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 If they'd just let me know there was a problem, I could have fixed it (and BTW, the files they uploaded are out of date.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.