Search Results for 'My Shapes'

[alekssa]

Hi Phoernik 🙂
Thanks for the reply and i didn't know if should have wrote later on that i solved it, It was my fault, lol.
Characters were all Gen8 males and only thing i changed is differen hairs, shapes and stuff like that. I did move them way out from where rendering crosses were and that was why.
So it's solved and again thanks, Phoernik 🙂

[jon kim]

@cage
Converting your character to a single slider by importing as an OBJ destroys the weight maps and rigging, but if you want to go that way, I would just use Hexagon without going through Morph Loader. Just simply send the character to Hexagon and then back to DS without making changes. I convert my characters to a master slider using the following method

http://www.digi-dotz.com/index.php/tutorials/daz-studio-tutorials/193-create-single-dial-morph-control-in-daz-studio-4-9

Normal maps are generally fine for the old folks, but they tend to be too static for my younger (under 40) characters and custom JCMs. I've spent a lot of money on video and system ram and like I said, I'm lazy and impatient. I typically render at 4 subdivisions in intimate scenes anyway. I agree that it's complete overkill in the vids example, but that wouldn't be my use. I want to create simple, elegant morphs to dial or that kick in automatically from movement and expression and forget about it. I don't have much experience in using maps in this way other than create and forget (more research... uhhh, this is fun), but I'm often dissatisfied with the result and just cleanup in PS and repaint the natural effect I want. I want too much I guess, but it would be simple if there was a way around Daz's restriction. Daz's offerings they sell as a solution are rudimentary at best, but they are a catch-all and can't be expected to work on the wide range of shapes I create. @frank22 @SkippyTheMeh Thank you so such for your input. If you have identified something I'm missing.. or a lot, well, it's all appreciated. 🙂 Here's to a Happy New Year

[SkippyTheMeh]

I have two problems with the lack of male content:

Firstly, in my non-pirate life I make and sell erotic\pornographic 3d-printable scenes as a little side-gig. I'm a straight guy, but I'm equal-opportunities when it comes to sexual preferences and kinks (and I'm always looking for a new customer base) so I've done a few models to cater for gay men or possibly straight ladies as well as some femdom stuff along with the usual male-centric naked girls. I appear to be one of the few artists who do so however. I get two or three emails a week asking if I can change a M-F scene to M-M etc. When you're working with 3D printed designs, texture maps don't matter as - unless you've got a high-end printer - what you print is coming out the same colour as the plastic or resin you put in, but I like to include full-colour promo renders along with photos and single-colour renders of my designs and occasionally, as part of a commission, I'll be asked to design and render out a full scene with quite specific requirements regarding skin colour, (body) hair, body shapes and genital sizes and clothes. That's usually easy for female characters; I've got any number of morphs and skins I can choose from. But for male ones my choices are much more limited and I've had to turn down commissions because of a lack of suitable morphs, hair, textures or clothing, not to mention non-futanari trans character options.

Secondly, one of my other hobbies is writing (terrible) erotic fiction and then using DS to put together scenes from the story. Once again for female characters this isn't a problem but if I want a middle-aged male I end up spending longer f***ing about with bump and normal settings than I do putting the scene together or rendering it out. I'm absolutely fine if I want 'hunky mid-20s male with chiselled jaw, smooth skin and trendy hair' or 'creepy old guy' but I'm out of luck if I want 'exhausted 40's dad-bod with a balding salt-and-pepper pate.' And don't even get me started on 3rd party male genitals! They might be fine if you want a character who'd take his own eye out if he got aroused, but for any 'lifelike' scenes the standard Genesis gens are much better but of course I'm then even more limited on what male textures I can use! I've currently got three main male characters sharing the same skin with non-so-minor tweaks to base, translucency, bump and normal levels in order to differentiate them. It looks horrible in renders and it annoys the **** out of me, but it's either than turn them all in to 20's ken-dolls.

Then there's tools like Skin Builder. I love it for creating consistent skins across multiple character and from reading the Daz forum threads so do a lot of a other people. I'd love it even more if it catered for males but despite multi requests, Zev0 has said that the time required to create a male version would cost more than they'd get back in sales.

[ADAM]

@Goblyn Thanks for posting.

The skin defects add a layer of reality to it.
The center tattoo doesnt blend as well as the others. Just seems a bit to dark IMHO.
I like the shade and color of the skin. Overall I think it looks pretty realistic.

