Bai Hu - mythological beast of East Asian culture

2021 May 13

I wanted to compose a scene with non-human creatures, and since I had previously created the Turtle and Crane (symbols of longevity), I decided to try making Bai Hu, the white tiger of the four cardinal creatures in East Asian culture. It represents the West.

I had to modify the texture of a 3rd-party asset, and create fog transparency effects for a plane. The mystical fire coming from Bai Hu's right eye is 3rd-party, but customised by me. The Light Fairies are a 3D asset. I am using only illumination from a 360 HDRI.

The images are not sharp because I used fog effect, bloom and a narrow f-stop and tight focus setting for the camera. I wanted the sense of capturing a creature which is very rarely seen and which moves very quickly when it knows it is being observed. Unfortunately, unlike Poser software, Daz Studio Pro does not have motion blur effect built into its rendering options.

Using Genesis Male 8.1 in Poser 12

via FBX and BVH formats

I used Genesis Male 8.1 in Poser 12 software.

Genesis 8.1 is natively usable in Daz Studio Pro.

The figure itself transfers across via FBX without any trouble, apart from minor material settings which need manual adjustment (such as the cornea becoming opaque, and all transparency values needing to be set at 1 instead of 0. Note though, all fancy advance shader settings such as bump maps, SSS and Normals are lost in the FBX trasnfer. You need to re-apply them manually but it is a Poser Root Surface regime and simpler than a Cycles regime).

The hair was something else - I had to re-apply the textures manually because only the scalp texture went across in the FBX, and was applied to all parts of the hair !

I used the Poser morph brush to fix some of the coat pokethroughs.

Save the geometries out from Daz Studio as one FBX file. Save the pose out as a BVH file. After importing the FBX into Poser 12, point at the figure and import the BVH file to it.

I did not apply the normals, displacements and bump maps in this Poser 12 render.

Here is the figure in Daz Studio Pro for comparison

I had earlier rendered the same figure with a crow figure using Daz Studio Pro (see below)

I added bump maps...

But I am not happy with the bump maps for the skin... well, there are limits to using Genesis 8.1 characters in Poser, ultimately for the reason that they are not natively Poser content. A lot of manual adjustment to the shaders, is required. I have only proven that it is possible to get the content into Poser via FBX route.

Painted Girl

20 May 2021

Using Daz Studio Pro, I tried the Tuki character for the Genesis 8 female character. She is basically a painted lady. I used Glider Hair, which, as it turns out, isn't very plaint for posing. I had originally wanted the scene to be by the poolside, but there is only one 360 HDRI taken from an outdoor swimming pool, and I did not really like the result, so I changed it to an HDRI with bokeh lighting instead. The scene setup and camera and render settings are my own. Bokeh 360 HDRI is from Greg Ward's website.

Testing my new PC

I am not able to continue my existing projects until my ethernet crossover cable is shipped to me. I have so much 3D data to transfer over, it is better to use this type of cable than to use cloud or wifi over local network. No point sticking thumbdrives in and out either. Meanwhile, I continue to test the new PC performance using Poser 12 and Daz Studio software. To jangle things a bit, the Daz Studio had a problem after the 21H1 updates for Windows Home 10. I had to get Tech Support at Daz3D to provide a fix.

Here are some test renders I made using Poser 12.

Next I show the screen captures of the Canvas workspace: