Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs several YouTube channels and websites, and he's also live on Twitch sometimes. To support him on his mission to make the world a better place, you can support him on Patreon or buy him a coffee.

How to aim left/right in Mass Effect Andromeda

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Ryder goes into cover automatically when you enter cover. However, by default he/she only aims to the right. That’s no good when your enemies are around the left corner.  So how do we change that? If they had only told us during the tutorial, ey? On PS4 and Xbox, it’s the R3 button (i.e. press …

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How to mute the mic when recording a voice over in Premiere Pro

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I recently recorded a quick voiceover in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5, but I ran into an issue for which the fix wasn’t exactly obvious. Here’s the problem: When you mark a track to record some audio and start the recording, the full mix is being played back through your speakers (or headphones). This includes …

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How to open and convert multiple raw images in Photoshop

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Opening several JPG or PNG images in Photoshop is the easiest thing in the world: just select several in the Windows Explorer or in the Mac Finder, right-click to choose Open, and Photoshop brings in each image as a new document.

But when we try the same with raw images, it won’t work: although Photoshop shows us the raw processing dialogue for all our chosen images, and lets us make individual changes, as soon as we hit Open at the bottom, only the current image is opened as a new document.

What gives? How can we open and convert several images at once?

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How to draw with an image in Photoshop

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Sometimes we want to reproduce an image using a brush stroke. It’s a handy way to replicate a 2D object along a path for example. Using the standard brush for this though, we’ll find that we can only reproduce a single colour image. But what if we want to reproduce all colours in our image?

Enter the Mixer Brush Tool. Here’s how to sample an image and draw with it in Photoshop.

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How to setup a Height Shader in Blender

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While we were discussing how to generate a terrain in my previous post, the next question is of course how to we give our terrain different colour values depending on its height. For example, at the very top of our terrain we may have snow covered mountains. Slightly further down we have yellowish rocks on …

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How to scale two axis at the same time in Carrara

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Sometimes we need to scale an object in two axis at the same time. Think of making a cylinder thinner rather than shorter at the same time, which would happen if we’d scale the whole cylinder. However, scaling the X and then the Y axis is cumbersome during modelling. Carrara has such an option: hold …

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Filed under: Categories 3D

How to apply textures in ZBrush

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I was trying to import a texture into ZBrush from an object I had created and UV mapped in Blender. The above shows an example of such an object, looking all nice and dandy in Blender.

However, when I imported it into ZBrush (after figuring out how to do that), I was shocked to see how ZBrush displayed my texture. Take a look:

That’s neither funny nor necessary. I’ve tested the same principle in DAZ Studio, Carrara and Poser and they all played ball, displaying the texture without a hitch. Only Hexagon wanted the texture flipped vertically, but – just like Carrara – offered handy tick boxes as to which direction an imported texture needed to be mirrored.

Zbrush also has such an option, but it’s not next to where you select the texture.

In this article I’ll show you how to import and apply a texture in ZBrush, to an object that has been created and UV mapped in another application. Let’s do this step by step:

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How to map a keyboard shortcut for Local View in Blender

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I’ve just learned that Blender has a wonderfully helpful function called Local View. This will isolate a selection, zoom in on it, and hide all other items in the scene. Using Local View again will bring back all items as they were seen before.

Thanks to Darrin Lile for this tip!

We can execute Local View with the default keyboard shortcut “Numpad /” (the division operator on your numpad) – but of course that only works if you have a numpad. On my Windows system I have one, but sadly on my Mac and my laptop I do not.

In this article I’ll show you how to map this shortcut to another key. Let’s get started!

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How to select every other vertex in Blender

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Hexagon had a really nice nth-selection tool (1 over n it was called). With it you could select every other vertex or edge or face, creating things like the star shaped pattern above. You’ll be pleased to hear that Blender can do this too! Rather than select every other point though, Blender likes to deselect instead. …

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How to install content for DAZ Studio

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In this episode I’ll show you how to install content you’ve bought for use in DAZ Studio. I’ll go through using Install Manager, DAZ Connect, and I’ll explain how to install content from ZIP archives (bought from marketplaces such as Renderosity or Hivewire). For Dwayne. https://www.versluis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Install-DAZ-Content.mp3Podcast: Download (Duration: 18:37 — 17.1MB)

Creating Walk Animations in DAZ Studio

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In this episode I’ll show you how to use aniBlocks to animate a character, how to animate a camera around it like a dolly, and how to merge one scene with another. This is a kind of a “behind the scenes” walkthrough of the following walk animation I’ve rendered recently. I’ve received several comments on …

