Creating Content for Victoria 8
This is an image (1920×1080 unmarked wallpaper version here) I was working on for the V8/Genesis 8 review. I wanted something to show that was basically entirely my own, but there were some setbacks and it was taking way too long, so I put it on hold.
Everything here (aside from V8) was modeled in LightWave and UV mapped with UVLayout. The dress is draped using DAZ Studio’s Alembic exporter plugin (figure pose animation), and LightWave’s cloth Physics FX, which is often painful. I’ve been considering Syflex, which has plugins for many 3D suits (LW, Modo, Maya etc) or VWD Cloth and Hair (Poser) and it’s DAZ Studio plugin. If anyone has any experience with either I’d love to hear. If I pick up either I’ll be sure to do a review.
I’ve used shaders from Mec4d’s amazing PBS Shaders vol 2. for Iray (platform and dress) and vol .1 (rails). I am not a skilled texture and shader artist, so I love shader packs, and these are some of the best available at DAZ 3D’s store.
Victoria 8 floating dress fix
Anyway, while rigging the dress (which I constructed specifically for the Victoria 8 morph), I ran into an annoying issue where the dress would “float” up off the figures shoulders. I don’t know how to fix this, but I do have a work around that does the trick.
Loading in the original mesh as a morph and then dialing it to max effectively dials out the weird shape the Transfer Utility thinks Victoria 8 is, returning the dress to the correct shape and location.
As far as I can tell this fixes the problem, or at least works around it. The item will morph correctly.
Victoria 8 Eyebrows
The fiber eyebrows that come with the base Victoria 8 product completely slipped my mind when I was doing the review. They come in just shy of 50k polygons, which is over three Genesis 8 figures, so not exactly a light prop. For closeups, they can make a world of difference.
I used them here, and while the benefit is debatable, it is still better than the bump maps, which is a step up from having drawn on eyebrows (though sometimes that’s exactly what you want – I’m not judging).
And that’s all for today. A bit of a mixed post, but hopefully something useful there for you all.
Impressive lighting in that render, and a nice dress as well =)
Does the V8 morph include any scaling? This may be what throws the transfer utility off.
“Official” fibermesh eyebrows is a great move. Let’s hope this will stimulate the texture vendors to include brow-less textures. I’ve been using the Oh My Brows products from Rendo, they convert well both back to Genesis (that one I did manually) and to G8F (via autofit), and have loads of morphs. Do these Vicky brows have any morphs?
Oh, and… are the eye materials in the eyebrow render V8 official? Specifically the cornea.
Thank you ^_^ I would upload the dress for you, but the rigging is little more than a quick transfer job and the base fit is kinda stiff (also based on the V8 morph).
I assume the V8 morph does include scaling, the size difference when dialing V8 out is quite noticeable. I know I could probably use this info to fix the issue, but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable in the area.
There are no morphs for the eyebrows, but they are rigged to follow facial deformations. As far as I can remember the eye materials in that render are standard.
As to brow-less character/texture sets, I thought it was quite strange that more of the new releases didn’t come with these options. Stranger yet for new V8 sets. Only two that made specific reference to this. None of the other V8 sets mentioned it one way or the other. I assume this might be down to many sets having previously been intended for G3.
https://www.daz3d.com/keri-for-victoria-8
https://www.daz3d.com/ly-camille-hd-for-genesis-8-female
You’re welcome =) And no need to apologise, I wasn’t commenting to mooch the dress off you =)
What I’d do is dial the scale out of V8 before exporting the shape to model around.
Thanks for the info; I suspected as much. DAZ materials seem to consistently fail at introducing any sort of correct Fresnel attenuation. All those “mirror eyes” *sighs*
That character by Darwin’s Mishap looks unusual. I wonder if it’s supposed to be a celebrity likeness? A bit of Linda Hamilton in there.
Haha! I know you weren’t mooching. I like to be able to share the content I make, but I rarely feel it is up to sharing standard. It tends to be a lot of one-offs.
Kinda like my renders =D
Funny/not funny ^_^
I was an early adopter of VWD and my experience was less than amazing. Despite fiddling with it for over two months in both Poser and Studio, it never did much more than shoot vertices off in every direction, or crash. Couple this with it’s other huge problems and you have an amateur’s attempt at writing software.
1) The gui was ridiculous and non-sensical with buttons stuck at random. Even the names where completely non-intuitive.
2) The little bit of tutorial material was almost useless. The translations weren’t very good, the narrator made great leaps of assumed knowledge, and the presentation was horrid.
The writer certainly tries hard but obviously has no experience in software development. He has recently lowered the price to entice customers but I feel that it’s not going to work since the software is still at an alpha stage. In the long run, poser already has dynamics and the ongoing re-write of the entire Poser engine is bound to include a major update to dynamics. Daz3D will never condone an add-on to Studio that they can’t make money from and will ‘break’ VWD’s functionality with future updates. I believe they (authors of VWD) should just give up.
Thank you for the insights, Bob. Your express the sort of doubts I had about the plugin. Perhaps with experience, VWD’s author will improve the plugin. As to DAZ breaking compatibility, that’s the frustrating nature of updating aspects that impact the API. I’m hoping DAZ will get Studio to a sort of more fixed stage where this isn’t such a frequent issue.
I actually just picked up Syflex last week. The LightWave plugin isn’t quite as advanced as some of the other versions out there, but it is much faster and easier to use than the native Cloth FX. I’ve still yet to do a lot with it, but so far it’s looking promising.
Test animation – https://youtu.be/2qiddpjqWJw
Anyway, thanks again for sharing your experience with VWD. I’m looking forward to seeing what the future of Poser holds.