New! Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 14

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  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,107

    I prefer the novavax but the pfister is more effective so want that one. Anyway, I'm waiting until they actually have vaccine and slots available without jumping through hoops. I'm very low risk and so shouldn't be taking other's slots.

  • HylasHylas Posts: 4,979

    Daventaki said:

     

    Does anyone have any opinions on Hamsters hairs?  Theres just not much posted in the few I looked at on the older hairs.

    I have Vivy and I love the character but I'm not really feeling the hair tbh. I ran into a weird issue once that I couldn't explain or resolve. To be fair I didn't raise the issue with tech support, perhaps I still will.

  • memcneil70memcneil70 Posts: 4,112
    edited March 2021

    I have Vivy also. Wasn't a fan of the hair colors, can't remember if I tried a hair shader on the hair itself. Also didn't submit a ticket, so must not have had a big issue with it. But if doing Manga/Anime, the colors would fit in.

    Well we finally got our snow and are under a Blizzard warning till 11pm tonight, with snow expected to continue to tomorrow morning and another system on Tues and Wed. And Bugsy and I found out that plowed car parks can develop ice fast. We both took a bad spill.

     

     

     

     

    My thanks to Robert!!!

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  • Robert FreiseRobert Freise Posts: 4,439

    memcneil70 said:

    I have Vivy also. Wasn't a fan of the hair colors, can't remember if I tried a hair shader on the hair itself. Also didn't submit a ticket, so must not have had a big issue with it. But if doing Manga/Anime, the colors would fit in.

    Well we finally got our snow and are under a Blizzard warning till 11pm tonight, with snow expected to continue to tomorrow morning and another system on Tues and Wed. And Bugsy and I found out that plowed car parks can develop ice fast. We both took a bad spill. 

    I can't get him to rotate!

    Here you go 

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  • memcneil70memcneil70 Posts: 4,112
    edited March 2021

    Thank you so much Robert! That drove me nuts. 

    Now, if we can get the PAs on DAZ to do a morph of a fur baby like him or of Novica's baby, that would be wonderful

    Mary

    No postwork was done on this. That is the real blizzard and taken on my new iPhone 12 Pro Max. Got it yesterday.

    Post edited by memcneil70 on
  • Robert FreiseRobert Freise Posts: 4,439

    memcneil70 said:

    Thank you so much Robert! That drove me nuts. 

    Now, if we can get the PAs on DAZ to do a morph of a fur baby like him or of Novica's baby, that would be wonderful

    Mary

    No postwork was done on this. That is the real blizzard and taken on my new iPhone 12 Pro Max. Got it yesterday.

    Your welcome and yes it would 

  • genarisgenaris Posts: 315

    Hope you're doing okay from your fall, Mary. BOY, that's a gorgeous plushie critter!  He sure looks at home in that blizzard of snow :)
      ~Gen 

    memcneil70 said:

    I have Vivy also. Wasn't a fan of the hair colors, can't remember if I tried a hair shader on the hair itself. Also didn't submit a ticket, so must not have had a big issue with it. But if doing Manga/Anime, the colors would fit in.

    Well we finally got our snow and are under a Blizzard warning till 11pm tonight, with snow expected to continue to tomorrow morning and another system on Tues and Wed. And Bugsy and I found out that plowed car parks can develop ice fast. We both took a bad spill.

     

     

     

     

    My thanks to Robert!!!

  • genarisgenaris Posts: 315

    Hello all! Maybe someone's already reviewed or talked about Mesh Grabber (MG henceforth) here, but after FINALLY diving into using it (after having purchased it back when it first dropped) I'm really hooked!  Using it to tweak clothes or objects to fix poke-through or to create soft-body deformations like when people sit on a couch are potential uses that spring to mind (and it works easily and well for those things!) but I wanted to see how it would work, along with the geometry tool, to wreck stuff!

