Regular readers of this blog (ie, those that were reading months ago when I wrote more) know that I have a strong desire to do 3D art. This mostly is driven out of a need to express myself visually while also having very little actual artistic skill. That lack of skill is what drove me to writing, because I had to do that, too, and it felt less like work to acquire good writing skills.

Ok, honestly, I thought my original writing skills were pretty awesome. I was wrong, I can tell by reading things I’ve written recently compared to the original (11 year old!) blog that still exists on the internet somewhere (GeoCities). Somehow I stuck the writing, but I’ve always truned back to the visual, the graphics, those sorts of things. Today the electronic tools available for free or nearly free are pretty amazing.

The wife wants to learn to do this. We hope to do a comic someday, I think, or at least something regular and interesting. But first we need to work on our mad skillz. Because of my enthusiasm with 3D, I own victoria 3, along with most of her high resolution maps, and morphs. So she’s something to play around with. Unfortunately, I don’t own a current version of poser. But DAZ, hoping to support their model-selling business, offers DAZ|Studio, a package similar to (but not as powerful as) poser.

So, she downloaded it, got a bunch of free stuff along with it, and I gave her my Victoria 3 model stuff. Only, the question arose about how to make her look less plastic, how do you make your own clothes, etc? I could barely tell her how to render in DAZ|Studio, but because I’d used Poser in the past, had a good idea of what should be there. So I sat down, installed it myself, and started to play with it on my own. To the left, you can see a simple, unlighted Victoria 3 render, with one of her high resolution MAT poses.

MAT Poses are an artifact of poser. Back in one of the older versions, there wasn’t an easy way to define a bunch of textures on an object, but it was possible to set a pose, which affected (or could affect) every single body part. Some bright person figured out a way to change the materials attached to the body parts instead of moving the parts, which gave us, MAT poses. Poser later made this a standard feature, and if you go into the materials room, you can save a MAT pose. This is good because today you can set up a character based around a common model (like Vicky, here) and double click on an icon, and apply materials, morphs, even poses, all at once. (Not that you’d necessarily want to do all three in a single pose, but you could).

So getting a render of Vicky with her hi resolution maps was as simple as getting her installed, loading the figure, and double clicking an icon. I also moved the camera a bit, and pressed the render button.

The next question for me to answer was how to apply an arbitrary texture to a model in DAZ|Studio. One for which I didn’t have a MAT pose. (Somehow in the process her head moved, and then back again, drat!) Since I wanted to explain this to my wife later, I decided it would be a good idea to go get the seam guide for Victoria. This is basically a texture that shows you the mapping from a traditional two-dimensional image to the three-dimensional model. It is kind of like unwrapped skin, laid flat.

And yes, they do look a bit disturbing. The seam guides themselves are pretty harmless looking, but when you look at say, the hi-resolution head texture for Victoria, well, that’s disturbing. Probably because it’s both obviously a face, and very obviously not. Kind of like a halloween mask slid down the back and laid out flat. To get this image, I applied all the body, head and eye seam guides to all the different areas of the model available for texturing. Each body part, down to the cornea and fingernails can be mapped to a different texture. Some areas are large (the torso), and some, obviously, are much smaller.

Areas that are particularly detailed get their own maps or special places on the maps. For instance, the eye, head and body are all separate textures because of the detail required for each. The eyes are particularly important for believability of the model, and the face for expressiveness. The body is the least expressive, but even that texture has a special place for finger and toe nails; just as the head texture has a place for teeth. All of that is caputred in the seam guides.

Now for this render, I also got rid of all the color tinting (this way a single skin texture can do multiple skin tones or eye colors), but I kept the bump and transparency maps. I don’t change those at all for this, and I’ll probably talk about them in a later post, when I’m working with the catsuit clothing model.

The next thing I wanted to do was to see if I could make my own texture. I loaded the seam guide and the high resolution texture into photoshop, sized them to be the same size, and let the seam guide be a semitransparent overlay for the high res texture. So you can see it is similar to the original, with a hint of some of the lines from the seam guide’s grid view. All I did here, really was to change exactly what image file the textures pointed to — one I’d made instead of one I’d found online.

That part is easy.

The next thing that I did was to try to add a tattoo to the skin. You can see that below. I searched around for a year, drew one in photoshop (remember that part about not being able to draw?), and added it to the head texture, using the seam grid and the actual image as a guide. It doesn’t quite look real enough (like it’s not really on her obdy, exactly), although for a quick effort it is okay.

I really want to learn how to do this, but I need to stay away from the face for a while. Unlike the body textures, the face is so much more contoured, that getting an image to wrap properly in the right place wasn’t easy. Which is why the next attempts will be with clothing instead of facial tattoos.

Below are all the images, with clickable buttons that will let you cycle through. I really wish the untinted grid hadn’t slightly moved, as it’s out of sync with the others. But I can’t do anything about it now (I’m not even sure I saved a working file of this).

With Tear Original With Grid Grid Only