VaM 1.x Detail Skin and Norm section...

How would you create an extra layer for the skin section to add nipple textures right on the skin shaders.. Ive made some really large detailed images, created n inspired by CuteSvetlana but they lose all the detail when added to the texture file..The cloth item is nice, but its hard to adjust exact skin colors and Ive been messing around with the actual DazModel and added a lot of subdivisions to the actual Mesh in that area..

How to add the extra subdivisions to the nipples and aerela back to the VaM model..
Or a better skin addon that doesn't have that gap and better alignment.
Or just make a slot to add higher detail images over the skin texture itself..

You want to add subdivision on the mesh? That's not possible. The whole system works ensuring you keep all the same vertices for being able to use blendshapes ( the morphs ), and thus, you need to have exactly the same topology.

The only way to add subdivision is through tesselation. And in VAM, it can't be localized, either you tesselate the whole mesh, or you don't.

For the texture, the only way you could have new slots, is if you'd write your own shader and use the custom shader loader plugin.

This doesn't help with the geometry, but I have been playing around with decal maker to test some things.

When using a 4k texture, one nipple is only about 125 pixels square.

I just did an experiment to see how big the texture files would be if I isolated just the nipples to upscale them to a stupid size for decal and normal overlays to use with the decal maker plugin. They are actually a surprisingly reasonable file size.
Just the nipples on a blank png decal upscaled to 16k was 2mb, and the 16k normal map (nipples with a plain RED: 128 GREEN: 128 BLUE: 255 background) was just 1.5mb.

As I only scaled up the images for testing, the results were nothing special to look at, but the same principle could give you much more detailed results with good images. At 16k, the nipple area is effectively up to 500x500 pixels each.

oh.. I didnt know you could do that with the decal plugin.. I'll give that a try then and thanks again!

The issue i might have is file size tho.. Ive been using a 100 inch monitor for everything so all my images are super huge.. I'll have to test sizes and those things too.

virtamater said:

oh.. I didnt know you could do that with the decal plugin.. I'll give that a try then and thanks again!

The issue i might have is file size tho.. Ive been using a 100 inch monitor for everything so all my images are super huge.. I'll have to test sizes and those things too.

Click to expand...

Normal maps need to have the "basic" background colour to not interfere with the other normal layers. Here's a quick test I did with a riddler 4k skin on the base female. The second image has an edited 16k normal map and specular decal to match the texture. (still kind of basic as a first attempt, but you get the idea.)

virtamater said:

Ive been using a 100 inch monitor

Click to expand...

That's not a "monitor", that's either a massive TV, or a Theater :' )

Resolution of the screen does not change anything about your image in a game in a standard use. At the same FOV, same distance, same position in a game... It's not because you'd use a 1080p or a 16K monitor that your image would become better/uglier. If you prefer, you don't see "more" of the texture, or "stretch more" the texture because you have a bigger screen. The relationship between a game and the texture resolution, is not the same as an "image" displayed flat (like in a preview software) in your native resolution.

A better resolution of a texture in a game engine would simply allow better quality when you zoom extremely close to the object... which will (again) still be the case for any screen size or screen resolution. At a standard average distance... several 4K for a single character is already overkill for a normal game.

All comes down to the texel density: how much pixels are in a 1m ( 1 unit ) of the engine. And sadly, the way Genesis characters are unwrapped, the texel density is all over the place: you have a 4K for the face, a 4K for the torso, a 4K for all the limbs... hence why you have weird discrepencies between the inherent high quality of the face and the nipples for instance.

The idea is to think of your use case and your constraints, and preview the textures from the most common situation. For instance, even tho we are in a VR game for VAM, where we can put our face at 1cm of the character, most of the time the distance will be a somewhat distant position like this. So preview that texture in this situation, not fringe cases like... the 3 times you're gonna zoom in... for any realtime use (a normal scene).

If you're doing virtual photography, or extreme close up shots, THEN in that situation you could crank up the resolution. But anything that's gonna be used for a standard gameplay scene... above 4K is overkill and hitting really hard the GPU for no real benefits. Having bigger textures makes the VRAM shoots up, longer loading times etc... so multiple characters with 8K sets could probably end up being very tedious to use in a scene without really obvious changes in a standard situation.

Texture work matters. Even tho texel density is important, you can clearly see that the texture itself has a massive influence on the final result just by grabbing different skins on the hub here. Better have a very nice 4K that will perform well... than have a bad 8K which has a 4 times footprint and can look uglier.