Hee hee

Listening to me go through my stash of spinning fibers must be funny. "Hankies. More hankies. Ooh, other hankies. Hey, still more hankies!"

I really like silk hankies.

I'd forgotten how much awesome stuff I have in my spinning stash. It's mostly silk in various forms and alpaca, with a few other fibers. One of my cats is allergic to sheep's wool, so I'm mostly wool-free, but... Well, I'm not a saint. There's a hand-dyed braid of roving in there that I got just before she was diagnosed because I had promised it to myself after finishing something or other, and want to keep that. There's a huge ball of a beautifully dyed English Longwool I won as a door prize one year at a kinda-local fiber guild event. Then a few odds and ends with some significance.

Mostly, though, I've got a lot of silk in various forms, a lot of alpaca in various forms, and a whole lot of sheep-free, brightly colored fibery love. :)

I love my spinning wheel

This is not a new phenomena. I've had my spinning wheel for, oh, I guess it's right about two years now. But I probably haven't used it for about a year. I pulled it out again yesterday and starting working on it. Ooh, this is fun.

Union rules require that I post a picture of the singles on the bobbin:

This is some silk top I had. I suspect it may have been the leftovers of two or more dyeing batches. Some pieces of it are very bright pinks and purples and fuchsias, while others are a more subdued grey-purple and grey-indigo. When I started it spinning it, a year or a more ago, I had a plan on how to manage the differences. Damned if I can remember what that plan was now. ::shrugs::

I figure I'll spin it until I run out, divide it onto two bobbins and make a two-ply. For other animal fibers I prefer 3 plies, but I generally two-ply silk. That structure shows off the sheen of silk well, plus you get more yardage. Silk is only going to fluff up so much, so I don't find that a 3-ply has much advantage.

Now I need to find the silk hankies I was halfway through, pull out one of my (great many) pretty drop spindles and finish it up. I do remember what I was doing with those. They were a blue-green mix with the ones on top being more green and the ones on bottom being more blue. I'd split them in half by color, and planned to ply them together to get a mixed blue-green effect.

Just a peek at what I'm doing

I know, I know, I still haven't gotten the First Impressions Dress packaged and posted. The sad part is I've basically just got to make a download thumbnail (well, three), and I just can't bring myself to do it. I really do what to get it done before my vacation is over, though.
In the meantime, though, here's a peek at what I'm doing now:

I love working with Pranx. He's just such an adorable figure, and the fan base is pretty cool.
There's also going to be a coat with this set. I'm still deciding whether I want to add a vest, too. I plan for each piece will be separate so you can mix and match. I'm not sure if that'll make it more prone to poke-thru when conformed, though. In theory it shouldn't, since they'll all have the same joint parameters, but Poser doesn't always act according to theory.
On a different hobby, I started an Ishbel shawl (well, actually scarf) some time ago because the center stockinette portion is good waiting room knitting, and I started the lace portion earlier this week. No pictures yet, but I'm excited to say that it's going very quickly, especially for lace. I'm already on the third pattern section out of five. :)

OMG, Entrelac Sheep!

Lookie lookie lookit!

If you don't have a Ravelry account, you can lookit Chemknit's, or go to the Amazon page for Norwegian Handknits, click "search inside this book" and search for "Entrelac Sheep".

I got the book Norwegian Handknits for Christmas, and as you may have guessed, I adore the pattern for the entrelac sheep! They're so cute! This is a thing which must be made.

Tutorial: Getting Marvelous Designer stuff into Poser at the proper scale

OK, today we got a tutorial. One of the things that MD users modeling for Poser have struggled with is getting models from Poser to MD and back in the proper scale. See, the problem here is that in most 3D programs, 1 unit represents a real world inch, or a centimeter, or a millimeter. In Poser, 1 unit represents 103 inches, or 8.6 feet, or 261.6 centimeters. I'm sure it made sense to someone at one time. OK, that's a lie. I'm not convinced that has ever made sense to anyone, anywhere, anytime. However, it's what we got, so we have to work with it.

Poser's stupidly small scale causes all sorts of problems when we try to play with the rest of the 3D graphics world, and MD is just an example of that.

Now, I generally use the free program Objaction Scaler, so that's what I'll be assuming for this tutorial. (BTW, sorry about the artifacts on the screen caps. I didn't realize they were saving that way until I was done with everything.)

1. Start in Poser. Load up the figure you want to make clothes for. Turn off IK, and completely zero the figure. If you're ultimately going to be making conforming clothes, you might want to use PhilC's "Super Zero" script if you have it or even start with the figure's OBJ instead of exporting from Poser, to make absolutely sure you have everything zeroed. If you're doing dynamic, the zero within Poser is what you want to match.

2. On the menu bar, go to File->Export->Wavefront OBJ...

3. Poser brings up a dialog box asking what frames you want to export. Select "Single Frame".

4. Next comes the "Select objects" dialog box. Make sure only your figure's bodyparts are selected. You can do this quickly by clicking the box beside "Universe" to turn everything off, then selecting the box by your figure name.

5. THIS IS THE FIRST IMPORTANT PART. Next you come to export options. If you are making dynamic clothes, do not check "As Morph Target". You can do what you want with the others, but leave this off.

If you are making conforming clothes, DO check "As morph target". If there are any hidden offsets, you want to match them.

6. Save your figure. You might want to save the Poser file at this point, so you can come back to it later instead of having to do all the zeroing and IKing again later. Open Objaction Scaler.

7. In Scaler, chose the figure you just exported as your input, and provide a new name and file path for your output. I always click the "Output File" and then treat it like any other save dialog to do this. It sometimes wigs out if I just type in a new file name/path.

Under the scaling factors, put in some ginormous number. Generally speaking for a typical figure, like Victoria 4, you'll want around 2500. It doesn't matter, but remember this number. I make it part of the output filename so I can reuse this avatar easily later without going "crap, how much did I scale that by" later.

(For the example, I'm exporting Aiko 3. She's pretty petite compared to the Vickies, but I want to use the same patterns for her that I do for them, so I'm making her larger than normal.)

Once everything's set, click the Convert button. It should finish pretty quickly.

8. OK, enough with Poser. Now we're heading over to Marvelous Designer. Once it's open, go to File->Import->Obj and select the figure you scaled up in the last step.

9. THIS IS A REALLY IMPORTANT PART. Import your embiggened obj at 100% scale, and load as new avatar. Again, do not change the scaling. Leave it at 100%.

10. Do your stuff in Marvelous Designer. When you're done, go to File->Export->OBJ, and give it a file name for your awesome new outfit.

11. THIS IS ANOTHER IMPORTANT PART. In the export options, export at 100% scale. Don't try to change it in MD. Also, you'll want to uncheck "shape" on the list. That's your avatar; she doesn't need to come along for the ride.

12. Time for another round in Objaction Scaler. Load up your awesome new outfit. Give it a new filename in the output box. Now, under scaling, put the same scaling factor you used for your avatar, but this time click the "Reduce" button. Click convert when you're ready.

13. I usually make a pit stop through UVMapper at this point to lay out the map like I want. All the pieces are already laid out flat for you like your pattern (which is beautiful mapping for clothing, BTW), but they're out of the 0-1 range, overlapping, and may not be in scale to each other.

Hint 1: When you bring it in to UVMapper, do not select "yes" when it asks if you want to correct out of range data. Instead let it bring it in huge, then select all and use the '/' shortcut to scale it down until it fits on the map. This keeps everything square, and then you can rearrange things and scale them relative to each other without distortion. If you let UVMapper do it, some of your pieces could end up squished in one dimension, but not the other.

Hint 2: If you don't change the pattern, MD exports the same vertices in the same order, even if you've fit your outfit to a different figure. So if you're fitting to a bunch of figures like I do, you only have to map one, and then you can import the rest, go to File->Import UVS, select the one you mapped and click OK. Identical mapping, no work. (If you had to change the pattern, though, no such luck. The mesh will be different.)

