The Genesis Figure and Subdivision Implications - Daz Masterclass #25

[Music] let's take a look now at subdivisions and subdivision surface modifiers and what this means while we work with scenes in both that studio as well as other 3D applications so subdivision is the process of having one surface like a polygon be subdivided into multiples so that more geometry is created and that can happen via different algorithms you can this mathematical process that you can use it and you can do it in different ways and the earliest mention of this was actually kind of an invention you could say by Edwin kmill and Jim Clark as far back as 1978 you may have heard of the term cill Clark subdivision before there are others but that's the most widely used I suppose today this there's actually a library that can be used by 3D applications that is called open subdiv it's a project governed by Pixar and they kind of write this Library they kind of renamed it from katl Clark to catm Mark in recent years I'm I'm pretty sure it's almost the same thing but you know over the course of so many years I think other things have crept in so I that's that's probably what it is I don't have exact details on it only that we do work with them literally anywhere and everywhere let me have a look in D studio and show you what this means as a practical example I've got my Genesis 8.1 male character standing in but before we deal with him let me go and create myself a sphere primitive right now I'll go bring that in with the default and here it is there it is the sphere now if you look really closely on these edges you can see that these are flat so really the circle isn't really a circle there are segments here and if I'm far enough away I might not care but if I'm close in there somewhere I know that this isn't a circle they're literally here straight lines and that kind of approximates a circle let me show you the geometry if I go and switch my viewp pod over from filament over to wire texture shaded or wire shaded either one will will work fine then I can see all these lines here and each of these lines here is a polygon so anything like each each of these squares is a polygon and that is making up a object it's the same with my Genesis guy here so he's made up of these things here but in his case there's just much more geometry that's going on so you know we'll stick with the sphere to look at a very simple example here now if I wanted to have a sphere that has a higher resolution then a 3D modeling app could go ahead and literally subdivide this so that would happen by cutting each of these squares into four squares so one subdivision level means I'm going to up my geometry by a factor of four so I'm going to make this four times more dense to get one level of subdivision in there but then you can imagine these lines that I see at the end here they now have a point in the middle so it'll be more accurate it'll be the curve that is being described here by the object can be drawn in much more detail and we can do this in D Studio as well with something called call the subdivision surface modifier so there's two things to this puzzle if you're building 3D objects in in something like blender you might sometimes want to subdivide your object because you need more geometry to sculpt in more detail to build in more detail in there the way we use this in death studio is that we have I'll just call it a base resolution or a low resolution object and we want to add subdivision at the end just before we render so that my object appears more highr than it actually is this cuts down on Computer Resources while we work with it but it also cuts down on file size and it has a lot of other advantages so if I if you imagine if I wanted to have this as a really higher sphere it'll be like one with 5 million polygons and that's like 50 megabytes on my hard drive whereas this is like a few kilobytes so that's one advantage and then of course memory consumption is the other Advantage so but in D Studio the way this works is that we have this thing called the subdivision surface modifier and we can create one on any object ourselves if one isn't already applied usually usually when you have clothing and when you have characters they're already in place but in this case my sphere doesn't have one and I can go and make one happen under edit object geometry convert to subd that's what will make that happen actually before I do that let me just go and have a look on the parameters tab under mesh resolution here there's this thing that's now called base resolution and nothing else so I don't have anything that I can I can do here but if I go and do this under edit object geometry convert to sub D Watch What Happens I get a lot of other options here and I get this dropdown menu that says I can switch now between base rest and highr and if I look at my sphere in the viewport look what happens there if I go and switch to base rest I'm back to my sphere that I can I can already count the edges here but if I go and switches to highr then my sphere looks a lot cleaner and a lot rounder which is kind of what I want isn't it so if we look closely this wi texture shaded view is now drawing me kind of a black line around each real polygon and a light gray line where these implied polygons are can you see that here these are in the middle those are the ones that are implied by the subdivision surface modifier I think if I can go do this yeah perfect we can actually see it here that's perfect so if I now set my subdivision level somewhat higher this is by default this is set to one if I set this down to Zero by the way then it's the equivalent of having this on base resolution so that'll be the same thing subdivision surface level Z means it's not applied one is the default as it comes in and it means I'm dividing every polygon once and that means I get four times the amount of polygons that I had before and also my computer needs to now work four times as hard as it did before if I go and set this to subdivision level two then you'll see that every polygon is divided twice or like every polygon that was already divided is divided again so now I have 16 every of my original polygon is now divided into 16 polygons but of course as a result my sphere is extremely high detailed now and you can go and literally create more subdivision levels if you want but notice that this will cause your computer to struggle at one point which is why this toggle is really helpful here if you go and switch this back to base resolution all of that is gone and my computer can work freely again without having to calculate and move so much geometry around and high resolution brings this back we do have have two subdivision levels so we have the subd level for the view and we have the render subd level and usually the render subd level is one or more higher than what we see in the viewport so what you could do is you could set the subd level for the viewport to something rather low rest so that you can move the viewport around and then when it comes to rendering you could say well this I want this to be a much higher level when I say much higher I'm not talking 10 or 20 or so I'm talking two or three or four maybe five at an average absolute push but you got to have the right hardware for this just so that your render looks that much more highr and the the shapes of your characters and your objects and everything else is just so much more highrisk at the bottom here we actually have the algorithm that is being used for this subdivision surface modifier and you can change that from cat Mill Clark to catm Mark to bilinear to Loops are there different ways of calculating the same thing if you want to have a play with that notice that mostly