Hello. I've been a Poser user for... nearly 20 years now. I'm interested in learning DS, just because of the wealth of creepy crawlies available on their plat form. So, I'm looking for some help/tips/tricks. I have an extensive Poser library and several custom figures based on M4 and V4. I'm able to load them into DS, but, none of the morphs seem to work. The work fine in Poser, but are completely gone in DS. How do I remedy this, short of loading all the morphs again? It also wipes the morphs out of any clothing I have configured to the base figure, which is bad, and most of those don't have nice injections I can just reload. Also, how does do materials work in DS? I bunch of my figures use displacement, but render flat as a pancake in DS. Any help would be appreciated.

That sounds as if your Poser saves are using External Binary Morph targets (in Poser, Edit>General Preferences>Miscellaneous tab). If so, turning the option off, loading the figures, and resaving (which will embed the morphs in the CR2) should allow DS to load them.

There are some types of Poser morphs that didn't work in newer DS (PMD). Most of the PZ2 stuff should work, I believe. See this thread: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2922537

In DS there is a Surfaces Tab, and in there there is Bump, Displacement and Normals. Textures may need some tweaking. Most should load fine.

Daz has 3delight and iray. The poser stuff comes over more compatible with 3delight. Then there are some plugins (in the store) that can get you 90% of the way to convert to iray, if you prefer. (or there are tuts how to do it)

Just keep asking questions, and folks will answer! I left Poser at v9, and tried to go back once, but it was too large of a gap.

Good luck!

RHaseltine posted at 2:47PM Tue, 04 September 2018 - #4335762

That sounds as if your Poser saves are using External Binary Morph targets (in Poser, Edit>General Preferences>Miscellaneous tab). If so, turning the option off, loading the figures, and resaving (which will embed the morphs in the CR2) should allow DS to load them.

You're absolutely right. I hadn't thought of that. I'll try that at my next oppourtunity

3doutlaw posted at 2:57PM Tue, 04 September 2018 - #4335763

There are some types of Poser morphs that didn't work in newer DS (PMD). Most of the PZ2 stuff should work, I believe. See this thread: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2922537

In DS there is a Surfaces Tab, and in there there is Bump, Displacement and Normals. Textures may need some tweaking. Most should load fine.

Daz has 3delight and iray. The poser stuff comes over more compatible with 3delight. Then there are some plugins (in the store) that can get you 90% of the way to convert to iray, if you prefer. (or there are tuts how to do it)

Just keep asking questions, and folks will answer! I left Poser at v9, and tried to go back once, but it was too large of a gap.

Good luck!

I don't plan on abandoning Poser for DS, just adding another tool to my belt. Please, would you mind telling me more about Iray?

What are the differences between the 2 render engines? Speeds? How do they compare to Firefly in terms of quaility and speed? Does DS support AO? What about effect, such as glowing object and the such? Does DS run a seperate process for subsurface scattering?

Sorry. Full of questions. Look at my Hair? Is it included in DS 4.10 or is it still a seperate plugin?

Well, unchecking External Binary Morphs worked.... materials look like ass in DS...

knyghtmare2021 posted at 8:58AM Wed, 05 September 2018 - #4335767

Sorry. Full of questions. Look at my Hair? Is it included in DS 4.10 or is it still a seperate plugin?

Still separate, I'm afraid.

So, here's the problem I currently face. I can load my lead character (See my avatar. Creepy, ain't he?) and he loads with all the morphs and what not. BUT, the design depends on displacement maps to make his armor. Everytime I load his disp map, it looks nothing like it does in Poser. Does Daz require a mesh be subdivided for micro displacement? If so, How do I convert a mesh so it can subdivide?

It depends on which render engine you are using - Iray does require vertices, including the virtual vertices created by applying SubD, for displacement while 3Delight doesn't. You could try converting your figure to SubD (if it isn't - Edit>Figure>Geometry>Apply SubD from memory) and setting the Render SubD level to 3 or 4 (in the Parameters pane Editor tab, under Mesh Resolution - 3 may be enough for a reasonable level of detail if the model was made to be smooth without SubD)

Thanks for the tip. That leads me to another question. HOW do i switch Render engines? I went into Render settings and didn't see anything remotely close, but I did have a 6 month old pulling my beard at the time....

To switch render engine, go to Render Settings tab, click advanced. You'll see an engine dropdown that will probably say NVIDIA Iray or 3Delight. There are other selections, but these are the mains. If you have 3Delight shaders applied to your models, they'll work ok in either 3Delight or Iray. If you have Iray shaders applied and select 3Delight, that usually crashes Daz for me. There are gotchas. It's a good idea to check out some tuts on youtube.

Ok, I think I got displacement figured out.... which again creates a new question. My character's suit has 3 materials zones with different maps. I can get the main suit looking good, but the boots and glovers take a different map, and i can't figure out how to change their material and only afftect thos material zones and not the whole damn thing.....

You don't have the separate surfaces (material zones) listed in the Editor tab of the Surfaces pane? By default the list is collapsed, so click the triangle next to it (in the left-hand section) to expand it.

BTW, Render Engine is also at the top of the Editor tab of Render Settings.

Yeah, I have the serperate surfaces listed, but changing them doesn't appear to work. If I change 1 I change them all

Could you post a screen shot of the surfaces pane as you try to change one of the surfaces.

knyghtmare2021 posted at 11:34AM Fri, 07 September 2018 - #4335766

I don't plan on abandoning Poser for DS, just adding another tool to my belt. Please, would you mind telling me more about Iray?

What are the differences between the 2 render engines? Speeds? How do they compare to Firefly in terms of quaility and speed? Does DS support AO? What about effect, such as glowing object and the such? Does DS run a seperate process for subsurface scattering?

3Delight would be the equivalent of Firefly. Iray is similar to Superfly.

It's been a long time since I needed a seperate AO, but I suppose you could get control, if you really need it, when using 3Delight. Glow and emissive materials are easy in either renderer, Subsurface scattering a bit easier in Iray. Not sure what you mean by a separate process for SSS.

Quality wise, you can get amazing results from any renderer when you've learnt its quirks, in terms of speed, simple lighting in 3Delight should be as fast as Firefly. If your scenes have full GI/HDR and an environment things obviously get slow. ...BUT add an nVidia card to Iray and it becomes much, much faster than 3Delight.

So, I got the displacement settings figured out. Does DS so anything like Poser's proceedural textures? Like Nodes for specular? Anistopic, Blinn, etc? Or do I need to greate a specular map for my textures? Also, how to I create, say, glowing Eyes in DS?

Does DS do raytrace reflections? How do I set those up?

I definately feel Poser's material room is more intuitive....

The Shader Mixer is the main way to build new shaders, it isn't an exact match for the Poser materials Room but has broadly similar features for 3Delight (Iray is rather moer different) - one thing to note is that in Poser's Material Room an input plugged into a block multiplies with the local value, in Shader Mixer it replaces any local value.

For reflections, just set the Reflection Strength to a non-zero value and have no map assigned to Reflection Colour for the 3Delight shaders; for iray you want non-zero glossiness (Iray does only raytraced reflections)