    Sometimes, just removing or hiding a part of something just is not enough to convey the effect you want. Using a slime prop, scaled, placed & reshadered, I created areas of wrenched, twisted and slagged metal to edge a ruined section of spaceship after explosion using MG; just hiding/deleting bits by geometry tool left a too-clean, broken-3d-structure sort of unsatisfactory void. Using the RAND falloff in MG (instead of smoother falloff options) lets you create cool changes in the mesh because it  randomly affects different polygons in target at different intensities.  Very cool and potentially useful for different effects in Daz Studio.

    A TIP for people who want to begin using MG: your mileage will vary, depending on the resolution of the mesh you work on. In 3pt image set I just did about spaceship wreck, the thing was huge, lots of details/parts but not real dense polygon-wise up close for trying to manipulate mesh with MG (or when deleting/hiding stuff with geometry tool in a way to simulate explosion damage:). So, (if subdivision is not the answer) you can use another prop or primitive item that has higher res/polygons count and add it over/onto the prop you're wanting to modify, and give it the same shader or materials as you want to make them work together; the higher res item will let you create more detailed changes to the item with MG. If you have, say, a very low res object and try to manipulate it with mesh grabber you'll get very simplistic, jagged shapes that just look like bad 3d from the dark ages. But if there's decent resolution in your mesh (as there was with Slime prop I used for slagged tortured metal), you can really push, pull and rotate those polygons around in a pretty fluid way and it's amazing to be able to remodel things directly in Daz Studio without having to attempt such things in post-work. Especially exciting if you're not a 3d modeller but wish you could! Some folks have lotta love for Daz Studio built-in deformer tool, but I struggled with that back when I tried it with frustrating and unlovely results; I found MG to be much more intuitive, personally, and somehow more direct and focused. First time clicking the tool I was able to readily wield it, unlike my Deformer experience. I think that since Mesh Grabber seems much like-and is accessed and used like-the geometry tool, if you've used that tool, you're pretty much at home with MG. (and I had successfully dabbled with geometry tool before getting MG.) YMMV of course; different strokes for different folks etc, but I'm really, really happy I'd purchased the Mesh Grabber, and then the add-ons.  Like the deformer tool, with Mesh Grabber you can make changes to a mesh and save out the change as a morph (if you bought the Mesh Grabber Morph Editor add-on or the MG bundle with all the add-ons), which gives us non-modellers an accessible way to make mods to objects right in DS that we can have available afterwards as morphs to use.  MG ROCKS. Try it!

    Here's an example crop from pt3 of the 3 part spaceship wreck image series I did and uploaded to gallery that shows some Mesh Grabber mayhem; click through to see actual gallery image (and click again to maximize it).

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    Links to other 2 images in series:     Emergency Off Mars! pt1 FIRST STRIKE    Emergency Off Mars! pt2 ADRIFT

      ~Gen

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  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887

    @memcneil70   Oh no, are you okay???? Ice is no joke when you hit the ground. Hope you AND Bugsy are okay.  surprise  Ci Pwff wishes he were there with Bugsy to play! 

     

  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887

    @genaris  Very nice images!   I have Mesh Grabber and the rotating thingamajiggie and will have to try them eventually. I am working on my website. The vendor is horrible, it had been over 24 hours so I added to the ticket and said to the effect "Hello, anybody home? Been over 24 hours."  and they sent back a twenty line reprimand about when adding to the ticket it went to the back of the line, etc. And that it took 24 hours. (I added to the ticket LONG after 24 hours.)  And then gave a one line response to my question. Which didn't come CLOSE to answering it (and I was very specific.)

    So my reply? "Perhaps if you didn't spend 20 lines chastising a buyer AFTER THEY WAITED TWENTY NINE HOURS you would have the competence to answer their question.

    (Huge capital letters)  ANSWER IT. Or I contact Envato and send them a copy of your reply." 