I have a problem making my figures to much like Barbie. I tend to have difficulty dialing in more normal/average body shapes.

If you win and dont want the points, you can always put the points towards a contest you'd like to see.

Hair for me is the worst culprit in removing belief in the render once you find a good skin texture.

[ShadowDemonLord]

I have noticed in the last 6-12 months the quality control on assets at Daz has dropped markedly.

The main area of concern for me is the meta data which of course directly affects smart content.

I install all assets via DIM (I like the history and searchability). If an asset is non Daz Store I use CPA to make it a DIM installable file.

Now to the recent problems I have norticed.

1. Install a new figure asset - load daz - go to smart content and the asset does not show upo. Go to content library and check the asset using db editor. For some reason the main figure file is set as preset -> character (which is how a PA saves it when they arer creating it). It should be actor -> character to show in smart content correct location. 10 second fix but how does this get missed bt QC team.

2. This second one is even more annoying and takes a lot longer to fix. Loaded up the new OOT mega upload hair 2. So far so good - loads as expected. Decide to change hair colour - nope - clicking on any of the hair materials does nothing. CHeck and found I have a new smart content library called materials. Yep - they missed loading the materials into the default smart content library (which just means you put \default\ in front of the file path to your materials/shapes etc. ONce again load up the .dsx file that controls this and add \default to the front of all the material settings. Fixed.

Now I consider myself reasonably advanced with my knowledge of meta data, hjow it works and how to fiox it or even create it from flat for non Daz store files. I would presume a lot of users would not feel comfortable doing what I did above - and to be honest they should not need to.

Yes we get a lot of content for free - but I also buy a lot (more than I dhould). Maybe the pandemic is hard on their QC team who I presume are working from home. BUt seriously people - load the asset and click on a few random icons - oh look it did not work - fail it and push it back to the PA to fix. Then release it.

Sorry for the wall of text but just getting frustrated having to write to DAZ and say I pirated your asset and it is broken - please hurry up and fix it and send me the updated file. 🙂

SDL.

[nii-san]

Hi,

Thank you for your work, the site is very good. But I would like to report a little problem with the search system.

It happened a few times that I did a search on the site and everything is going well,
for example :

Home Page

But if I do the same search on the forum :
https://zonegfx.com/forums/search/My+Shapes/

Error 504 Gateway time-out, and for about 15 minutes, no more access to the site.
These are specific keywords that cause the problem, but I did not remember the others that I used, sorry.

[Raex]

Seems like no one else is too interested. Either way, I checked it out. This is what I found.
The vendor has applied a transparency mask/filter (applied in cutout opacity) to a surface, and then made that surface emissive. From there, he makes that surface turn into a point, enclosed by some object (the bulb of the lamp or tubelight), and makes a morph of that. Then, all you need is to dial that morph to turn the light on and off, when turned on, the surface is flattened out outside of its enclosure. When it's off, the surface turns into a dot and gets surrounded by an enclosed object trapping the light within itself.

That's how the switch works.

EDIT: Trying to do the same in blender. My only problem is that there's no option to converge but just merge. Merging dissolves the vertices, edges and faces. And I thought it only merges them since there's already another option for dissolving. I could only find another workaround for this, smoothing the vertices. It works for spherical lookalike shapes, but for a tube that creates a line.
If your light is pretty thin in the first place, it doesn't get fully bound within itself. (Maybe I could but I couldn't find much)
Is there any other way to get the same effect?
Another thing that I had an issue with is morph loading. When I load the morph from the point when the vertices are smoothed out to when it's flattened out (aka, I load the version where the light is supposed to be off, from a point and then make a morph from the figure when it's on), the shape's somewhat distorted. Doing it in reverse, when it's from on to off gave a better result. I bet it wouldn't be an option if I could turn those vertices to a point itself.

Any help, calling out to all the pros over here.

EDIT2: Okay, It's far easier in Daz, to simply scale the object after relocating it's centre point a little so that it's within the object (to have it enclosed). My only issue with this is that surface emission direction just reverses/messes up altogether when I import a surface back this way.

[jrnkmail]

@aitha Okay, that looks interesting. I'll have to check it out.

I'm curious if someone would test something for me. Having a bajillion morphs loaded, it would take me forever to load any character, approximately 8-10 minutes with additional ones taking ever longer.

