Jay Versluis 
It is with great pleasure that I give you my latest texturing endeavour: MIRABEL Textures for Sunny’s First Date outfit, perfect for an autumn stroll.
MIRABEL contains a total of 48 texture presets for DAZ Studio, 24 for Iray and 24 for 3Delight. I’ve created high-resolution texture maps for the top, skirt, scarf and boots, 6 outfits in total – but the combinations are endless.
By default Blender has one window with multiple interface sections: the main viewport, the properties panel, the outliner, and so forth. We can easily create more of those sections by clicking on the little triangle in the top left corner of a window and drag left or down. Likewise, we can collapse those windows by …
In this episode I’ll explain how to render a camera with depth of field in DAZ Studio 4.9. The assets I’m using are available from DAZ 3D, they’re called BC Movie Stands “The Office” by The Ant Farm. For Branson. https://www.versluis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Rendering-with-Depth-of-Field-in-DAZ-Studio.mp3Podcast: Download (Duration: 30:30 — 27.9MB)
In this episode I’ll show you how to upgrade to a new version of Blender and copy your settings from a previous version. Blender is a bit “special” in that it does not automatically overwrite an existing version, instead it installs the new version alongside the old version. The idea is that if the new …
Sometimes you want to use the same material on another object and only make a small change to it. Rather than this change affecting all linked objects, we need a new material with all the settings of the old material.
For example, in the above image I’ve used three chocolate shaders. They were all the same, except for the colour of the chocolate. I started with milk chocolate, then changed the colour for the dark and white chocolates.
There is an easy way to do this in Blender, albeit not entirely obvious at first sight. Let me show you how to copy and paste materials in this article.
In other 3D applications, it is common to “look through” a camera to position and manipulate it with the usual viewport controls, and then render the result. In Blender things are a little different (of course). We can manipulate the viewport, but we cannot render it. We can see it rendered as a preview, by …
When we setup a standard material for Blender’s Cycles render engine, it’ll start with just a single diffuse node like this: To add a Normal Map to this setup, we’ll need to add two things: a new Texture Map node (Add – Texture – Image Texture) a new Bump Map node (Add – Vector – Normal …
When we setup a standard material for Blender’s Cycles render engine, it’ll start with just a single diffuse node like this: Feel free to change the diffuse colour or add a texture map to it’s colour input. To add a Bump Map to this setup, we’ll need to add two things: a new Texture Map …
Manga Studio (or Clip Studio Paint as it’s now called) has a very versatile brush engine. We can customise our own brushes too, so that we can “paint” with our own images – just like the ones above, all of which come with the app.
The process is less than intuitive, but once you’ve done it a couple of times it grows on you. I tend to forget how these things work pretty much instantly, so here are some notes on how to create a brush from a seamless tiled image in Manga Studio.
I’ve just learnt of a new way to expand selections in Hexagon: select some faces (or edges), then position your cursor away from the object, then hold down CMD (Mac) or CTRL (PC) and drag in any direction. The selection will grow into the direction that you drag. It doesn’t always reliably work, because some weird …
In large scenes it can be handy to navigate as if we’re playing a 3D computer game. And that’s possible in Blender: Hit SHIFT+F to enter First Person Navigation mode, then use your mouse to look around in 3D space. Now use the following keys to move around your scene: Left Cursor (or A) – move left …
Here’s another texture set I’ve made for the wonderful Cathy Outfit by outoftouch. I call them LILIKOI. It means “passion fruit” in Hawaiian. Very fitting I thought! LILIKOI contains a total of 20 texture presets for DAZ Studio, 10 for NVIDIA Iray and 10 for 3Delight. You can mix and match any skirt with any top for a total of 100 …
Manga Studio has a really nice feature that I have been looking for in Photoshop for some time: a Selection Brush.
In addition to the usual lasso, marquee and Magic Wand tools, there is a way to simply paint over a part of your image, which then becomes part of (or reduces) the current selection.
Turns out this feature (and then some) is part of Photoshop too – it’s just not called a Selection Brush. Although from what I understand, there is such a feature in Photoshop Elements (a different product entirely).
In Photoshop, this tool is called the Quick Mask feature. It’s dead simple and extremely versatile. What’s not to like? Here’s how to use it:
I was doodling away in Photoshop, one hand on the keyboard and the other using my Wacom pen, when out of a sudden this crazy cyan blue line appeared right across my canvas. Super annoying!
My Intuos tablet has a mind of its own sometimes, selecting things that I don’t want, and perhaps this was one of those occasions. Or perhaps I had accidentally hit one of the gazillion keyboard shortcuts that does something I didn’t even know Photoshop could do. Who knows.
Either way, I had an ultra annoying line across my document, and there didn’t seem to be a way to get rid of it. Here’s what it looked like:
Moving the document also moves the line, so it had to be something that could be turned off. But how?
I’ve just released a new texture pack, this time for the very versatile Strapless Mini Dress for Genesis 3 and Victoria 7, by hameleon and santuziy78. EQUINOX contains a total of 40 texture presets for DAZ Studio, 20 for NVIDIA Iray and 20 for 3Delight. I’ve added presets for the whole dress, as well as separate presets for the …
Material Zones are – as the name suggests – different parts of a single object that can each be assigned a shader. This sounds more complicated than it actually is.
In a nutshell, you can tell an object that its top should look different than its bottom at render time – figuratively speaking.
Such zones can be assigned only at the modelling level, so that each surface can be described differently by your rendering app. Here’s how to assign these Material Zones in Blender.