14. OK, back in Poser. Either open the file you saved when you made your avatar, or again load up your figure and zero everything. Then go to File->Import->Wavefront OBJ... and select your reduced size and optionally UVMapped

15. THIS IS THE FINAL REALLY IMPORTANT PART. Uncheck everything in the import dialog. Don't scale, don't drop to floor, don't do anything except import your outfit.

16. Ta-da! Your outfit fits. You're ready to clothify it, group it, or whatever you'd normally do at this stage.

Everything's fine in the back, too, in case you were worried.

"First Impressions" Dress Update

It's been a while since I posted a WIP pic, so here we go:

I've pretty much got the Poser versions done except for packing, but I'll be sitting on them for a while yet, I'm afraid. Zigraphix is releasing a free DAZ Studio Shader Mixer tutorial, which should be out in the next few days at the latest in theory. So with that to help, I plan to take another run at DAZ Studio materials for them as well. (Although I'm still not going to try to recreate BagginsBill's 140-node wonder with the pinstripe wool.) My previous first-impression-of-the-software ranting aside, I do want to support DAZ Studio users to the extent possible without losing my sanity.

Believe me, though, I do want to release this soon -- if for no other reason than I'm getting kind of sick of looking at it. ;)

Another "First Impressions" Dress Status Update

The good news is that I'm finished adding morphs to the V4 "First Impressions" dress.

The bad news is that I still have to do the separate top, which will have more morphs than the dress. Basically, other than the She-Freak, any morph that poked the shins out the back of the long skirt was skipped because magnets didn't handle it well and the Cloth Room was time consuming and inconsistent. The top will have many of those that were skipped on the dress.

That "many" brings me to the other bad news: I had to take away one of the She-Freak variations, so only She-Freak variation 1 will be available on the dress. I didn't realize it when I first made the morph, but the magnets I used had pulled the modesty panel through the front of the dress, which just isn't acceptable. That will be a problem in the top as well.

I'm hoping to get this set out this weekend, but that'll probably be pushing my luck, given the amount of stuff I have left to do. (V4 morphs on the top, nice thumbnails for everything, packaging each of the three sets.) So it may be next week instead.

Getting there...

On Sunday I spent way too much time dealing with a crisis of Renderosity's making. I am the anonymous "distressed member" who was afraid I was a victim of the weirdest hacking ever. I'm still not happy about the situation, especially since they haven't actually gotten back to me personally about the problem after figuring out what it was. I stumbled upon the thread.

In addition to uploading some of my freebies without bothering to warn me, they also deleted several, again no warning. If they'd just let me know there was a problem, I could have fixed it (and BTW, the files they uploaded are out of date. English Bob has the most recent at Morphography, hosted with my permission and thanks.)

Anyway, I lost some time on Sunday. And to be honest, adding morphs is really boring. It's mainly "load up a magnet set, check for pokeage, spawn morph, lather, rinse, repeat."
I'm doing my best on the V4 version to support as many of the derivative figures as possible, as well as Morphs++. For the full dress, Aiko and The Girl were fine, but I was only able to add two of the four She Freak variations and about half the Stephanies. See, I generally use magnet sets to add the morphs. The She Freak is so muscular that her shins go right out the back of the skirt, and the magnet sets don't look right fixing that. For two of them, I was able to use magnets on the top and then the cloth simulator to fix the skirt, but the other two change enough at the waist joint to break the mesh in half when I try that. The version that's just the blouse will have all 4 She Freaks, but only two on the dress.

After slogging through that, I started on the Stephanies, and let me tell you, when I saw that some of her fluffier versions also poked the shins out the back, I lost my will to live for a moment. Then I decided just not to bugger with it. If you absolutely must use Ella or Grace, you can use the blouse and you're on your own for a skirt.

All I've got left to do now is match the V4 Morphs ++, make thumbnails, and package the things.