However, I noticed that my saved scenes loaded very quickly, less than two minutes. So I created a scene with the base G8 model and now just load that scene instead of G8, saving myself about 7 minutes of load time. Yes, I have to then apply body shapes and skins, but I was doing that anyway. I rarely leave characters as is upon loading. And it's still much quicker than waiting for the characters themselves to load from scratch.

So if someone has a really long load time on characters, try making a scene with just the base G8F and let me know if it loads more quickly. I've been wondering if it's a weird fluke for me or if it's something I can recommend to people to improve original load times.

Thanks!

-Jrnk

[Vaaern]

I downloaded this file yesterday from the blog and today my computer gave me a notification that it included a Trojan Horse virus (wacatac or something). Anyone else who has downloaded this that can confirm this? I'm a bit scared, this is the first time I get a virus on my computer (in a few years).

[Spanky]

@Nightreaper thanks, I tested it at your order and... holy moly that looks spooky!
Its all somehow deformed 😮

my own solution was: I made all from the butt and below just invisible (clicking the eye). The positive thing: If you hide the body parts (instead of morphing!) you do 1. not! load the textures + not the Geo = Renderspeed !
So the shape is not a good solution.

I assume it did not worked, because it is a shape and shapes doesnt load/work without restart, I installed it during my daz3d was open.
Other optuion: load a new char, that will refresh the Sliders in the shape region. I had that with expressions already, they require to reload a char or to restart the engine.

[Spanky]

@fuzzy3000 thanks. The problem with Products I down own, getting support from official site is, I had it one time, I asked the support and they said "we could not find the product in your Lib..." hell these derps are checking if I even own it :/
After that I just stopped the conversation. So i try to ask here...

@nightreaper, how did you made it?
I had my char, loaded the tentacles and then selected my char and clicked Hide Legs, and... nothing changed :/
Maybe it doesnt work on all shapes/bodys?
Or is it maybe only visible in iray?

[jrnkmail]

Personally the excel sheet sounds like extra work to me. I prefer to make a file structure that works organically for me and use a good search program to find what I need when my brain won't remember on it's own. Following is how I organize mine, but near the end I link a couple other interesting forum posts about this sort of thing as well as the program I use for searching. TLDR, just jump to the end and check out the other forum posts and/or see if the program is useful for your requirements 😛

When I first started organizing things I thought I didn't care much about keeping full product names. That ended up being a huge mistake for figuring out if I already had a duplicate since a lot of items end up being reposted and if you have a couple thousand items you're probably not familiar with all of the ones you have; you just thought "damn, that looks cool, I could probably use that in unnamed-project-idea that you won't get around to for a year or so..." 😛

So for storing backup files I recommend keeping the full, original product name on the top tier folder. Personally, I move the SKU to the end of the file name since I like to find products I am familiar with quickly when looking for them visually. You still have the SKU there if you really do need to search by number.

Sorting for how it displays in Daz itself is really a matter of preference. My categories (2nd tier folder is always Content, followed by 3rd tier folder which is where I actually personalize things) are Animations, Environments, Lights & Cameras, People, Props, Scripts and Shaders. I also have Scenes and Presets set one level above those, so they're easy to find at the bottom of my Library tree.

Really, you want to pick categories that make sense for you and how you work. "Props" tend to be the messiest category since every artist thinks props are something different. I tend to reorganize the folder structure of most props so that they fit into a more appropriate category like Environments, or the subfolder of Clothing. Often times poses will require a prop that was separated into Props, I just move it right into the pose folder so I don't have to go looking for it if it's really specific to those poses.

Within the major categories I listed, I break some of them down with further sub-categories. Environments has Exterior and Interior subfolders and those are further subdivided by Vendor. Originally I didn't bother with Vendor categories, but I eventually felt that was a mistake as well. The quality of certain vendors is such that you want to be able to quickly find their other products since they might have something you think will likely work with the scene you're working on.

Props get broken down into Furniture, Vehicles, Weapons, Modern, Scifi, Period. People is the largest breakdown of folders since it gets sorted by G1, G2F, G2M, G3F, G3M, G8F, G8M, M4, V4. Then under each of those Anatomy, Characters (Youth, Elder, Asian, African, European, Other, Inhuman Organic, Inhuman Synthetic), Clothing (Accessories, Footwear, Sci Fi, Period, Modern), Hair (sorted by Vendor), Materials, Poses (Expressions, Hands/Feet, Dynamic, Static) , Props (same as the Prop folder breakdown), Shapes (Faces, Bodies, Full Body, Partials).