By default Blender exports every item in your scene when you choose File – Export. That’s not so good if you only want to save out a small portion of a large scene. But it doesn’t have to be that way: there’s the often overlooked Export Options on the right hand side, on the same …
Here’s a texture set I’ve made for Jolina’s Swimsuit by outoftouch. SYMPHONY Textures is a set of 16 Material Presets for DAZ Studio, 8 for NVIDIA Iray and 8 for 3Delight. All maps are 4000×4000 pixels, ideal for ultra high resolution renders. Installation and Usage Unpack all ZIP files into your Poser/DAZ directory. Load a figure, …
Here’s a texture set I’ve made for the Jolina Dress by my friends from Rotenburg and der Wümme, outoftouch. Although we don’t actually know each other, I feel a special connection because I used to live in Verden an der Aller, which is a mere stones throw away from Rotenburg. It’s a small world! The …
Did you know there is a way to open several images in the same document as layers in Photoshop? It’s a real timesaver if you have several renders that all need to be composited onto the same background for postwork. It’s really easy to do: open Photoshop (duh!) head over to Scripts – Add Files to …
Photoshop can combine multiple images into one and save them as HDRI, which allows us to use them in our 3D renders – either as 360 degree backgrounds or as light sources.
The way to do it has changed several times over the years – so here’s how this works in Photoshop CC 2015.
Sometimes, the 3Delight render engine in DAZ Studio can throw a hissy-fit and complain with the following error message: 3Delight message #45 (Severity 2): S2069: the interface of shader ‘/Users/versluis/Library/Application Support/DAZ 3D/Studio4/temp/shaders/brickyard/{407f8e5c-3a9b-4708-b5e5-799ff1fe7c1d}/shader_Surface.sdl’ is invalid 3Delight message #45 (Severity 2): S2051: cannot load shader ‘brickyard/{407f8e5c-3a9b-4708-b5e5-799ff1fe7c1d}/shader_Surface’, will use ‘defaultsurface’ This problem occurs frequently on complex shaders, such …
Sometimes it’s necessary to select more than one saved selection in Photoshop. And I was often wondering how to do it, thinking there had to be a way – until I discovered it by sheer accident today while pressing seemingly random buttons. Usually I call up a seed selection by heading over to Select – …
I’m as excited as a kid in a candy store – because last Monday my new (old) HP Z600 Workstation has arrived! Built and sold to the government in the summer of 2009 for roughly $5000 (give or take a grand), it came to me via an eBay auction for $171 plus postage some seven years later.
Equipped with two Intel Xeon 5560 processors, no hard drive, 4GB of RAM and only a COA sticker for Windows Vista, I had a little bit of work to do to get it all going:
I wanted to use this machine for 3D rendering in both Carrara and DAZ Studio, so for the latter I decided to buy an NVIDIA GTX 970 graphics card. I had to do a few internal modifications to the machine to make it work – but work it does, and it was a lot of fun to get this rig going.
Without further ado, here’s my Z600 story.
Yesterday I’ve written about how to create a Smart Prop in DAZ Studio, and today we’ll learn how to do it in Poser.
The principle is the same: model your 3D object as you wish, then import it – or load and create a primitive in Poser. I’ll do the latter and give Andy some exciting earrings (even though he doesn’t have ears).
As you’ve guessed it, these are just two sphere primitives. Poser can’t create its own, but you can load a variety from the library under Props – Primitives. I’ve scaled them and moved them into place.
Smart Props are little items of geometry that can follow another object without the need to be completely rigged – unlike conforming clothes, which need to have the same skeleton and rigging as the parent figure. Smart Props are great for things like jewellery and other ancillary items. Let’s see how we can create one …
KeyShot comes with several pre-installed environments, based on HDR images. We can use them in other applications too, if we know where to look for them. On a Mac, the KeyShot5 HDR images are stored here: /Library/Application Support/KeyShot5/Environments To navigate there, hit the Go option in your Finder, while holding down the OPTION / CMD key. …
When the Genesis figure was released in 2011, it was not natively compatible with Poser and only worked in DAZ Studio.
Shortly after its release though, the folks at DAZ came up with a way to make Genesis and related content available in Poser, called the DSON Importer – a script that reads the DAZ Studio files and translates them on-the-fly into something Poser can understand.
It’s not perfect, but it works with both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 figures – as well as related content, provided that so called Poser Companion Files exist. The good news is that DAZ Studio can create those files with minimal effort – if you know how to do it.
Let me show you how in this article, which was inspired by a forum thread over at HiveWire.
Mac Users will be familiar with the above dialogue. If you have DAZ Studio, Install Manager and/or Carrara installed, this thing shows up several times during your working day:
Should this drive you crazy, then read on – because there is indeed a solution to this! It has to do with a bit of command line hacking and location scouting. But if you’re clever enough to figure out such complex 3D applications, the following steps will seem like a walk in the park to you.
The following steps worked for me on OS X El Capitan 10.11.6, DAZ Studio 4.9 and Carrara 8.5 Pro.
My first idea of growing grass in Carrara was to make use of the Hair Object. It sounds like an easy workflow too: drag the hair object onto my terrain, adjust its growth behaviour, adjust the colour to resemble grass, and case closed. This approach works fine with primitives and vertex objects.
But sadly, it doesn’t work with terrains. So I thought, perhaps I’ll apply a patch of hairy grass to a plane, and then use a Surface Replicator to replicate the plane all over the terrain. That doesn’t work either: while the plane itself is being replicated, the actual hair (or grass) that’s growing on it is not. I compare this to using the best string trimmer vs scissors on your lawn. Perhaps the Hair Object isn’t such a good idea to be used with growing grass on a huge terrain after all.
A very different approach comes from Phil Wilkes, who has kindly shown how to model a more complex patch of vegetation in this video. I’ve taken the same approach but only modelled a single stalk of grass, replicated it onto a plane, and then replicated that plane onto my terrain.
Here’s how I did it step by step.