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How to create a drape effect in Photoshop

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It’s easy to create an effect of draped cloth in Photoshop, like in the image above. We can do this with the Gradient Tool. It’s the icon with an actual gradient on it, sometimes hiding behind the Paint Bucket or 3D Material Drop tool (if you don’t see it, left-click and hold for about one …

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How to run DAZ Studio on a remote machine via RDP

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I’ve been playing with Windows Azure the other day, specifically to hire rendering machines. My idea was very simple: if I have a long animation to render, why not pay a nominal amount of cash, but have the result back within hours rather than days?

So I created a Windows VM, logged in from my Mac via RDP (Remote Desktop Connection), installed DAZ Studio and some content… but sadly I couldn’t start DAZ Studio. I remember having had this problem before on my home network, where I have a similar setup.

This happens because DAZ Studio needs OpenGL 1.3 or higher, and with an RDP connection, only OpenGL 1.1 is supported. Quite rightly so, DAZ Studio throws an error message and quits. However, the app works just fine via RDP, so how can we circumvent it closing prematurely?

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What is the /data/auto_adapted folder in DAZ Studio

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I was setting up an animation on one system, then transferred the scene over to a more powerful rendering machine. Usually DAZ Studio 4.9 does a good job at installing required content automatically (thanks to DAZ Connect), but this time my scene showed up with several scary grey blocks instead of content. In addition, I …

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Getting started with ShadowBox in ZBrush

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ShadowBox is an interesting feature with which we can create 3D geometry from three intersecting masks. Let’s see how to get started with it step by step in ZBrush 4R7. Select any tool to begin, perhaps something that can serve as a starting point. I’ll use the Dog tool. To do this, hit the COMMA key …

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Filed under: Categories 3D Tagged as: Tags

How to download previous versions of Marvelous Designer

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Marvelous Designer (or Marvy D as some fans call it) receives frequent updates with a plethora of new features. With every round new version number, and upgrade fee is necessary – if you bought the software with a perpetual license (like I have, because I genuinely dislike the subscription model… but I digress).

This means that it is very likely that a new version passes you by, and you have the need to download an older version of Marvelous Designer.

Good thing you can: from the Download Archive.

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How to play HALO on Windows 10

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The other day I bought a brand new copy of the 2001 classic HALO – Combat Evolved for Windows. I really liked this game and played it on the original XBOX quite a bit – even thought I must admit that I neither liked nor got it the first few times I picked it up. …

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How to avoid missing textures in Reality for DAZ Studio

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I was playing around with Reality for DAZ Studio the other day, and the above phenomenon occurred. It’s a Michael 6 render that should have worked out of the box – especially because Reality is clever enough to convert his skin shaders to automatically. The render worked fine on one of my machines, but not on another.

Strangely enough though, I could see the textures fine in the viewport. And a quick test render in both 3Delight and Iray showed the textures fine too. But Reality and LuxRender wanted to render the skin tone as some scary metal.

So what’s going on?

The culprit is DAZ Connect. On this second machine, Michael 6 was installed not via the DAZ Install Manager, but from within DAZ Studio via DAZ Connect. This has happened because I loaded the scene (from Dropbox), and DAZ Studio recognised that Michael 6 was not installed, and hence offered to install him for me. I accepted the generous offer, but Reality and LuxRender can’t handle textures installed via DAZ Connect.

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How to render “Manuel Bastioni LAB” characters without purple skin in Blender

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I recently discovered the Manuel Bastioni LAB add-on for Blender. Judging it only by the title you’d never guess it’s an extravagant people generator of the highest caliber! Bastioni was working with the folks from MakeHuman for many years, but The LAB is his own project.

In a nutshell, it creates ready-to-use characters, complete with poses and morphs, as well as many other complex goodies. And as with many complex things, rendering can take a while. I tend to prepare a scene on one machine, transfer it to a faster system and let it render while I setup the next scene.

This workflow usually works a treat with .blend files, but not necessarily with those containing Manuel Bastioni characters. Turns out the skin has a good chance of looking alien purple. Quite a nice effect, but perhaps not all the time.

Lucky for us, knowing why this happens will help us understand how to fix the problem. It’s not a bug, just a question of which box to tick when saving those files. Let me show you which box that is and how to avoid the purple skin effect.

The Purple Skin Phenomenon

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