organic forms like spheres and characters and clothing and so forth they usually work with subdivision surface modifiers other things like buildings and anything that's kind of square and has hard surfaces that might not be made to have subdivision surface modifiers I mean it might but it might not always work that way let me show you an example with another primitive if I go and bring in my Cube friend here and if you go and look at his geometry it is literally just six sides or six polygons and we literally only have eight points here or eight vertices 1 2 3 4 and then four on on the bottom that's literally all we have if I were to try my subdivision surface modifier trick on this guy I'll go under edit object geometry and add my subd modifier here then look what happens this guy is turning into a kind of a weird sphere now kind of a low rest sphere and that's because the geometry isn't made to hold my original shape in place this during the 3D modeling process would be done with something like Edge Loops that there would be instead of just the sides there' Be additional smaller Edge Loop cuts that would hold this geometry in place if I do apply such a subdivision look if I go and increase this now to level two I can see that my cube is actually becoming a sphere and and a rather handsome one too some 3D applications even have special names for these things I believe in blender this thing is called an icosphere and then this thing would be called the UV sphere I mean they're both spheres they're just made up slightly differently and the edge Loops are in different places and all that so if I go and switch this guy back to base resolution you can see that the cube is actually still there but this additional calculation has really not done this guy any favor so if you do set up your own subdivision surface modifiers do think about that if you have something like an architectural set and you think I wonder what happens if I apply one there and it completely falls apart it's just not made for subdivision surface modifier in mind so I'll go and delete him and go back to my sphere and let's talk about what this actually means for our characters and when we're working with characters well it means that my Genesis figure will look more handsome in the final render as well as in the viewp that we have more resolution on the character than we'd normally have if we didn't have subdivision so if I go and zoom in on this guy and I switch him from high resolution to base resolution I can see that his ears are getting chunky and that I don't really see that much roundness on the phase and there's also detail on the body that I might otherwise not see if it was left in base resolution however base resolution is the amount of polygons that this figure has when we load it in and it's usually good enough to work with in the viewport but for the final render and also for lining up things as we work with it high resolution is preferred now notice this implication that has happened here this is a Genesis 8.1 figure and its default is set to subdivision level two as a result this is now 16 times the amount of polygons that the Genesis base resolution has even one level higher in the render level as it says as it's set up here and the implication is that it might be difficult for my computer to move my guy around so if I go and give him a pae I've got this pose dial here that if I go and left click and drag it then he goes from the regular a pose into something more of a natural pause that would have them standing regularly still there so if I do this with the subdivision level I might find that my computer is struggling a little bit but if I go and turn this back up to my base resolution level it might be easier on my computer to do this look at the all the polygons that are disappearing here so if I go and do that again I can see that my movement is a little bit more fluid here if I had a character that also has hair as well as clothing I'd have a lot more polygons to move and at that point any computer might start struggling imagine you also had background objects and all that and you want to make a small change and you think hey I really can't move my figure properly and this is It's is important to remember as we start moving our figures around as we pause them so if I go and do this now that we're going to learn more about later which is kind of the inverse kinematic as we move the characters around if I do this with the high resolution I might see that this is just not that easy and I don't get as many frames as I try and do this that is why it's a good idea while you work with this especially on the Genesis 8.1 figures to switch this to base while you work the Genesis 8 figures and the three and the two and the regular Genesis figures they only had a subdivision level of one but the 8.1 figures they have one of two and that is why you might find your computer just has that much of a harder time as you work with it when you're using 8.1 figures thankfully there is the way to switch this over to base resolution but if you had multiple items in your scene that might be cumbersome this is why I use a product actually by 3D universe that I highly highly recommend you look into and I might just go and bring it up on the toolbar here I have it here up on all the time it's called the scene tools set one let me go and look for that here it's under utilities it's actually a set of three things this one is set two this is set one and this is set three the first one they all have little icons here that will do various things one of which will create a little toolbar at the top here so if I go and double click that I'll go and see that a portion of my toolbar is now added here and each set has that I might just go for completion I might just go and do this set two so anything with the orange arrow here will make these little icons appear in my toolbar and then set three that's more for posing and for pausing tips and tricks so they're all extremely good I love them all and the last icon of the first set here that will switch all my objects from base to high resolution let's just have a look at that this means it's high resolution if this has got all the the many dots here if I select this then D studio will go through every item in my scene and make them base resolution so this is also true for clothing items and you can see it's actually happened here on the figure but if we had clothing items and all that it's really really easy to switch everything into base rest then start doing your poses on this character uh put him into shape and then when I'm kind of done I'll switch it to high resolution and then I'll make the fine adjustments that I need and then we're there that's really important to remember when we work with characters and clothing not so much with hair hair sometimes has it often doesn't it really depends on the hair but you can see that the geometry account can literally shoot through the roof if you have everything enabled in high resolution and that'll make your computer struggle and give you a really bad time as you're working with it so I'm going to make full use of this scene tool set one and I'll switch back and forth between high and base resolution frequently just so that you know what this is and I highly recommend you work like this as well in our next episode we're going to have a look at how we can pose our characters either with pose presets or with the various the Myriad of tools that we have available inside D Studio to make our character us do what we think they should stay tuned for [Music] that

Channel: Daz 3D

Views: 726

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

Id: LyFosdstkmA

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024