Hello, all!
First time poster, long time fan.
So ... I bought this awesome Titan Armor suit today. It's for a character in this thing I'm thinking about doing. Applied mats to the suit, and her Toularouse (sp?) hair, did a render, and there's nothing; the armor rendered white, and the hair color change was not apparent. I was going to do another test, but I cant find the render presets, and I'm not hip to every little detail point in the render window. I'm a Poser veteran, and Daz and Renderosity, et al, have been on my radar for years, but just recently, I took the dive into 3D modelling -- I have some perfunctory experience with MAYA from a few years back, but I recently downloaded Blender, and I've been continually impressed with how serious that software is. I get a lot of this stuff in concept more than practice; especially getting into the technical aspect. I have built unique bump, and transparency maps in my day. I plan to make my own scenes, textures, some monster-character work, but humans are not going to be a thing I'm able to do for years. One has to have a real artist's touch to get that level of realism out of a mesh. For me, I like 3D scene-building to be more of a plug-n-play concept. One of the things I love about Poser; the ethnicity dials -- super-friendly way to create new characters. This is an area where I feel like DAZ is restrictive with the base models (I need more character morphs), and the posing tools seem cumbersome.
There are other issues I'm having, too, like figuring out what file type is the best to export w/textures mapped so when the character's loaded, so are their mats, and that they retain a relative size going between worlds (I understand each program has its own way of measuring, which is just silly; there should be a global standard), and why does it seem all my rigging fails when I go from one program to another? (Not that I've done a lot of animation, but it's another aspect I want to explore, and it would suck to be locked to one venue). This is probably just my own ignorance fighting against me. I think what I need is some sort of 3D Guru, but that's why I decided to bring my ignorance to the forums -- so I can learn.
My toolset is -- Poser 11, Bryce 7, Blender, the Adobe Suite. All the elements are in place, methinks, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around essential work-flow concepts -- creatively, I'm a writer, so I tend to think in broad strokes.
Also, the DSON (?) exporter doesn't seem to do it's job. I had to do a manual install of the DAZ Poser content, and it made such a damn mess of things (as I did it right after I'd just loaded the software, so I wasn't sure what was in the base menus to begin with). I uninstalled both DAZ and Poser, and did clean installs, so now all my "This for Poser" content is hibernating in the Smith Micro Install Manager queue -- along with the DSON Importer, and the Photoshop 3D bridge -- both of which can't seem to understand where they're supposed to live even when I do the directory adjustment.
So, I know this is a $#*&%! first post, but I'm really hyped to get into creation mode, and these obstructional technical issues are becoming frustrating.
Not really sure if I'm asking anything, I guess I just wanted to throw my issues out, and see who has some thoughts on any of these obstacles. Thanks!