Ghastly

Well here's a video of me performing with my friend Dave Gould at Nuit Blanche. This one's just a goofy song I wrote when I was experimenting with my KP3 and I was just starting to play with 3D too.

So I've got it retopoed now but I'm running into problems with the UV. Basically I want two separate UV maps for the outfit. One is for just the body suit, gloves, and boots and the other if for all the armour bits. I thought that if I hid the body suit mesh and unwrapped the pads it would ignore the body suit and give me a new UV map for just what was visible in the scene but that doesn't seem to be the way it works. How do I create a second UV map for just the armour plates? Okay I think I figured it out. Little box where it says Default lets me add a new UV Map and then I move the faces for the plating to that new map.

And that's just the stuff that's in front of me. There's even more stuff behind me when I took the picture. The Arturia MicroBrute is the latest aquisition. I got it because it was the same price as a Kenton Pro MIDI to CV converter so I can MIDIfy my Moog MG-1. It was like getting a MIDI to CV converter that came with a free analogue synth and sequencer.

I got it to work by changing the Surface layer into a voxel layer and now it's retopoing fine. Does retopo not work on surface layers?

It's a little too big to post. 148mb and the limit is 144

Yeah that would be neat. I don't often use softsynths but that could be really neat to have. As you can see I'm more of a hardware guy.

I'm making an outfit where I want one layer to be the main suit and another layer to be the armour plating but I'm having troubles with the autoretopo. The first layer retopoed with no problems but trying to retopo the plating layer I get a mesh that is wickedly dense but all collapsed in weird sort of ways. Any ideas what is going wrong?

I've probably used my Atari 2600 more as a synthesizer than a game machine lately.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

I just find it very hard to get nice points on my toon hair unless I crank the retopo poly count up. The tips always come out blunted.

I absolutely love how easy it is to sculpt a nice looking toon hair with this software but I'm having a little trouble getting a nice crisp retopo that doesn't end up looking all blobby. Are there any good tutorials and getting a nice retopo mesh for toon hair?

I've imported a Marvelous Designer mesh I made into 3D coat as a Surface layer and as a skin with a thickness of .4 It looks fantastic, but I want to turn it into a voxel layer so I can make some cuts to it. When I try to resample the mesh to a higher resolution it ends up turning into a woodgrain like mess. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

I've got a bunch of meshes I made while I was using the beta of Marvelous Designer 3. I wonder how well they'll retopo in 3D Coat. MD3 for all it's faults actually does a pretty decent cloth sim although the mesh it generates is made of random tris. Theoretically I believe I could use 3D Coat to mix and match the meshes I've already made in MD3's beta to create an infinite combo of outfits (ie. sleeves from this outfit with torso from this outfit with skirt from this dress and collar from this shirt).

Woot! There we go. It would seem that DAZ uses Maya normals and not 3DS-Max normals. Now the normal maps are baking. But I'm still getting a lot of artefacts in my bakes, especially on the diffuse map. What settings should I be looking at to maximize baking quality?

Where do I find that preference menu?

I reduced the voxel mesh to 1.4 million tris then did a bake with 3D coat, then exported the voxel mesh at full resolution and did a bake with xNormal and the difference in quite remarkable. Is there some setting I need to set to get the 3D Coat normals to bake the same as the xNormal one?

The problems don't appear in 3D Coat (except for artifacts in the bake like black squares and spots that aren't coloured). I can't fathom what settings there would be in Daz that would cause the problem. The normal map has no intensitiy setting just a spot to load the map. I've never had this problems with normal maps I've created in Sculptris.

It still doesn't work. If I don't save a scene and exit my scale is preserved. As soon as I save, exit and reload the scale goes all wonky. The units stay as centimetres and I change the SceneScale back to 1 (the shifts were maintained at 0). When I try to import another Daz scaled mesh the object is too small. When I hit Autoscale the object becomes too big. If I hit autoscale a second time the object shrinks very slightly.

Yeah, subdividing the mesh further in surface mode then making it a voxel again seems to fix the problem. Thanks!

I'm having problems when I cut things in Voxel mode but not when I cut them in Surface mode. Here's what I'm doing. 1) I import a Genesis Mesh as a non-voxelized mesh just to have as a reference. 2) I re-import the Genesis to another layer mesh but this time hit close mesh and subdivide button and deselect merge without voxelizing. Now I have one undistorted Genesis mesh as a reference and on another layer I have a voxelized version of the mesh to sculpt my clothing from. Next I perform a VoxExtrude on the entire voxelized mesh and extrude a thickness of .4, Smoothing of 0 and extrude alone Vertex normal. Now I have a thicker version of Genesis that encases the reference mesh and I can use this to start sculpting clothes. But for some reason after perfroming the VoxEtrude it is no longer a voxel mesh but a surface mesh. I have no idea why it does this and the video on VoxEtrude I watched on YouTube does not show this happening. I can turn it back into a voxelized mesh no problem though. Now the next thing I do is start cutting off excess parts of the mesh to just leave what I'm going to sculpt into my clothing. Here's where things get weird. If I leave it in surface mode it cuts with no distortion although sometimes it gives me a boolean error message and won't let me make a cut I want to make. If I cut i voxel mode It doesn't cut properly and I get weird results like this. Does anyone know what's going on and how to fix it.

Okay this is really weird. If I start a scene, set the scale, import and autoscale my first import every other import and export is to scale. If I then save that scene, then load it again later and go to import a Daz scaled mesh the imported mesh isn't to scale even though the scale measurement is the same. Hitting autoscale just makes it even bigger.

Okee dokee I've got scale working properly with Daz objects. Before you start a scene set the Define Measure Units in the Voxel menu to: Units = Centimetres (cm) Voxels per unit = 1 Unit Scale = 1 Then when you import the first Daz object hit Autoscale in the tool options window. and this will resize the object to proper dimensions. After that every Daz object you import should be in the proper scale as well as export in the proper scale and position.

They might not show up too well in that image because of the diffuse colour. Here I've circled some of the bake seam problems I've had so they show up more. In the red one I've drawn a green line that shows the direction of a fold so you can see how it's being shifted over a few centimetres when it gets baked and the flow isn't continuous across the seams.

It looks like even the normal maps are not being baked correctly. There's weird seam issues that I just can't seem to resolve.

I am having so many problems trying to create a clean bake. I keep increasing the ray length and it helps with the uneveness across the seams but there are still random gaps in the seams (even though I export the diffuse map with fill empty space option enabled) and there are random black patches in the baked occlusions. Is there a ray length number that is optimal to fix this problem or is it something else. Everything else on my bake settings are default with the exception of "keep UV" instead of "auto UV".