We need a "substance designer" within Daz

RexRed

We need a "substance designer" within Daz...

I have lately been really detesting FBX import/export. It rarely ever works right and leaves behind textures.

It rarely exports or imports glass, fire, volumes, instances, wood, marble, eyes are a trouble, poses...

I am wondering if I should blame the FBX exporter or python...

Why can't the industry get together, agree on some "standards" and fix import export?

Now the reason why I am making this post.

I have thousands of shaders strewn all over my Daz library. Many of them will never see the light of day.

It would be really nice if we had a material/shader tool that would find every shader and material and allow us to paint these shaders on geometry right within Daz.

I know we can apply these textures but a dedicated paint mode where we could have on one side a palette of our shaders and on the other side, tools where we could turn off items in our scenes and spray, dabble, drip, flake, mist, splatter, frost, freeze and grow... these shaders we have. import/export will probably never get fixed. It is a shame but inter-exchange of models and their textures is broken due to a lack of standards.

You get something looking perfect in one program, export it and spend hours, days, weeks creating "nodes" and remaking the textrues again and again.  

I export anything into blender or unreal and get a litany of Illegal meshes and textures not found inverted normals etc We are lucky if the base texture ever even makes it across the "bridge".

Makes me wish I lived 10 years from now instead.

We need tools within Daz.

I buy a scene and the grass is very detailed and the rocks are very detailed the characters and their clothes are very detailed but the ground is 1k and all pixelated.

I would like to be able to use some of these shaders I have and spray a little here and there to spruce up the look.

Give us some paint tools that we can use right in the viewport. 

Write on the shader if it is Uber, PBR or 3Del also so we don't have to try it and find out after the fact.

It would be nice if we could add "skins" or "layers" to landscapes and other objects so we could put these shaders to some good use. 

The other day I dragged a ground texture in Unreal from Quixel onto the ground and I was shocked at how it changed the whole ground into something that absolutely amazed me.

I could not see a repeating pattern and it looked very 3d with dirt and twigs and soil debris, we need that within Daz so we don't have to export stuff out and then get our models stuck there at the mercy of the fbx nightmare of a dissapointment exporter.

Thanks.

RexRed

This is the same ground in the same asset that came with the grass. 

Notice how detailed the grass is. And you can see the threads in the cloth of the wizard's wardrobe.

...and the ground is terrible.

I realize the landscape plane is huge and if the entire landscape was 13k it might look better.

But most people could not even load the scene then.

Being able to spray on a few shaders here and there would be nice.

I know I can isolate this section and make a zone out of it but it would be nice if that processs was easier.

And when entire scenes are glued together that makes if difficult too isolate objects.

Planes should not be glued to the items populating them.

Also, Ultra Scenery ground should not be 1k. You try and make surface zones and the geometry has jagged edges.

Being able to put a finer layer over areas and paint them with shaders would be nice. 

I will say in defense, from a distance this ground looks amazing! We need a higher resolution of the ground maps. Same goes for Ultra Scenery ground, 1k is terrible.

UncannyValet

fbx cant be expected to be a perfect universal bridge between different softwares.  We need some way, when importing files, to define how we import textures and which slots they would go into in our PBR/Iray Uber shaders etc. Even if it involved some planning and renaming files to follow scripting convention, I would be happy with that.

Hopefully Daz will get USD exporter, so we can move stuff from Daz to other software easily, and if it gets USD importer, then we can bring into Daz easily (but i doubt we will get importer to be fair).

As to texture painting in Daz, there are some multilayer shaders that allow you to have multiple tiled textures layered over eachother using masks for each layer.  We can technically paint a mask in Daz, using SBH Editor, but I wont go into that.  Of course it pales in comparison to what you can do in dedicated texturing software like Substance suite softwares, or even Blender which mainly just has vastly superior texturing capabilities because of a vastly superior shader editor.

RexRed

UncannyValet said:

fbx cant be expected to be a perfect universal bridge between different softwares.  We need some way, when importing files, to define how we import textures and which slots they would go into in our PBR/Iray Uber shaders etc. Even if it involved some planning and renaming files to follow scripting convention, I would be happy with that.

Hopefully Daz will get USD exporter, so we can move stuff from Daz to other software easily, and if it gets USD importer, then we can bring into Daz easily (but i doubt we will get importer to be fair).

As to texture painting in Daz, there are some multilayer shaders that allow you to have multiple tiled textures layered over eachother using masks for each layer.  We can technically paint a mask in Daz, using SBH Editor, but I wont go into that.  Of course it pales in comparison to what you can do in dedicated texturing software like Substance suite softwares, or even Blender which mainly just has vastly superior texturing capabilities because of a vastly superior shader editor.

I have been asking for Michael 4 for Genesis 9 for a while now and everyone said it would be impossible to do. 

Well, "Character Creator" did it and according to them, they only have a small crew of programmers.

While Bryce and Hexagon languish in neglect for many years.

Daz as a company has a good number of times more revenue than Reallusion.

Michael 4 not only imported into CC4 it was two buttons I needed to click and FBX importer miraculously worked with no fuss. Daz crashes if I try and reimport anything back.

I could put imported Genesis 9 clothing on M4 immediately had him come alive and blink and completely refit him with a new skin textures including eyes hair morphs etc.

So when they say characters can't be reimported back into Daz I don't believe it.

These same characters can be imported into Unreal, Blender, Maya, Unity and a ton more. Daz is not listed.

And Bryce needs multi-processor rendering and Hexagon mesh editing tools should have been integrated into Daz long ago.

Embergen is coming out with a landscape generator... So I guess I will be using that. I am guessing that Daz will probably be the only program not listed to be compatible with Embergen landscapes. Bryce renders too slow with only 4 processors allowed... And the landscape grayscale bitmaps Bryce generates are actually still fantastic! The UI is glitchy like Hexagon, needed to be refaced long ago. These exterior programs would be been nice additions to Daz (with a few more like texture painting).   

The software side of the Daz Studio experience needs more focus. I like what they are doing, we just need more. A lot more.

One thing I will say in Daz' favor, the program is rock solid and rarely ever crashes.

CC4 and Unreal crash on a regular basis (many times a day). In my experience, Blender rarely ever crashes.

Geogen, now available, (what Bryce is not). 

WendyLuvsCatz

I have been asking for Michael 4 for Genesis 9 for a while now and everyone said it would be impossible to do. 

it's actually not hard to do just cannot be done to be sold by anyone without DAZ's permission

anyone with R3DS, Faceform, Wrap3D or whatever they are calling it now could do it

(I don't have that software but it looks pretty accurate on YouTube tutorials for any vaguely humanoid mesh)