Oh, exciting news! Marvelous Design had just gone gold (as in within the last five hours "just"), and is available for $99 for a non-commercial license until February!

Almost There

For the First Impressions Dress, I've got the Cookie and Victoria 3 versions done except for nice thumbnails. The Victoria 3 version includes a metric buttload of morphs to match the DAZ morph pack. Not every morph, because some just didn't look right, but a whole bunch.

I can now do the Victoria 4 version morphs because Lyrra's and Netherworks' magnet sets finally went on sale in DAZ's PA sale. Warning, "Good Old Days" story coming in. I left the 3D hobby about 5 years ago, and I've been back in less than a year. Now, back then the annual Published Artist half-off sale lasted the whole month of November. A lot of PAs didn't like that, and I can't blame them, because for an entire month they were only making half their usual commission. Well, now any given PA's items only go on sale for one day (usually works out to a day and a half, and I've heard rumors of a one-day "catch-up" at the end of the month), and I think that's a little too far the other way. I wasn't able to get something off my "A-list" until November 26th, and I was getting pretty frustrated. Ironically, yesterday's A-list item wasn't even on my wishlist. It's Uzilite's brand new Marquis set, which I have plans for.

I much prefer Runtime DNA's 2 or 3 week long annual 50% sale, and frankly, it works better at getting my money. I got the things I absolutely had to have when it first started, but more things have kind of been sneaking into my cart over the last few weeks. ::whistles innocently:: At DAZ, however, I've actually taken things off my wishlist this month, because I'm in there every day to see if anything's on sale (the alerts are infamously unreliable), and some items I stared at long enough to realize "I don't really want that after all". You know how it is, when you look at something enough times, you suddenly see flaws you never would have noticed if you'd only looked 499 times instead of 500.

I wonder how they'll run their DAZ originals sale next month. They do seem fond of these "one day only" sales.

Anyway, back to my original topic, I'm almost done with the First Impressions Dresses. I "just" need to make the V4 morphs and thumbnails, and get everything packaged up. Of course, I can't distribute it until I can buy a Marvelous Designer license. They updated their TOS in preparation for going gold, but haven't actually gone yet. Nonetheless, I'll be ready for when they do.

DAZ Studio first impressions

Now, I was planning to make DAZ Studio shader versions of the materials for the First Impressions Dress, or at least approximations. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen any time soon. I gave it a shot, and DS promptly beat me like a redheaded stepchild. (Granted, I am a redheaded stepchild, but that's still quite rude.)

I don't mean to call anyone's baby ugly, but my first impression about DAZ Studio 3 is that it's taken everything that's bad about Poser, and made it even worse.

Takes shaders, for instance. Poser has the Materials Room, which is arcane and kludgy and very painful for any but the simplest of set-ups. But there is a third party scripting engine by BagginsBill that makes things tons easier by allowing you to write materials files in beginning-level Python. (Seriously, I'm only on chapter 4 of "Python Programming for Absolute Beginners" and I can write some pretty bitchin' materials in Matmatic.)

DAZ Studio equivalently has Shader Mixer and Shader Builder. The first challenge was figuring out which to use. Now, I may be talking out my ass here, but as best I can tell, Shader Mixer is roughly equivalent to the Poser Materials room. And like the Materials Room, it is arcane and kludgy and painful. Only Shader Mixer ups the ante by also being almost completely undocumented. Also, I am about 95% certain that there is not an anisotropic specular brick in there, and that is a basic and necessary highlight type. It's critical to anything that has directional grooves or parallel filaments, including brushed metals, hair, and satin.

I'm sure I could find or make an anisotropic shader in Shader Builder, which is basically a renderman shader scripting engine. Only, it's visual. Just like the Poser Materials Room or Shader Mixer, only even more confusing. Yup, you guessed it: arcane, kludgy, painful and poorly documented. Yay!

Now, the ubersurface shader that comes with DS (that's its name, I swear) does include anistropic highlights. I was even able to get a semi-servicable satin with it despite my ignorance. It won't do DS Free users any good, though; you'll have to have Advance to use it. So there I was thinking "OK, maybe I can make this work", and I save my preset -- and DS won't acknowledge it.