    Got an immediate answer with the question appropriately answered.  devil

  • genarisgenaris Posts: 315

    Thnks, @Novica :)    YES, tech support at too many places is often terrible about READING WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WROTE and ANSWERING what you actually asked!  How many times has any of us finally gotten a response from tech support somewhere, and read their response and known they did not even read what you'd sent them!?  Countless times in such a situation the tech support response asks me for "further information" which...wait for it...I'd already provided in my original ticket/message to support.   EERRRGH!  I def can feel your pain!
        ~Gen

  • vwranglervwrangler Posts: 4,883

    Novica said:

    I've been so offline and not following the latest "advancements" I don't even know what pbr skin IS. So I looked it up and it's Physically Based Rendering which is more realistic with how light interacts with skin. Okay, so now I'm wondering how to tell if the figure I am rendering is PBR or not? And maybe someone can help gitika1 ? (Sorry, I'm clueless but we'll get you an answer with the other forum surfers. The most knowledgeable folks on the planet IMO.)  @barbult @ladair to mention a few.

    I was looking at the new guy Thomas by Matari3D, and realized that there actually may be a way you can tell if a character uses the PBR shader before buying, although it depends on a couple of things.

    If you have the DazDeals plugin, it links from the product information page in the store to the readme for that product. Once you get there, if the wiki is behaving a little, you'll get the readme front page. (If you get a page that starts with "This is a placeholder", then if you reload a few [dozen] times, you'll get the actual content; they still haven't repaired the API that pulls from the database to the wiki, so it's more than a little verklempt these days. Any other message seems to mean that the readme actually isn't there yet.)

    Go from the readme to the file list linked on the page. (Repeat extreme reloading as needed.)

    Scroll down to the Runtime/textures section. If you see a map that ends -- or possibly starts -- in "AO" (for ambient occlusion) or maps for "Detail", those are for PBRSkin and not used in Iray Uber.

  • genarisgenaris Posts: 315

    OMG, thank you @vwrangler ... I've been so frustrated, trying to look into products using the readme page links and all too often getting that "placeholder" text instead, since the Great Store Changeover Misery --but I didn't know you could actually get the pages just by multi-refreshes.  Just one more rexample of why I try to keep up with this thread!
      ~Gen

    vwrangler said ...

    SNIP to:

    If you have the DazDeals plugin, it links from the product information page in the store to the readme for that product. Once you get there, if the wiki is behaving a little, you'll get the readme front page. (If you get a page that starts with "This is a placeholder", then if you reload a few [dozen] times, you'll get the actual content; they still haven't repaired the API that pulls from the database to the wiki, so it's more than a little verklempt these days. Any other message seems to mean that the readme actually isn't there yet.)

    Go from the readme to the file list linked on the page. (Repeat extreme reloading as needed.)

    SNIPPED off

  • memcneil70memcneil70 Posts: 4,112
    edited March 2021

    @genaris and @Novica, I mostly had a killer headache last night. Aches and pains I expected today don't seem to be there. Bugsy and I made the trek out for the morning bathroom run for him and the backstairs from the second floor of the apartment are almost snowed gone. I started to lose footing on the bottom five stairs and going back up, I had to use the railing to pull myself up. 

    Target closed early yesterday, right after the Blizzard warning went out; today my flatmate is calling a recording that is saying they are opening at the normal time! I have no idea how they think folks can get into work. Our cars have about 2 feet of snow piled up behind and around them. The driveways and streets look like glass and no sidewalks have been shoveled. Won't be until later this morning. 

    I use Mesh Grabber often. Sometimes with frustration, other times with great results fast. 

    @vwrangler, thanks for the 'AO' info. I had just looked at that page and overlooked that bit. Matari3D does good characters.

     

    Post edited by memcneil70 on
  • memcneil70memcneil70 Posts: 4,112
    edited March 2021

    Daventaki said:

    Unfortunately Daz is not making it transparent if the new characters are using the PBR skin shader or not the only real way to know is to purchase and then return if it does and you can't use it.  Shame if you ask me, but thats my opinion, specially since a ton of Daz sales depend on by this get that for this percent off etc.   AND the new PBRSS does not work in earlier versions of DS so you have to upgrade to 4.15.