In the end it just has to make the most sense to you. For example I put ALL poses in one folder since I'll just convert them to whatever generation or sex of character I'm using. I've even considered just lumping all G3s and G8s into the same folder with an addendum to the folder name so I know exactly what generation it was originally, since it's generally possible to use skins interchangeably. I haven't done it simply because things like morphs don't work with the click of a button 😛

All of this can take a lot of work, but I just slowly work on it ten or thirty items at a time until they're all reworked properly. Anything reworked the way I like it is in a separate folder from the items that aren't so I can easily just grab all "Content" folders en masse and install them very quickly should I need to do a reinstall.

I use a program called Everything that I found on ninite.com (highly recommend, there's some good programs in there and anything you use regularly can be easily kept up to date or reinstalled should the need arise, very useful for fresh OS installs to save some time reinstalling programs you always install) to search quickly for duplicates, it'll search across all your hard drives and has some nice advanced search features. I don't think it can help you with a cloud archive unless that is also on a local drive, as is the case with cloud backups like Dropbox, et al.

It took me quite a while to come to the filing system I currently have and I realize this is a long read, but if you come away with a couple ideas to improve your own system then I'm happy to have contributed.

Good luck and hopefully you'll find some decent answers to your question.

There's a couple other forum topics I read about this sort of thing that might be helpful:

[https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/feed-up-downloading-dupes-want-an-easy-way-to-catalogue-search-your-content/]

[https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/manual-install-to-ds/page/6/] Eelgoo explains his directory structure and someone made a PDF out of it, I thought it was a good read.

Also, this dude uses scripts, but I haven't cared enough to get into that sort of thing... yet. [https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/content-library-rebuild-tips-tricks-help-me-lol/] Maybe there's something in there that you find helpful.

[Nicodemus]

@Zaith,

This is a critique from an animator, so understand that I'm trying to help you, not criticize you. My comments are to help you get better and in no way are to hinder your development as an animator.

1. Your hand movements are completely unnatural. Sometimes, you get it right, but the majority of the time you have what we call "lock wrist." Believe it or not, your fingers will move with natural body movements, without even realizing it. As an example, flex your forearm muscles without clenching your fist. Your fingers will naturally attempt to spread out, if you're not making a fist. If you bend your wrist up, the thumb will naturally curl inward. Put some extra effort into your hand animations. It will go a long way to making your animations look superior.

2. All of your characters are flat faced. Your lip syncing is good, but they're all emotionless. If you're animating in Daz (which I applaud you, if you are, 'cos it's animation tools suck donkey balls), use the blend shapes for facial expressions. If you're using Keymate and Graphmate, take the extra effort to blend expressions to make your characters not look so flat.

3. Use dForce Hair or play more with the morphs in the hair. Again, the movements look unnatural. If you're rendering scenes based off storyboards (Which you should be), make sure to scrub the scenes repeatedly using the animation slider. It will go a long way to help you notice wonky animations in hair, body, effects, etc.

4. You really need to work on your lighting. I'm not sure what you're using for a render engine, but the lighting is critical for outstanding animation renders and again, it looks flat and lifeless.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'm out of touch with C4D, though. I haven't touched it since my Amiga days, which ended about 20 years ago. 🙂

[Rycharde]

V4 and M4 Shapes for Genesis comes in an executable saying it cannot find the required asset to install (have had this happen before and despise executables).

How do I hold my jaw to get this to install? I've pointed it to my Daz library where all my purchased Daz files reside, but...

[AnjaBear]

@Jeremy @mokswagger I have a 14-year-old son who came out to me last year and he is doing Daz Studio stuff, and he has a unique perspective on the men he renders, and I give him the freedom to do as he likes, within limits of course. I don't want this theme to get too LGBT as our hosts are Russian and I think its not always a good topic, so we should keep it on track with males, products, morphs, shapes and what we like and want to see, but I have many gay male friends who give me feedback on my guys. I know Mavrosh's work and Nan Fredman, she used to make nice freebies for the males too.

Daz forums I would never post in as they are homophobic over there. And Rendo is just paranoid someone will get them slapped for mentioning LGBT anything - I think they sit in someplace like Tennessee or Kentucky.

If you want to talk about that sort of stuff though we can always talk on Discord.
You sound like a fun guy to talk to!

Anja