Decimating your Characters and combining textures with Daz Studio

let's have a look at a magical tool called the decimator for Dash Studio hello everyone I'm Jay and on this channel we're helping you become better 3D artists with Das Studio on this episode I want to tell you about an exciting little tool called the decimator for Dash Studio it's handy because it lets you reduce polygons of a figure as well as attachments before you send it over to another program it's exciting because it Works hand in hand with a built-in tool called texture Atlas to literally reduce what you're exporting from that studio and then use it on other platforms the see how it works decimator is a plug-in so you have to install it and then head over here to help about install plugins and then when you click on this you get a long list of things that is currently installed plug-in wise inside that studio and you find something that's called the Das decimator there it is and it's going to have a red little plug here that tells you hey you need to provide a serial number and that is where you're going to put that in and then restart that studio and then you have it activated the serial number you find on your Das account so if you log in there's a section called serial numbers if you click on that find the decimator copy that out paste that in here restart their studio and the plugin will be active so the way this works is then that we have a new tab that we can open and I'll do that in a moment but just to give you an overview of what my demo character looks like here this is Angela 9 and if you wanted to check any of the parts that are currently attached I've got the figure and I've got some clothing and I've got some hair and of course I've also got but the eyelashes and the mouth and the eyes so those can all be reduced with decimator in one Fair swoop and you can set how much or how little you want to reduce every single one of them just to get an overview of how much geometry there is in any of these parts you can use something really handy called the scene info tab you can get that over here from window panes and then at the very bottom here you see something called scene in full I'll go and left click and drag that over here to the bottom and in here thank you so much for Tata by the way for bringing this to my attention I didn't even know we had that you can use that studio for decades and still find new things that you hadn't seen before so this shows you all the pertinent info about your scene like I currently have just over 250 000 total vertices in my scene here but if I go and head over to my scene Tab and drill down into Angela then I can go and see what item I've seen is how large if I go and click on Angela then you'll see that this changes so the vertices are now about hundred thousand if I go to just the tear duct for example that's just 800 so that's not bad and the eyes eyes are about 8 000 but you know you may have a project where all that is way too large like you know the summertime top is about ten thousand and the bottoms is about fifteen thousand and the Voss here that is forty six thousand so you can have a look at how to reduce all these things so decimator then is also another tab that we can grab from window panes and there's the decimator here mine is docked on the right hand side and it goes and works in a very particular way in that you first of all you select the object you want to decimate in which case this is a whole character with parented items works with single objects as well that have nothing parented then you head over to decimeter prepare to decimate and when you do that it kind of calculates a moment here and then shows you a summary of what it's found in the tab underneath it there we go so you have one that's the overall resolution in percentage that's currently set to 100 it's also detected the amount of vertices here but then you have them spread out like you have Angela and the eyebrows and the bottoms and the tops and so forth and you can either you can go close these down when you're done with them or you can open them up and then make individual changes to these things so I can either set an overall resolution if I'm thinking hey this needs to come down to about 50 and I don't really care what that looks like on an individual item basis you can do that hit enter and then decimator will calculate for a bit and then comes up with this and then you can decide is this what I want so pull through don't worry about that that's just projection Maps that's going to come out again later but you might see that hey with an overall value the character looks bad but the hair still looks great and still has too much topology so you can go ahead and tweak that individually let me go and drag the slider down so you can also visually make a guesstimate so if I turn that to 25 and there's a bit of a drastic result on some items you can see that the eyes are getting a little bit touchy here but the hair still is very high poly so make sure you don't set that to under 10 because otherwise you get seriously evil people coming out so oh my God this looks crazy but you know I mean it's trying its best to do decimation and it works better on some objects than on others let me go and set this back to 100 and we'll decide on a per item basis what we want to reduce here so like say Angela I want to reduce by 50 so I'll type in 50 here and that's just Angela reduced that's just the character now if I go and close her down and have a look at the eyebrows six thousand polygons for eyebrows is too much for me so I want either I can type in a value so I say I don't want more than 100 500 maybe for the eyebrows then it'll calculate what percentage that is and then perhaps on the summertime bottom so maybe I'm okay with 2 000 polygons here let's see if that is maybe too much or too little let's maybe leave it at four thousand and then go further through here there's a pull here I don't think I need that I could probably remove that the mouse I'm going to leave untouched but I'm going to have a look at the hair and see what I can do there it says 92 000 polygons I think if I try to make that 20 if it's original it still looks okay for what I might want to do with it I might even try something else like maybe 10 that's how you can kind of get to a level that you're still comfortable with and you know maybe you can reduce it down even further to maybe five percent and it looks a little bit scruffy but you know it's something you can try out and something that lets you granularly decimate your