OTOY Forums

I've found a simple way around the autoconversion issues. Some may already know this, but here's a quick tutorial as many still seem frustrated.

In shot: Don't use autoconversion. Use templated materials.
Templated materials automatically pick up the relevant textures from the DAZ materials. You make them from normal materials, simply by checking the "TEMPLATING" box in an image node in the NGE:

Then just select which source to use and add the material to you presets.

When you want to use it, load up a figure and select the surfaces you want to give a specific material. Here I've selected all the skin areas on GF 3:


Then just drag on drop on your templated materials:


This assigns the material to these surfacs, picking up the relevant textures. Rendering gives you this:


Sometimes something goes wrong and your material is still white. Just unlink the material and try again

Now select your nrw materials and rename them after the surfaces:


And you get something like this:

Note that I have fewer materials in the last shot. I had to redo the face and ear mats, so they ended up as seperate materials. Just drag and drop one onto the other, and do the rename again to get the above.

If you want to simulate the old autoconversion, just template a simple diffuse mat and drop everything on that

I did not know about this! I will try and learn about it when I get a chance, this seems useful, not just for the autoconversion but in general.

I never used templating, this seems awesome!

indeed... but i still dont get what templating exactly does compare to the "usual" default setting. smaller filesizes?

Templating tells the material to use all given parameters, but allows it to search in preferential order for image maps. I.e. set up a skin on one character, tweak as desired, then set each image map as a template in NGE. If you then apply the material to a new character as a template, all templated image maps will look for an image map to load from your scene instead of the one you used for that first character. Just makes a particular material setting you use on a lot of surfaces easier to reapply without having to either redo all the tweaking or manually load all the new image maps. Similar in principle to ctrl-clicking a shader preset in Daz Studio native, then ignoring image map changes, to apply the shader settings while retaining all maps.

thanks