I’m am currently working on a camo add-on pack for my Hollywood Styles Biker Outfit. I’m doing both military prints/colors and fun prints/colors. I’m setting up the materials to have a similar shiny, bling, bling look to them as the original textures, but not exactly the same.

Here’s a couple sneak peak pictures:

Hope you like them! Let me know what you think!

My latest product just released yesterday on DAZ3D.com! It’s called “Hollywood Styles Biker Outfit” made for Genesis 3 Females. The design for this outfit was kind of created by accident. I was messing around with some new software I had bought, figuring it out, and this was the end result LOL. I like the way it came out, hopefully other people do too…

It wasn’t originally going to be a biker outfit, hence the vinyl materials. It wasn’t until I showed my wife one of the promo images and she said, “It looks like something a biker chick would wear.” I was like huh, it kind of does. And that’s the story behind the name…

Since I was happy with how the vinyl materials came out, I decided to ship it with them instead of making new leather materials.

Check out more pictures of the outfit here!

I Hope you like it!!!

The scene was assembled and rendered in Daz Studio 4.8 with NVIDIA Iray and then layered over the background image I found here.

While working on my latest product (keep your eye out, it should be released soon) I decided to change the name when it was nearly finished. What sounds like a simple task isn’t if you want to also update the texture file names as well. Normally this would involve re-saving all the Material Presets while going through them one by one, updating the path and file name of each texture. With 11 Material Presets for the top and 11 Presets for the pants, each with 3 references to texture files you can see how this could quickly become an annoying task. Fortunately there’s a better way…

This video is probably most beneficial to content creators, but could also benefit any hobbyist that likes to make custom materials for items in their content libraries. I’ve also used the techniques I demonstrate in projects outside of the CG world. They can work great for HTML. Sometime when you’re trying to import a word document into HTML, HTML editors will create unwanted page breaks and other random things when maybe you just want paragraphs. You can use Replace Text to help in those situations as well.

In this video I demonstrate my method of renaming a DAZ Studio product and updating all the Material Presets to use a new folder structure and new material file names.

You can also use these techniques when creating Material Presets as well. Sometimes when creating them, all the settings in the preset will be the exact same except for the actual texture files themselves. I have found it more convenient in certain situations to make one Material Preset, save it uncompressed, create a copy and use Replace Text to change it from referencing one texture file to another. Then just rename the copy, and repeat for all the materials you’re trying to make for that one item. This is especially useful when one Material Preset references the same texture file in multiple locations, i.e. Base Color, Glossy Color, etc. Then when you’re finished creating all the Material Presets in this manner, you can use DAZ Studio’s Batch Convert to re-compress them all at once (I show how to do this towards the end of the video).

I mention WinRAR as my favorite archiving program, here’s a link to the website. It’s not free, but you can download a trial and check it out. The trial never actually expires, after 30 days it will just start asking you to buy the program when you open it up. If you like the program, I’d recommend buying it, you can find it for around $25-$30.

Other programs used in the video (All are Free):

• Bulk Rename Utility
• Replace Text 2.2
• Daz Studio

I recently purchased ZBrush 4R7. At first for me, getting used to the interface felt a whole lot like trying to pick my nose with a baseball glove on. The hardest thing was getting used to how to navigate the viewport. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very powerful program and I am happy with the purchase, but there were a couple things I wanted to customize that I couldn’t find the ability to do so within the user interface.

Here are a couple things that I wanted to customize, how I was able to do so, and a couple other tips ‘n tricks that may be helpful for both the beginner and more advanced user as well:

Set ZBrush canvas to fill entire viewport

Depending on your monitor size and screen resolution, you may be annoyed when you open up ZBrush the canvas doesn’t fill the entire viewport. Fortunately, there’s a simple fix.

Go to the “Documents” menu. Next to the “New Document” button, make sure “WSize” is highlighted, then click the “New Document” button.

A new document should be created with the canvas filling up the entire viewport.

Now to make it like that when you start up ZBrush, navigate back to the “Document” menu and click “Save As Startup Doc” button.

Bam, you’re all set.

Add mouse wheel zoom functionality

I simply was losing my mind not being able to zoom using the mouse wheel!

Thankfully I found a plug-in to add the function.

Here’s a link to the main thread with the plug-in and installation instructions.

*For it to work with ZBrush 4R7, refer to post #83, here’s a direct link.

Change ZBrush’s scratch disk location

If you’re like me and have both a SSD and a HDD, you may not like temporary files being constantly written to your SSD. If you don’t know, SSDs wear out faster than HDDs. In normal use scenarios most people probably don’t need to be concerned about this, but I like to keep things in tip top condition =). Another reason a person may want to change the location of the scratch disk is to conserve precious SSD space for other things.

