Here’s a high-level overview on how we can convert existing skin textures from older Genesis figure and use them with another generation, like Genesis 9. The principle is the same for the other direction too, should you wish to use a G9 skin on an older generation or perhaps a different figure altogether, like the …
I’ve recently made the above video about converting Genesis 8 characters to the new Genesis 9 figure. It’s been a runaway success and I felt we all might benefit from written instructions in addition. These are easier for me to update as new tips and tricks come to light, and link to other relevant resources …
I had a minor catastrophe the other day when all my Smart Content had seemingly disappeared in Daz Studio. I’ve had such things before and could fix it by re-importing all my metadata, but this time round it didn’t seem to work. I had to first reset the whole database, then employ a very specific …
Blender has a very powerful yet somewhat confusing re-timing feature. This comes in handy when you want to render animations at a different frame rate than they were designed to be in. As an example, you may have setup your scene with 24fps in mind, but want to render out a 60fps version, or vice …
I use Morph Loader quite a bit in Daz Studio, and the deeper you go down a rabbit hole, the more parameters you have to adjust. The main ones are usually “Reverse Deformations” and “Apply Deltas Only”, and if you use the tool only occasionally they’re easy to remember. If you’re a PA and use …
Now that the Head and Body shapes have been released for Genesis 9, I thought I’d let you have the complete “character recipes” as it were for the two custom figures I’ve built on stream over the last month. Hand and Greta were a fun project, particularly because I feel we’ve made them together. Here …
The other day I imported Normal Maps from Marvelous Designer into Substance Painter. Turns out they were flipped, or at least parts of them were. I was trying to find a way to invert them, which I knew had to exist, but it wasn’t very intuitive to find. Thanks to Fugazi (aka John from 3D …
When you trace patterns in Marvelous Designer, you end up with a Graphic Trim on each piece, which can look a little distracting on the final garment. This is in addition to a texture you may have applied, so it’s vital to remove the graphic trim eventually. Sadly this is neither intuitive nor memorable, so …
I had a weird issue that threw me when I was working in ZBrush the other day: flipped normals (not Henrik and Morten, the actually phenomenon of normals facing the wrong way). ZBrush only shows the “right” side of the normals by default, and although it has the option to show both sides, the default …
Sometimes we may need access to occluded parts in Substance Painter. The easiest way to deal with such hidden parts is by making them accessible before importing the model, such as opening the lid of a chest or the mouth of a figure, or even “exploding” an object to make all its surfaces accessible. While …
This week I’ve been playing with the fascinating Warp Projection tools in Substance Painter. This way we can project an image onto a 3D object and add vertices onto the projection grid, with which minute details can be lined up for a perfect fit. I’ve tried it with one of those pre-made head textures and …
I’ve just figured out how to do Projection Painting in Substance Painter, and thought I’d best make a note of it. The magic happens inside a regular Paint Layer. It works in both paint mode and projection mode, but to transfer colour information, we’ll need to switch into Projection Mode. With your paint layer selected, …
Blender can do projection painting with textures that can be used as stencils. It’s super handy when it comes to transferring 2D images onto 3D objects. All we need to do is load in a texture, then rub it onto our objects in either Vertex or Texture Paint mode, as well as the new Sculpt …
One of my supporters was asking if there was a way to use Genesis 8.1 materials on the older Genesis 8 figures, and if the reverse of my character conversion video on the opposite process could be used. It got me thinking and experimenting, and while it’s not a one-click process, I’ve made it work. …
A while ago I watched a nice video by CG Cookie about pouring some coffee into a cup in Blender. It’s a great starter video, even though I found it really tough to follow when I tried it for the first time. I thought I had made some notes on the process back then, but …
We can rig simple figures manually and without the Figure Setup Tool in Daz Studio. It occurred to me that I didn’t know much about this process, until a viewer on Twitch asked me about it. I thought I’d best do some research, make a video and write an article so we won’t forget for …
Blender has this habit of being a little different then perhaps any other 3D app. While it can deal with morph targets, they’re called something different and it’s entirely un-obvious how to bring them in (hint: it’s NOT the import option, nor in Edit Mode). I’ve just figured out how to do it and thought …
Many render engines have the concept of decals. Those are texture projections that can be thrown onto existing objects without having to amend the actual texture files. Footsteps and bullet holes in video games are examples of decals. I’m not sure if Cycles or Eevee have this concept natively, but there’s a relatively easy way …
Importing Mixamo animations into Daz Studio has always been a passion of mine, but the process has never been simple. I’ve previously described how to use the Genesis 1 figure as a workaround, but the hand and finger movements were off and needed some further attention. When Travis from Daz forwarded me a post by …
Timelines are behind a lot of the animation magic in Unreal Engine Blueprints. I’ve been implementing one to make my plants grow on Jay’s Farm, but I needed a functionality that would let me change the duration of my parent timeline with a variable. That way different seeds could grow with different rates. There’s no …
There has been an issue with Premiere Pro with the list of “Recent Files” for many years that I’ve thankfully only experienced recently. It’s that list of recently opened projects that is shown both on the home page and under Files – Recent. On my system, it appears that files I’ve just worked on are …
We had an interesting discussion on my private Discord server the other day, about the difference between changing the frame width and changing the focal length. At first glace, both options appear to do the same in the viewport. However there’s an important difference and implication on other parameters as you setup your scene. The …
I had a great question from a viewer today (hi Doomguy) about what additional tools I use when working with Daz Studio. It’s an often overlooked aspect of the software that Daz Studio by itself can only do so much, and external tools can help build better scenes, work faster or aid in making adjustments …
Like everything in Unreal Engine, rendering a subject with a transparent background isn’t a one-click affair. It’s doable though, thanks to a neat tip by Alexzander The Geek on YouTube. In the above screenshot, the background was added in Photoshop, exactly how I like it! Here’s how to do it in principle: enable transparency in …
Depth of Field is extremely difficult to judge in Unreal Engine, at least visually in the preview. It’s also a little intimidating to setup, and I don’t mind telling you that it was very difficult for me to grasp the concept. Yet like so many things in Unreal Engine, there is method behind the madness, …
I wanted to setup some portrait lights the way I’m used to doing it in Blender and DAZ Studio. In those apps, we usually have a way to point a light source at an object so that when we move either of them around, the other one follows. The above GIF is a good example …
The Tick Event is a somewhat special event that is called every time a frame is drawn in Unreal Engine. Many actions are derived from it in a running project. Sometimes we may need to drive things while we’re editing a project though, without being able to press play. Sadly we can’t use the Tick …
EPIC have recently introduced something called the Movie Render Queue to aide us in exporting stills and animations from Unreal Engine. The previous method (Movie Scene Capture) was a tad clunky, and is – as we live in such dramatically fast times – already being deprecated. Although Movie Render Queue is working great, it’s not …
I’m currently importing large amounts of OBJ files into DAZ Studio. I was thinking of making my life a little more streamlined and came across a super handy script by the very prolific and talented Jaques aka mcasual. He has something called Load Many OBJ, which does exactly what I need. Once installed, the script …
Blender has a handy script built-in that lets us export multiple selected objects in our scene as separate objects. I remember mentioning this principle in a beefy article focussing on Unreal Engine workflow, but thought it would be neat to turn it into its own article. Here it is! Let’s assume we have several objects …