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DAZ Studio to Vue Taking a Prop from DAZ Studio to Vue

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thd777

thd777.deviantart.com


Taking a Prop from Daz Studio to Vue

by thd777

thd777.deviantart.com

DAZ Studio is my primary source application for figures and props to use in my images that are created with Vue 8 Infinite. This tutorial illustrates my standard work flow when taking a prop (the example here uses the Guildhall) from Studio to Vue. I will go over export, import and the basic material adjustment as well as some options for "spicing up" the materials in Vue by using layered materials. I am using DAZ Studio 3 Advanced and Vue 8 Infinite. However, pretty much all of this applies to Studio 2 and the basic version of Studio 3 as well as most flavours of Vue (as long as you have import capability).

To get started, load your prop into Studio. I used the pre‐built version of the Guildhall and the surrounding walls.


Once you have all parts that you want loaded and adjusted/posed we are ready to export. (we will be exporting as OBJ, so the resulting object in Vue will be static. If you want to open a door or something like this, do it now!). Choose export from the file menu.

In the export file dialog choose a name, a location for saving and the "wavefront object" file type. I am using a central folder for all my exports to Vue (called "Vue Transfer"). Within this folder each object gets its own subfolder (Here: "Guildhall and Walls"). This has the advantage that I can easily find exported files and their corresponding textures (see below). Click “save". Now the OBJ export options will appear.


The options that are selected in the screenshot are what I usually use as my default. They generate an OBJ file that maintains the texture references and behaves nicely in Vue. They also result in all textures being collected in a subfolder "Maps" in the destination folder. This is very convenient for resizing of the textures (see below). The scale of 10% is set so that aV4 figure comes in at a fairly realistic size in Vue (~1.7m). You will need to adjust this if your Vue is using different internal units (under File‐Options. I am using 0.1 m).

The .obj file contains the geometry, the .mtl file describes the material zones and texture references.


One common problem when moving Poser/DAZ type content to Vue is that the large texture sizes can very easily make Vue choke. Frequently the large sizes are not at all needed! Look at your texture sizes and think how large the figure/prop will be in the final image. If you are planning to do a 1600*1200 pixel render and your texture is 4K*4K with the figure taking up approximately half the screen, you can safely reduce the texture to 1K*1K without any loss of resolution. This will save enormous amounts of memory. The Guildhall textures vary in size, but I decided to reduce everything to 50% of the original size. This provides significant memory savings, but retains enough detail for mid distance shots. You can use pretty much any image editing software to do this. I am using ACDsee Photo manager which allows me to batch process all texture maps in the folder in a few seconds. I switch to the maps folder, right‐click on the first map and select "Open with ACDsee Photo Manager".

In ACDsee I use ctrl‐a to select all maps and then use "Batch Resize Images" command to reduce the images sizes to 50% of the original. In the options I have chosen to replace the original files (they are copies, so this has no effect on your precious files in the runtime!). ACDsee can also automatically move the originals into a save place (for example an "Originals" folder inside "maps"). This only takes a few seconds and now I am not wasting memory on textures that I don't need. Obviously, you need to


evaluate each time what sizes you need. For background elements, I frequently reduce texture sizes to 20% of the original, for a close‐up portrait I will mostly use the original size or maybe a 75% reduction. Now we are ready to fire up Vue. Use the "Import Object" command in the file menu to load your OBJ.

In the following dialog, de‐select all options.

Click OK. Now Vue should start working and eventually the object should appear in your views. In order to speed up work and to be able to see "inside" object I usually set the top, side and front view to "wire frame" and only the Camera View to OpenGL (smooth shaded).


Ok. We have successfully imported the model into Vue. Now comes the fun part. Use the camera controls to pick a good view of the whole object and do a quick render to assess the damage.

The main problems that one notices at this stage is an improper bump (too high or too low, in this case it seems to be a bit low) and boring highlight settings (usually black highlights with 100% intensity and 0% size). Let's fix those.