I eventually figured out that it was saved within DS's internal faked Poser runtime, and DS wanted it outside of that to even show it, which brings me to my other big complaint: file management.

Poser's native file management is rock stupid. I'm sure the libraries made perfect sense in 1998, but now I want something more like Advanced Library. Forget these top level categories; let me make my own. Maybe I want to organize by figure and have hair and clothes under that. Maybe I want a separate category for clothes. Let me do it; there's no reason not to.

DAZ Studio makes that even worse. You can use a Poser structure -- and oh, apparently it'll refuse to see DS files if you do that, judging by the satin fiasco. Or you can have a bunch of DS folders tossed together. You have to go through level by level to get where you're going, and it's a huge stupid PITA. Just give me a file browser, dammit.  (I'm pretty sure there is a simple file browser in there; I'm just not sure how to get to it.)


Now, I may eventually go to the effort to learn DAZ Studio. But to be honest with you, it is not a priority. First I want to learn modeling with Blender and Python programming. In the meantime, DS users, I apologize. I'd like to give you full functionality with my freebies, but there's a learning curve I'm just not ready to scale.

First Impressions Dress -- Materials

Today I spent my development time making materials for the First Impressions dress. This is my favorite for the outer cloth:

There's also a navy version of it. That's not a texture map, BTW; it's all procedural. DAZ Studio users won't be getting an exact version of this one. It's generated in Matmatic using the Loom function, and as much as I love the DS guys, I'm not building 133-node shader by hand.

I am going to try to build DS versions of the materials (including a simpler pinstripe), but I can't make any promises. I've never worked with DS's shader mixer before, and it's basically undocumented. I'll do what I can.

What I Did Today - Victoria 3 First Impressions Dress

First Impressions dress for Victoria 3. I already had it modeled except for the buttons, so don't think I did it all from scratch today. "Just" mapping and Poserizing.

I'm using PhilC's OBJ2CR2 utility for the Poserizing. Man, that thing is just amazing. Literally saves hours or even days of work. It even added the bodyhandles to the Cookie version of this dress, which made me squee out loud. Didn't do that to V3's, unfortunately. Maybe the template's too old, I dunno. So anyway, I may bake in a few morphs for basic leg moves to help the DAZ Studio people.

I also got myself the book Blender Foundations and want to start learning that software. Eventually I'd like to get to the point where I can model shoes to go with these outfits, but that'll be a way off.

What I Did Today - First Impressions Dress

This is a Poser dress I'm making for Cookie. The colors are only to make the details easier to see; I haven't done textures yet. There will also be versions for Victoria 3 and Victoria 4, although they won't be 100% texture compatible. I had to shorten the bodice back length in order to fit Cookie, and I'm not willing to put up with badly distorted textures just to share mapping 100%. Only the "bodice" will be different, though.

This dress is based on one from the 1930s. The 30s were an odd fashion decade. There were some beautiful glamorous evening gowns, but day wear tended to be really... frumpy. It's like an entire generation just forgot about darts. Everyone except the starlets might as well have been wearing sacks. (Some little girls actually were wearing flour sack dresses, but that's different.) I made some alterations to make this dress more appealing to modern eyes, while still keeping the period essence.

On a more technical side, this virtual dress is a hybrid piece, which means that it's both conforming and dynamic. So DAZ Studio users will also be able to use this one. You can load it up and treat it like any other conforming outfit; it even has body handles to help in posing. But if you're in Poser, you can also clothify the "hip" bodypart and have the skirt and peplum behave dynamically. Unfortunately Poser's cloth self-collision detection isn't all it could be, and sometimes the top of the skirt will poke through near the waistband. However, a transparency map at the top of the skirt can be used to fix that easily enough.

I've also made just the top into a conforming piece, to be mixed with other skirts or pants. I think the modeling and rigging on both pieces are basically done.