character without having to take it into another package you can do that all straight from inside that studio so that's how you set your decimation values there let me go back to the scene tab just for a second and head over to the parameters tab on to mesh resolution under resolution level so this is a new thing that's now appeared as decimator was working it shows you the decimator working resolution we still have the high resolution as well as the base resolution of our character so bass is the original polygons high resolution is an applied subdivision modifier that's applied at the end on most figures often on clothing as well as on characters and you can already set this to base but that might not be enough so decimator working would be the resolution that we've currently dialed in but if you wanted to lock that in and perhaps create several levels of detail you can go back to decimator and say create LOD up here and when you do that a little dialog box comes up and it'll now let you specify another resolution level that we've just looked at here so maybe I'm going to call this medium rest just something like that if hit OK and then the decimator will copy these adjusted values into a new resolution level here called medium res and the cool thing is now you can switch between the high resolution version of Angela which looks like this and compare that to the base resolution which looks like that or go to your medium resolution and then you can see what resolution you'd need to apply for what use case you can also create multiple lods the same way so you can have a fiddle and then create multiple resolution levels and then export those out as you see fit so the only downside to this and I just wanted to let you know I don't really know if that's a bug but you can't save your scene with all levels of detail intact that is not something that's supported in that studio you can have a export all these things out and then replace the meshes individually later if you want to bring them back in I just thought I'd show you where that is if we wanted to export Angela's body you can go and select her head over to file export and then select obj's here and then perhaps we'll say Angela medium hit save and then this dialog box comes up and which you can set perhaps the Dash Studio preset make sure you filter by object so on only selected roots and this is now going to save out the medium resolution just for the Angela figure here let's do that that's the obj if ever you wanted to bring this back with Angela selected you could head over to edit object geometry add level of detail and so say you open that studio up again and you think hey I'd like my medium resolution figure back or maybe even something that you've decimated in an external application you can say add level of detail and then you can go and import that by browsing to the obga file that way just thought I'd let you know and there is another interesting tool that goes hand in hand with getting your characters out at a lower resolution with textures and that is the texture Atlas I've explored this in a previous video just to round off this exciting little video you can reach it on the surfaces tab so if you right click on surfaces there's your texture Atlas and it will now combine all textures from your character which is the Genesis 9 made up of four tiles but then you also have another one for the hair and you have probably another two texture tiles for the clothing and they're probably all a little bit too large for the Target project so you can go and open texture Atlas with the Angela or your Genesis 9 figure selected all the parented items underneath it hit Auto range and think about it for a second and then it gives you a preview image of what the combined texture is going to look like this is a table that lets you specify weights for how large or how small your individual tiles will be combined onto the new texture so in my case I'm thinking the eyes are probably a little bit too large whereas the body textures here maybe even the texture for the outfit are a bit too small so you just go and change that say my body needs to be maybe twice as large you can select these tiles here and then just double click in here and then set this to two then there'll be twice as large I'll do this for all the skin textures here and maybe I'm going to leave the clothing as it and then I'll hit Auto Range again and then it'll kind of rethink about it and present you with a new version of what it would look like now say you're happy with this you can hit the accept button button right here if you click that then you get another dialog and that will now go and let you specify other details about your export routine so Atlas UVS is the name of the combined new UV set that'll be applied onto the clothing as well as the figure and any any follower basically the target folder is where your maps are going to go perhaps I'm going to find something on my desktop here I'll just call that maps and double click in here and then you can give it a title then you can give it a size so 512 is probably a little bit too small but if I combine everything into a 4K texture I'll say 1496 by 1496 and that'll combine everything onto a 4K texture you can specify PNG jpeg Tiff or bitmap here maybe I'll leave it on PNG and then on the images it'll try to export everything that's available so if we don't have a bump map it doesn't come out but I would say leave it ticked hit accept and then let that do you calculate this and that'll now calculate a low resolution combined single texture out of all the textures that have been used in the scene with this figure and now you can go ahead and Export the figure as obj or sfpx and then use this resulting texture in your target application so then you have a choice of using the hi-res mesh medium or low rest mesh or the base rest mesh and it's all exported directly from that studio when it comes back your character might look a little mangled in the viewport but don't worry about that in the texture folder here on my desktop under Maps I can see that I have my diffuse I've got my bump image and I've got a normal map exported and this is what it looks like if I open that up that's kind of neat so very handy tool to have in combination with decimator and I hope it helps export your content at a low resolution with lower Maps into other applique locations

Channel: Daz 3D

Views: 4,944

Keywords: Daz3d, Daz Studio, Daz 3d, 3dArt, 3dSoftware, FreeSoftware

Id: RU5FTHs-MDg

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023