    I thought the hut looked pretty cool in the Beauty in Paradise set but I was not impressed with the trees and grass they looked cartoony to me also.  And the waters edge is very calm but very frothy...

     

    Does anyone have any opinions on Hamsters hairs?  Theres just not much posted in the few I looked at on the older hairs.

    Daventaki, this may be too late for you, but I was looking at Vivy's skin today and decided to load her hair and do a quick render for you to see what I did with the hair. The eyes don't have natural ones, but if you needed them, there are other products that could be used. The smile is from one of the included expressions that came with her.

     

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  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887

    A lot of the hair I end up doing postworked strands, as the transparency on the ends seem too extreme, or it looks too "wispy brush."  @memcneil70 thanks for showing that. I've been offline all day, the website drama continues. My husband's template, we can't figure out how to get the demo content, I went through all the public access html files, everything is there which is in the explorer files we downloaded. So we went through every single thing in the WP admin panel and the pages/posts just aren't there. (Yes, we activated the theme after installing it.)  After dealing with mine for going on six days, I do know what I'm doing to the extent I know about pages, posts, etc. 

    So then we decided he should get his money back and just get my theme. Well, Paypal went through, but NO DOWNLOADS! (On Envato- that has never happened to me before.) So now we have a template with no demo content and it would be like starting from scratch, and the second template isn't there at all. What a day.  So Mike notified Paypal about the first template and the lack of content, and then Envato froze his account!  So we're taking on Envato, I took screenshots with date/time showing (in the bottom right of your computer screen) showing there was NO DOWNLOAD for the second one at all. 

    Not to mention our pool cleaner thingie broke, the refrigerator broke, and my car is in the shop. :)  Is this 2020? 
    Oh wait. My sister just told me last night- my niece came down with Covid in January, and then gave it to her dad (my brother-in-law.)   In summary, for my family- who has had that *$((#$*  virus?   My mom, my husband, my brother-in-law, and my niece.  . And my husband's boss, and 3 contractors from the office who rode in the car with the colonel. GEEZ!!!!!  Anyone from your families/ work?

     

  • My maternal Uncle died of it, and a step-cousin had it twice and her mother just got over it.

  • nemesis10nemesis10 Posts: 3,415
    edited March 2021

    Since Matari's Thomas was mentioned, I thought i woud mention that he is a great figure: not exactly Michael 8.1 (which I like but has a very characteristic look as does Torment), clothes, hair, and jewelry!  The skin does use the new UV's and  PBR shader; I will have to see how easy it is to cut apart a merchant resource to match it.

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  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887

    @nemesis10  He looks chock full of personality! One question- to me, his cheeks look extremely blushed (almost like women's blush.) What's your thought on that? Is he extremely ruddy?
    Thanks for showing him. That's some body he's got!

  • memcneil70memcneil70 Posts: 4,112

    I am wondering if instead of thinking that 2020 is in the rearview mirror, we should be worried that we still have nine years of the 2020s to come? Think of the early decades of the 20th Century and what happened during them. The 1920s and 1930s were not all that fun for folks on the Great Plains of America. Both sets of my grandparents ended up moving from their homes, Arkansas to New Mexico and Iowa to California in the 30s. We see migrations happening already due to climate change now.

    My son's office held normal business office work until senior management started to come down with Covid. That is when they realized that an office that was mostly desk work could work from home, just like my son had been doing for 9 months effectively with them, without loss of productivity. 

    My friend who was opposed to the vaccines, the other day on the phone said he was open to the J&J! I then mentioned the articles about Crispr and the scientist who discovered the technology that developed it. Sent him the links at his request. So there is hope, with the facts to get through to those who resist.