There are a couple ways to change the scratch disk location:

The easiest way is to go to your “C:\Users\Public\Documents\ZBrushData” location, open up the “ZBrushScratchDiskPath.TXT” and change the file path located in the document to wherever you would like the scracth disk to be located.

*Now make sure whatever path you specify actually exists (ZBrush won’t automatically create the folders, you have to manually create them) or it won’t work properly.

The 2nd way is a little more advanced, but in my opinion, is the way to go if you also want to change where the “QuickSave” files will be saved as well.

Change where ZBrush saves it’s QuickSave files

To change where ZBrush saves it’s QuickSave files you have to create a directory junction. A junction is similar to a desktop “shortcut” except programs will also follow the path.

To create a junction fire up the good ol’ “Command Prompt”, make sure to run it as administrator. Now simply type in:

mklink /J “C:\Users\Public\Documents\ZBrushData\” “D:\YourNewLocation”

*Important: type in exactly as shown, except replace D:\YourNewLocation with whatever path you would like.

**Note: this is to change the location of all the files in the “ZBrushData” folder. If you only want to change the “QuickSave” files location see below.

To paste into Command Prompt, right click on the Window Title, select Edit > Paste.

The command I used was:

mklink /J “C:\Users\Public\Documents\ZBrushData\” “D:\Users\Public\Documents\ZBrushData”

Finally, cut and paste the original “ZBrushData” folder to its new location.

Now every time ZBrush tries to write to it’s default “C:\…\ZBrushData\” location it will actually be writing to whatever location you specified.

If you only want to change the location of the “QuickSave” folder, add “QuickSave\” to the end of both paths and only move the “QuickSave” folder to the new location.

Change GoZ Cache location

Navigate to “C:\Users\Public\Pixologic\GoZBrush” and change the path specified in the following 3 text documents:

• GoZ_ProjectPath.txt
• GoZ_ObjectPath.txt
• GoZ_ObjectList.txt

You may not have all 3 files depending on how many times you’ve used GoZ.

*Again, make sure that whatever path you specify actually exists (ZBrush won’t automatically create the folders, you have to manually create them) or it won’t work properly.

A couple of other useful resources

A keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet pdf with the most important items – download here

A full list of keyboard shortcuts as a printable pdf – download here

Renderosity’s 2015 Halloween Contest’s theme this year was Terrifying Monsters.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time I would have liked to dedicate to this contest and threw something together as quickly as I could. This is what I was able to come up with:

I think I spent most of a day on it, between coming up with ideas, and then when I decided on this concept, assembling the scene. All of it was done in DAZ Studio, rendered with Iray, and I didn’t do any post work.

I would have liked to have spent more time playing with the lighting and what not, to try and give it a creepier feel.

I let it render for 4 hours with two GTX 980’s to try and get rid of all the pixelation. If I remember correctly, even after 4 hours it was still only around 92% converged. It probably could have gone another 2-4 hours.

You can view all the contest details, entries, and winners here.

Well, I made it back. I’ve actually been home now for a couple months. I wanted to post sooner, but there’s always lots to catch up on, and then when I’ve had free time, I would forget to post!

This is the most recent picture I took of the exterior of the house. You probably noticed the roof wasn’t completely done at this point. You can see the scaffolding wrapping around the upper perimeter of the house and some bracing going above the dome we were using to support tarps to keep rain off before the blue waterproofing membrane was applied to the dome.

Anyway, even though the trip was full of good beer, friends, and a super nice house to get to work on, it’s good to be home!

After months of working 60 hour weeks in the heat of summer, sleeping in a camper on a bed that’s too short for me, and showering outside, we’ll just say it was starting to catch up with me.

So much for a 6 week project huh? For the record, I didn’t come up with that number. That’s how long the homeowner told me the project would take…

This is a picture from inside the great room looking towards the upstairs office. You can see the timber frame trusses that support the ceiling of the great room and some of the other really nice wood beams that support the west end of the engineered trusses that make up the actual roof.

But that’s beside the point. It was a very cool project to be a part of. Lots of really nice wood work, some 20′ tall walls, I got to help build a wood frame dome, and there were even copper gutters! How cool is that? Oh what, you’ve never seen a copper gutter before? Neither had I…

This is a picture of the dome ceiling (aka the office ceiling). The tongue and grove paneling wasn’t quite finished at this point.

The house is designed with the gutters to be built in and hidden by a decorative detail that will wrap around the perimeter of the house. The idea behind the copper gutters is that they should last virtually forever. Really it’s a smart decision, just one that’s out of my income bracket =)

I’m thinking I’ll try and put together a week by week series showing the progress as we went along.

Stay tuned…