Hi,
I brought a VAM figure into DAZ for morph-making..
Was absolutely astounded how ROUGH the mesh was in DAZ, whereas in VAM it looked gooood!
Do use smoothing of 4 in VAM for better hip-thigh deforms.
Have found when i make DAZ morphs at 1.0 strength, make sure to set the range to 2.0 before export, and find in most cases I have to use 2.0 in VAM.
So think your thoughts about heavy exaggeration is 100% the way to go.
There are no masks to disallow smoothing on this or that, unless it's an unpublished feature?
Do find normal maps don't get smoothed as much. Just have to dial in the strength under one of the skin tabs. So if you are good at baking, that may be worth a try?
Only downside of normal maps...is all layers use that same strength - limbs, torso, face. So if one layer is a bit 'granular', well it means rebake or manual paint which is extremely laborius and near impossible for some physical aspects. But granularity dulling would work. Have done it.
Thanks for the reply.
I'm mostly concerned with facial features for models sculpted in Blender. A lot of defining features around the lips, nostrils, philtrum, septum, etc... Get smoothed out — actually feels like the mesh gets relaxed first — and the identity of the face can get a bit muddy due to smoothing.
Authored faces, especially, are a lot less forgiving of very minor changes.
I don't ever go above 2 smooth passes, I find more than that is just too much, and with 2 passes, all of the skinned mesh physics still behaves well, without any nasty triangle shadows showing up.
And you mentioned that there is no cancel mask for this feature. I would be amazing if there was a greyscale cancel mask to dial up and down the amount of smoothing by UVs, similar to how you can paint the sim texture for clothing rigidity. I hope VaM2 implements something like this.
It would also be amazing if I could export the run-time smoothed version of my mesh, so that I could at least re-bake my textures in Blender. Take out some of the bends and kinks that can show up when the mesh gets relaxed.
And yes, good topo discipline can go a long way, but I feel like I'm squeezing all I can out of the G2F at this point, and something's gotta give.
I've currently set up a little scene with two buttons that swap between Source morph with zero smooth passes, and the second with 2 passes and a running morph preset that updates as I edit it, so I can toggle between the two and make micro adjustments with the hundreds of targets morphs I have in my library.
Ultimately I think the best way to deal with this is to author small morphs in Blender based on the source morph, so the deltas are the same, but isolated to, say, the philtrum, nostrils, or something. A lot of work, sure, but more precise than guesstimating what features to exaggerate in the sculpt, then go thorough the process of turning into an in engine morph just to see what VaM's smoothing does to it.
It's all a work in progress I guess. And thanks for the feedback, a bunch of better artists than me have been making VaM looks for a lot longer, and I'm sure more people have run into and found methods for offsetting the smoothing passes.
