In the future, you can load Callie 6, but then do a single click-and-drag from your shader browser to load your saved custom Carrara settings.
- Repeat for the clothes' textures - and again save so that in the future you have a 1-click adjustment.
To address minor poke through, you have several choices for genesis content. Unfortunately, using the "morph in the posed position" option in animation mode is often disabled (argh!). The easiest as Dustrider mentioned is to purchase a morph set like Pokeaway. Or, you can still create a new material zone for the part poking through and apply an alpha. Or, I often am able to ignore the protected topology warning and use soft select for minor adjustments. Sometimes, the object mesh makes soft select impossible, but I'm pretty sure that is driven by the merchant's modeling program not Carrara. Here is one basic approach for using the vertex modeler.
- select the "actor" level of the clothing item.
- enter the modeling room. It will give a protected topology warning. I simply ignore it, but you can uncheck the protected topology setting in the view menu.
- use the vertex editing and soft select tools in the vertex modeler to make small adjustments to the clothes.
OK -that seems complicated but it is really not. The key is that when you purchase a new character like Callie 6, either purchase a global shader like one of Ringomontfort's, or edit and save a global shader of your own. In future, when using the character, load as normal, then a simple 1-click and drag from the shader browser to the globe will adjust all of the settings for you. For poke through, you can buy poke away, or you can use material zones with alpha, or you can ignore the protected topology, or...
Hope that helps.
Skin shader settings - as I said, I'm not a good source for this, but here is some information that may be helpful. I'd also recommend PhilW's "realism" tutorial from Infinite Skills sold here in the Daz store.
1) general discussion of skin in 3D art
The Art of Skin Shading
by Sharon Milne
http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/the-art-of-skin-shading--vector-4812
Skin Tones Tutorial in Photoshop
by - ChiCha-Tutorials
http://www.idigitalemotion.com/tutorials/guest/skin_tone/skintone.html
2) from the Carrara forum, an older discussion of skin shading specific to Carrara by Jonstark
Skin settings: here’s mine (sorry I was away from computer for quite a while tonight, would have responded earlier if I could have, and I didn’t realize you were on such a tight deadline)
So for most skin areas (torso areas, face limbs) I use pretty much identical setup.
In the top channel I put the bump amplitude to 5%
Color channel is the color texture map of the character (may want to switch the dropdown from fast mip map to sampling for Gaussian filtering, to avoid strange seams in distance shots).
Alpha channel is left at default 100%
Highlight channel is set between 4% and 8% as per what suits my eye (I once used Spec maps here, but eh I’m not as sure I need them anymore and prefer using a straight percentage). Highlight controls the brightness of the specular effect. Higher percentages = brighter specular glinting.
Shininess channel is set between 3% and 5%, again according to taste. Shininess controls the spread or how wide the specular effect is. The lower the percentage, the large the spread of the glinting over the skin. That might seem counterintuitive, but lower % = larger area of effect. Think of it as micro roughness of the texture.
Bump channel is the bump map texture.
Reflection channel can be set to none, or if you’re feeling daring, you could add a tiny bit of reflection (like 1% or less), but bear in mind any reflection is going to slow the render time a little bit, probably not worth mentioning or noticing in slowdown time, *unless* you decided to use blurry reflections, in which case it will slow you down quite a bit. I don’t recommend using blurry reflections for animation at all, it’s more the kind of thing you would use for a still render closeup that has to be very precise, and if you use it make sure the max depth is set to 1.
Transparency, Refraction, Glow, and Translucency I would leave at none (though there is a cool way to use a slight bit of glow to fake subsurface scattering).
Subsurface scattering I do use, but will slow render time with calculations too much in an animation with any kind of indirect lighting calculation (so if you’re using skylight or full GI then subsurface scattering might be too much of a render slower to be worthwhile, on the other hand if you’re using direct lighting and the ambient light in the scene tab to fake indirect lighting you may still want to use SSS). Finding good SSS settings is very very tough, lots of people I respect very much for their Carrara skills use lots of different methods. Looking at mine, I realized I’m using the same ones PhilW recommends in his Realism Rendering tutorial series, so I can’t in good conscience give them out in a public forum or else I’d feel like I was giving away part of his product. Let me jump back to a prior SSS setting I used to use, that I still think it’s pretty decent and give that instead.
diffuse: 99
translucency: 10
Intensity: 10
Refraction: 30
Fresnel: 10
pair it with a light pink color to simulate blood beneath the skin (if I’m remembering right; I didn’t write down my color settings at the time, so play with it and see what pops for your eyes).
Now lips are similar to skin with a few differences, I try to make lips for girls a bit more shiny to simulate lipstick, can do this by raising the highlight intensity and the shininess percentage to make it a bit more glossy, and the lips look a bit better with a slight amount of reflection (imo).
Eyes are very important (imo)
Eyesurface: Can be very useful as an all over the eye cover to give reflections, but my current setup I don’t use it and have it set to transparency 100% with the top channel ‘no light interactions when fully transparent’ checked.
Lacrimal: This is the skin in the corners of the eye, and I use skin settings with higher highlight and shininess settings to make it look a little more ‘wet’.
Sclera: The whites of the eyes, I use the eye texture for the character here, again like the lacrimals I add some highlight and shininess amped up a bit to give a wetter look.
Pupil: The dark hole in the center of the eye. Can leave it fully black in the color channel and nothing else, or can also just throw the eye texture from the character here (it will map to the black part at the center of the eye texture anyway). No reflections here, which may seem counterintuitive, but seriously can look weird if you put reflections in.
Iris: this is the colored center of the eye. It might seem counterintuitive but currently this is nothing more than the color channel with the texture map of the eye, no other reflections, highlights nothing (well it doesn’t hurt at all to throw a little bumpmap in if you have it).
Cornea: This is the eye lens that sits over the iris, and this is where all the magic happens to make the eye ‘pop’. Even though it’s transparent, this is possibly the most important part of the eye texture. Refraction here is very important, I actually have my refraction set to the ‘ethyl alchohol’ dropdown, my highlight is way up at 400%, my shininess is at 21%, my transparency is set to 100% and my alpha is set to 49% and the color is set to black. I don’t have reflections set here, but for closeups I would use reflections in this channel (for longer shots the highlight should work just fine, especially if you have a low intensity light pointed at your character’s face, that gives good highlights to make the eyes pop but no real cost in rendertime). You also may very well want to change the eye shape in the assembly room parameters to make it so the cornea is nicely convex while the iris is actually flat below it (it only should appear the iris is convex because of the refraction from the cornea).
I’m actually looking back at my settings and thinking this may be an older texture setup, not my most current, as I play with refining skin textures all the freakin time (it’s one of my long term hobbies with Carrara actually).
There is a lot more that can go into trying to get super realistic skin, and many other methods, but I thought that might be a quick and easy way to get you used to the various shader components and comfortable playing around in the texture room.
thank you so much, Diomede, to take the time of a such helpful explanation!!! I've copy and archive your explanations, as it seems so "sensitive" to use the genesis models in Carrara, and some of the recent content is anyway attractive!!!