    Mary

  • nemesis10nemesis10 Posts: 3,415

    His cheeks are pretty ruddy... I actually like that we get characters that have facial imperfections. An important note is there are no merchant resources yet for 8.1.  With Genesis 8, people lucked out since the merchant resources were essentially the same as Genesis 3.  I think we will see more idiosyncratic skins until merchant resources are available but I think of that as a bonus.  If you like the morph, Michael 8.1 skin would be a good substitute if you wanted less rudeness.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,107

    I am lucky in no covid-19 directly. There was a guy that visited his son that lives in this neighborhood back in way back January 2020 caught it & died. And before that a schoolmate's son caught something very like covid in November 2019 and died but the average hospital in US had no inkling that this untreatable pneumonia they couldn't figure out might of been covid-19. Also, another schoolmate's older brother caught it and died. A branch of my 1st & 2nd cousins in northern Illinios all caught it & gotten over it this past summer.

  • memcneil70memcneil70 Posts: 4,112

    One of my favorite things is to play with morph packages, sliders and of course characters, although I often default to the base Genesis character, male or female to start with. So I collect characters who have great skins or morphs. As I went through my G8F library to see what I could remove to lower my load times, I looked initially at the skin, then the face shape if the skin was 'iffy' (as in air-brushed) and the shape might save the character, along with an included hair, wardrobe, or accessory. Anime/Manga characters I was a bit more flexible on, but I was surprised how many had decent skin textures. I also enjoyed finding skins from all over the world's peoples who made me want to stop everything and render NOW! But I also started to recognize some of the same moles over and over and eyes that had no relation to the skin tone of the character. And then there would be the gems, where the PA created a completely full set of new eyes, makeups, lip colors, ... that was suitable for this particular character. And then do it over and over again with each new release. Must be why I have so many of some PAs' libraries.

    Bought a Otis for Genesis 8.1 Male today, unique face, interesting color tones on his skin, and promo showed his ability to use the new facial expressions very well. He is not a model, but a guy I would see every day of my life. A normal guy. Thomas is one too. I have a huge backlog of rendering stacking up.

    Got to go, the Snow Demon is telling me it is his time!

  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,887

    Oh, and a milestone for me. Mike and I have been married THIRTY YEARS as of March 16th. We got married in 1991.  laugh 

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 24,240

    Novica said:

    Oh, and a milestone for me. Mike and I have been married THIRTY YEARS as of March 16th. We got married in 1991.  laugh 

    Congratulations, and wishing you 30 more! 

  • NathNath Posts: 2,798

    Novica said:

    Oh, and a milestone for me. Mike and I have been married THIRTY YEARS as of March 16th. We got married in 1991.  laugh 

    Congarats!

  • vwranglervwrangler Posts: 4,883

    Novica said:

    Oh, and a milestone for me. Mike and I have been married THIRTY YEARS as of March 16th. We got married in 1991.  laugh 

    Congrats, and may you be married for many many more!

    Supposedly, the traditional gifts for the 30th anniversary are lilies and pearls in some form. Not sure I've ever seen a pearl ... well, anything for men, though. Except maybe cufflinks.

  • genarisgenaris Posts: 315

    Congrats on the big 30!  Something to celebrate in the midst of all the, um, 2020 (and lingering into 21!) stuff. 

    @vwrangler  (who said: [snip] Not sure I've ever seen a pearl ... well, anything for men, though. Except maybe cufflinks.   [snip]         
           LOL... of course there's pearl accessories for men: pearl-handled revolvers.  And, those would be perfectly appropriate for women also.... so for a certain kind of married couple's 30th anniversary ( the Mr & Mrs Smith kind, LOL) a matching pair of those would be the perfect gift. :)
      ~Gen

  • Carola OCarola O Posts: 3,823

    Novica said:

    Oh, and a milestone for me. Mike and I have been married THIRTY YEARS as of March 16th. We got married in 1991.  laugh 

    Many grats! 

  • Tim82Tim82 Posts: 859

    @Novica, congrats on 30 years :)

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