Select the guildhall, right‐click on the material preview in the top right and scroll to the bottom of the list. There you will find the very handy "Edit all materials" command. This will open the editor and all changes that you make will be applied to all materials that were in the list. Only parameters that you change will be adjusted. As long as you, for example, do not touch the texture maps or transparency settings, each material will maintain its individual setting. If you adjust the highlights or bump all materials will get the same values. Let's do that in order to quickly get the model to look a bit better.


When the material editor comes up, make sure it says "X materials" in the top row. X is the number of materials that you are currently editing (122 in this case). In material editor (see below), switch to the "Highlights" tab. First change the highlight color. There is no "one setting fits all" here and you will probably have to go back later and modify some of the materials on a one by one basis (for example make windows and metals more shiny). However, the default from import is bad for all materials. So we can as well set something reasonable for everything first. I chose a very pale yellowish/orange color for the highlights, almost white. For the intensity and size I used 20% for both. This results in fairly weak, diffuse highlights which makes sense considering that most of the model is dry stone. You can see on the little preview what effects the highlight settings have. Play around and choose a value that looks good for your model.


Next we need to fix the bump. Switch to the bump tab and adjust the Depth. In this case I increased it to 0.3 from 0.1.

Ok, let's close the material editor with OK (the x will discard all your changes!) check where we are. Switch render quality to "Final" and render to screen. The result is below. Not bad. This would be perfectly usable in many cases.


Before I finish here, I want to show you a little trick that can add a lot of individuality to a model. If you look at the image above, we see an old building and one could easily imagine moss growing on the stones and dirt/leaves/pigeon droppings on the roof. Well, with Vue is pretty easy to add these kind of effects. For this example I'll show you how to add moss. Let's start with the ground. Select the ground plane of the model (in the example bb_ground) and open the material editor. Click "Add Layer" and choose the "Dark Grass Procedural" from the "material Layers" collection (that is default Vue content as far as I know). If you do a test render, you'll see that the new layer covers all of the stone ground. That is not what we want. We want a patchy effect. In order to achieve this we need to control the Alpha to make the layer below peek through. For the patchy effect we can use a fractal. Right click on the preview under "Alpha production" and choose "Load Function". In the function selector, I chose the "Grainy Fractal" in the "Basic" collection. This produces a nice random pattern of moss. There are other possibilities. You could use a function from the bumps or spots collection for example. Experimenting is the key here. If you look at the test render in the camera window below, you can see that it works nicely. I reduced the Alpha boost to ‐24% to get a less sharp effect and have the stone pattern show through better.


Now we need to apply this to the walls. The difference is that for the walls we do not want to have an even cover. The moss would grow mostly at the bottom. Well, that is easy, too. Select one of the walls. I worked on the low front wall first. Apply the same layer as above and set the same alpha and alpha boost. Now switch to the "Environment" tab. We want the moss at the bottom, so we need to adjust the altitude range to exclude the higher regions. I use ranges on a “by object” scale and here I found that ‐1 to ‐0.5 works well. Basically, ‐1 is the lowest part of the object and +1 the highest. We don't want the edge of the moss to be very sharp, so I set the "Fuzziness (top)” to 26%.

Now we can apply the same settings to any other wall we want to have moss growing on. You will need to adjust the altitude range depending on the object. An easy way to see where your moss ends up is to use Vue's material highlighter. Click the little pen next to "Dark Grass procedural" in the layer list and set a color. I chose bright red. If you now do a test render, the material will be shown in your highlight color and you can see easily where it is and how it distributes (see screenshot).

Instead of using a "By Object" altitude range, you can also switch to "Absolute". This has the advantage that you can now enter the ranges for the moss in real world numbers (0 to 0.5 m for example) and this will be the same for all materials that use this setting. The disadvantage is that your moss will move if you move the model to a different altitude or change the sea level (which is the reference for 0 m).


Now it is time for a test render at final quality to see where we are. I loaded a default Ambient Occlusion Atmosphere (I used "Monterrey") and here we are:

Not bad, Eh?

You can use the same trick to add rust to the metal, dirt to windows, pigeon droppings on the roof, and so on... You can see an example of where this can lead on the cover of the booklet.

If you have questions or run into problems, feel free to drop me a PM at the DAZ forums or a note at deviantArt.

Have fun experimenting and

Happy Vue‐ing!

thd777

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