Forum: Blender


Subject: Cycles Skin & Lashes Shader for imported DAZ/Poser figures

FigureSculptor opened this issue on Nov 27, 2012 · 3 posts


FigureSculptor posted Tue, 27 November 2012 at 1:15 PM

Here are a couple of Cycles node shaders that I use when importing DAZ figures into Blender. For those not familiar with it, Cycles is Blender's physically-based path tracing renderer that became available with the 2.61 release, and has gotten betterw ith every reles

When you import a Collada file from DAZ into Blender, Blender creates materials for you based on the materials exported from DAZ, but it creates them for the Blender Internal renderer only. It does not create materials for the Cycles renderer. If you want to render in Cycles, you have to manually recreate each of your materials. I created the two node groups in the attached file to speed up that process:

http://www.mediafire.com/?ihhxkb85wqul6y1

The "Basic Skin" node group takes a number of inputs, including a diffuse texture, optional bump map, and optional specular map. All of the color inputs can take either a single color or a texture map. There are some additional controls that you can use tweak the strength of the various color/maps:

Unfortunately, Cycles doesn't yet support SSS or normal maps. Normal maps are coming in 2.65 (there's a test build available now). Once 2.65 is released, I'll update this to accept a normal map as well (there are ways to use the normal map in 2.64, but I haven't been happy with the results, so I decided not to support them).  

We probably won't see SSS until at least 2.66 and possibly not until 2.68. The "Tint" and "Under Tint" controls can be used to kinda sorta fake SSS until then.  If you don't want to use this feature, simply set their strength values to 0.

The second node group is called "Lashes". It's primarily intended for creating materials using eyelash and eyebrow transparency maps, though it could also be used for body hair or pubic hair or any similar kind of material.

To use these node groups, open the Blender file where you want to use them, then press Shift-F1. This will bring up the "Append" dialog. Navigate to the aforelinked blender file, navigate into "NodeTree", then select Lashes and shift-select Basic Skin. Click the "Link/Append from Library" button, and now the two node groups will be available in your Blender file in the node editor..

To use, create a Cycles material and open up the Node Editor. Press the "A" key to add a node, then select the Group submenu, then select either Basic Skin or Lashes. Once it's added, hook up the Surface and Displacement nodes to the Material Output, and then set any values you want. At very least, you're going to want a diffuse texture for the Skin shader (though you get okay results even without it) and a transparency map for the Lashes shader. Note: the Lashes shader expects a black and white transparency map, not one that uses alpha.

Another thing to take note of: DAZ Studio's Collada exporter seems to only export the diffuse texture for each material, even if there is a bump, specular, or normal map being used in Daz Studio. That means, if you want the best render possible, you'll probably have to navigate into your Daz Studio content folder or Poser runtime folder to find the rest of the maps. Daz Studio also sometimes doesn't export the lashes transparency maps, so you may have to dig those out manually too.