Custom Designs

potter.roryquinn

Hi, I'm new and have a character I'm working on that will require adding custom tattoos on the skin and patches on clothing. I know I will have to draw the patches and tattoos separately in photoshop, but how do I then transfer those drawings into the Daz studio and place them correctly?

Richard Haseltine

If you want to merge them with the texture, or add them as a floating layer above the texture, the tattoo needs to match the UVs of the model (instructions that tell it how to wrap an image around itself) - that often means adding controlled distortion, or even splitting the tattoo in two or having it in parts on two separate maps.

If the tattoo isn't too large another option is to use an Iray Decal Node (from the Create menu) to project the image onto the model - you don't then have to worry about the distortion or seams in the UVs, but it does work only if you can project the tattoo onto a reasonably flat area - a tramp-stamp would be easy, a full sleeve impossible as it needs to wrap around the model.

A thrid option, using an external tool like Blender, would be to remap the model so that the area you wish to  tattoo is as flat as possible, ideally with any seams away from the area you want to work on or at least with a nice, clean, straight seam - once you have that, and have positioned your tattoo correctly on the map, you can bake a new map from it using the real UV mapping and that can then be overlayed on the base maps (e.g. through the Layered Image Editor) or applied to a Geometry Shell that uses the remapped UVs.

Chezjuan

For some of the tattoos you might be able to use the layered image editor. That works if the tattoo will be on a particular texture and not cross over to another. I've done that on occasion for arms and torso tattoos. 

Ive also seen products that use geoshells for tattoos. I haven't tried it, so can't say how best to do it, but that might allow more positioning flexibility.

For the clothing you can possibly use layered image editor to place them, though the look would be sort of flat.