Tutorials

 

Importing Poser Characters into trueSpace 5 and 6 with the luuv plug-in

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3. Importing a DAZ character 

All right, after all those preparations, now you're ready to import your character into trueSpace.

Open up the plug-in, navigate to the folder where you saved your character and double-click it. Luuv will start working on importing the object and the textures and setting up the groups, if you enabled the "Preserve groups" option.

Once your character is in your scene, you'll notice that the transparency maps are not transferred over in the .mtl file, so you'll have to set them up yourself within trueSpace. 

 

3A. The Eyes

Let's start with the eyes. DAZ characters' eyes prior to Victoria 3 were made up of two spheres: the outer eyeball, which needs to be transparent and shiny and the inner eyeball, which has the eye texture. Victoria 3's eyes are a little different: they have 4 material zones and they are made up of two objects: a sphere (actually the back part of the sphere is sliced off so it's not a whole sphere) and a disk behind the sphere. The sphere's eyewhite part is textured with the eye texture and its cornea part is textured transparent. The disk has the iris and the pupil texture. (Figure 3.2)

There are several different methods that you can use to texture the eyes. Which method you'll choose will probably depend on which figure you're importing, how you're going to use the character in trueSpace and which method works best for you. If you're going to have a close-up of the character's face in a scene, it might be best to break the eyes up into their groups so that you can texture each part correctly and in the most realistic way. (Victoria 3, however, might not need this step - see below.)  If you are not going to have a close-up of the character, then for figures other than Vicki3, you can make the outer eye sphere transparent without decomposing the character or the eyes. This will show the iris and the pupil underneath, but it seems that for some reason the eyewhite part of the eye will be totally white, without the eye texture (which usually has pinkish areas and little blood vessels) applied to it. Another method would be to make a new eye texture for the outer eye which would include the eyewhite, iris and pupil areas and to apply this texture to the outer eye sphere. I will describe texturing Victoria 3's eyes separately. 

  • Breaking the eye up into its groups

First of all, make sure that the "Enable raytracing" option is on in the render options toolbar  and don't forget to save the .obj, .mtl and texture files inside the trueSpace folder. (The .mtl file includes the texturing information and is automatically created when you save your character in the .obj file format.)

If you imported your character with the "Preserve groups" option enabled:

- Open up the list of parts in the Keyframe Editor (tS5) or Scene Editor (tS6), and select one of the eyes. 

- After selecting the eye, click on "Decompose into objects". (Figure 3.1) In tS5, click on the Refresh button    in the Keyframe Editor's toolbar to show the new hierarchy. In tS6, scroll down until you find the newly created eye group. Click on the + sign in front of the eye group and select the first object in the group; this is the sphere that needs to be transparent. 

 

Figure 3.1

 

- Load the glass shader from the Reflectance Shaders Library, make it shiny and set the transmission and refraction values at 1.

- Click on the Paint Object    tool to apply the transparent and shiny material to the outer eye.

- Now select the second object in the eye group. Load your eye texture map and set the reflectance shader to "matte" (the matte reflectance shader is also in the Reflectance Shaders Library). Apply the texture to this object with the Paint Object tool.

- Repeat the whole procedure for the other eye.

If you imported your character with the "Preserve groups" option disabled:

- First you'll have to decompose the mesh into its parts. Just select the character, then click on "Decompose into objects". 

- Open up the list of parts in the Keyframe/Scene Editor. You'll see that now the different parts do not have their descriptive names, only "NoName" and a number. Set the display option to wireframe. Click on the items in the list and you'll be able to see which part is which. 

- As you go down the list, find the eyes and you'll see that they are already broken up into their 2 separate parts. Again, in each group, the eye part that is listed first (and is a little bigger than the other eye part)  is the one that needs to be transparent. So, load the glassy texture and apply it to this one. Then, load the eye texture map and the matte reflectance shader and apply that to the second part. 

- Do this for both eyes. 

 

  • Making a new eye texture for characters 

The  eye texture of DAZ characters before Victoria 3 were included in the head texture file. If you look at the UV template, you can find the area where the outer, transparent eyeball is mapped.  This is usually left white. If you copy and paste the eye texture to this area and scale it to the appropriate size, you can apply this eye texture to the outer eyeball inside trueSpace. This way you just have to texture the outer eye  and don't have to worry about  breaking up the eyes into groups, and texturing two separate spheres. So it's a faster way of texturing the eyes, but as I pointed out before, for close-ups you might still want to go with the previous technique. 

I describe the steps of making this new eye texture in detail in the Tips and Tricks area.

  • Making the outer eyeball transparent

Another method is just to make the whole outer eyeball transparent and shiny with the glass shader. This will reveal the pupil and iris texture underneath, but there are some drawbacks. One of them is that for some reason the eyewhite part will be all white and without the eye texture applied to it, and the other is that later on you can't easily change the eye texture if you  want to (other than breaking  the eye  up into groups after all or applying the eye texture to the outer eyeball). You can make the outer eyeball transparent without breaking up the character or the eyes into their groups by loading the glass shader, then clicking on the eye with the "Paint over existing Material" tool .

 

  • Texturing Victoria3's eyes

As I mentioned earlier, Vicki3's eyes are a little different than the earlier DAZ characters and they are a little easier to texture inside trueSpace. Here are some methods that you can use:

- Load the glass shader (with the same settings as I mentioned above) and click on the middle of the eye, where the pupil would be, with the "Paint over existing Material" tool . This should make the cornea  transparent and now the pupil and the iris should become visible. You might also want to click on the eyewhite part of the eye with the "Inspect" tool    to load the eye texture, make it a little shinier, then click on the eyewhite part with the "Paint over existing Material" tool to apply  the new, shinier eye texture to it.

- You can decompose the character or the eye the same way as described above and texture the eye parts individually. For the outer eye sphere, you'll need to load the eye texture and click on the eyewhite part with the "Paint over existing Material" tool, then load the glass shader and click on the cornea part with the "Paint over existing Material" tool. For the iris/pupil part, just load the eye texture and apply the material to the whole object with the "Paint  Object" tool.

- Since Vicki3 has a separate eye texture map, you could apply this texture to the outer eye sphere without breaking the eye up into its groups.  To do that, load the eye texture, then click on the eyewhite and also the cornea part with the "Paint over existing Material" tool.

Figure 3.2

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Copyright ©  2002-2012 by Susan Lee.