Character Creation in Cinema 4D and Daz Studio

1. Introduction: 3d character creation is hard and very time-consuming. You need to learn anatomy, modeling, texturing, and rigging. And once you've done all of that, you still need to create hair, clothes and prompts, which is even more work. Or you could do all of that in just a few minutes with free software. And in this course, we'll show you how high it's staying from CG shortcuts. Welcome to our new course, character creation in cinema 4D and DAS studio, where we'll show you how to design and create stunning photorealistic characters and incorporate them into your Cinema 4D workflow will start by introducing you to dance studio, the free software that will literally allow you to create amazing characters. In just minutes, we'll explore the data marketplace, see where we can source free models, design and shape our characters, create clothing and accessories, hair materials, posing, and even animation in the most comprehensive training for DAS studio out there. Then we'll show you how exact step-by-step workflow for getting your dad's models into Cinema 4D, including mesh correction, material conversion, troubleshooting and lighting and rendering in Redshift. Then in the class project, we will create a classic portrait style render together and walk you through our whole does to Cinema 4D process from start to finish. So you can do the same with your own creations. By the end of this course, you'll be able to create stunning characters quickly in dance studio and incorporate them seamlessly into your Cinema 4D projects, as well as learning loads of tips and tricks and dads, Cinema 4D and Redshift along the way. So that's it for now. Let's get started. 2. Installation: Okay, so before we get started, we'll need to install the dads 3D software, which is completely free and available at dad's 3D.com. And there you'll just need to hit over to the download Studio tab. And if it's your first time on the site, you'll need to set up an account. So I'll just fill this in quickly and start creating. And that'll take you to the downloads page and start downloading the software to your computer automatically. And there's also a few handy videos worth watching on this page as well. Then when that's done, downloading will need to go through the installation steps. So let's just click through here. And when it asks which directory you want to install this too, I'd recommend putting this in the default directory, which is the C drive. And it's definitely possible to install to another drive. But in my experience, that can lead to some issues later on. Also, once you've got a load of data assets installed on your machine, your dad's library can become pretty massive. So just keep that in mind when you go to Choose your drive. Then we'll hit Next again, and that should start installing. And I'll just fast forward that. And now we have dad's central installed on our computer. So let's just sign in with the login details we just created. Then you'll be prompted to install Data Studio. But you might want to go out of that and just check your settings here first. And just make sure Data Studio is also being installed to the correct directory. And as I said before, you definitely want to make sure you've got plenty of space available here because your dad's library will get pretty big, pretty fast. And this also defaults to the C drive as well, which is fine for me, but you can switch it to another drive if you like. And with that setup, that's now installed Data Studio, which is where we'll be spending most of our time in this course. So now that that's done, you can Open Data Studio by clicking here or on the shortcuts that have been created on your desktop. You can also head over to the desk Studio tab in Dallas Central and launched the studio here. And you can also find any assets that are linked to your account under my assets. And obviously as this is a brand new account, we haven't purchased any assets yet. But we can see a few of the free assets here that we can choose to install if we want to. We'll also look at another way to install assets a little later on. And finally, we can also find any plugins we have available up here and some resources and a few tutorials created by the guys at Dad's to get you started. So let's fire up dance studio, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Daz Interface: Okay, so here we are in Data Studio. And the first thing we wanna do is head up to connect and make sure we're logged into the account we created in the last lesson. That way, or your dad's assets will be linked to dance studio over here in the all products section of the Smart Content tab with a brand new account, we currently only have a few of these free assets showing up in here. And the assets at the top are lit up. And that indicates that these three are the only assets currently installed. And we can check that down here in the installed tab, where we now only see those three. Then we have available which of those remaining free items we can choose to download to our computer. And downloading is super easy. All we need to do is double-click on the asset we want to download and install. And that will start to download with this line indicating the progress of the download. So let's cue up a few of these. Then if we head over to the pending tab, we can see the three items that acute for download and their progress. And well, that's doing its thing. Let's take a look at the Updates tab, which usually only shows products that need updating, but for some reason it also shows downloads in here as well. Let's go back to All again. And if we look down the side here, we can filter all of our assets by various categories, which makes finding things nice and easy. So if we click on Accessories, for example, we're given a list of all the dads products that include accessories. Or we could try environments and get products that are tagged as environments like this interior scene, for example. Then we've got figures, which is where you're usually want to start when you're creating your characters in Dez. And these are the base character models we can use as a starting point when designing and customizing our characters. By default, you'll have the Genesis eight starter Essentials Pack installed, which if we double-click, will show us what's included with that. And if we choose, all files, will see everything inside there. Or we can also filter that by selecting a category from the list here. So let's select figures, which gives us a male and female version of the default Genesis eight character. And we can actually choose from version eight or 8.1 modals, which are a little bit more detailed and higher resolution. So let's double-click on the Genesis 8.1. Female character shall be added to the scene like so. That's usually the first step, but let's carry on with the character creation. Let's see what here we have available in our starter essentials. And you can see we have a sample male and female hairstyle we can choose from. So with our character selected, we'll choose the female here and double-click that to apply it to our character. We're not limited to using assets from this figure. If we click here and go back outside our starter essentials, we can choose from any other assets we have in our library. So let's give our character some clothes. If we hit down to wardrobe, let's download the Shadow Thief outfit, which you can see has been designed for Genesis eight female figures. And now that's been installed. It's lit up at the top here. Before we apply it to our figure, I just want to point out this filter up by context check box down here. This is actually going to filter our products according to whatever figure we currently have selected. So it's currently only sharing assets that are compatible with our Genesis eight female figure. But if we were to switch that off, we can now see all the clothing we have installed in our dads library. And that includes clothing for male characters or close design for older model versions like this genesis to outfit. So while these assets aren't designed specifically for our Genesis eight female character, there are ways to apply older or non-compatible assets to our newer models. We'll look at doing that a little later on in the course. Let's just switch that back on for now. And we'll double-click on our thief outfit, which shows us all the items of clothing we can use in this product. And that's because we're filtering this by the wardrobe category as well. And we can even click on this to reveal the subcategories, which will allow us to filter those items by where they belong on the character. So we have the full thief outfit broken into each item of clothing. So you could apply each item of clothing separately if you wanted to, or mix and match items to create your own outfits. And down the bottom here, we can click on outfits to bring up a single asset, which includes all the items of clothing in one. So you can quickly apply the full outfit to your character. And you can even see a preview of what the Full Faith outfit looks like on a desk character up here. So with our Genesis eight figure selected, let's double-click on this to apply the full thief outfit to our character. And now our character is starting to look a bit more complete. But our preview over here isn't looking very accurate. We can't see any of the color or detail in that outfit. And that's because if we take a look at our viewport preview modes up here, where currently set to smooth shaded, which renders nice and fast, but it's probably not the best mode to use when designing your characters. So let's take a look at some of the other modes that we can try here. This one is not great either. So we could just go through these one by one until we find a good one. Or we can hold Control and just cycle through the numbers on our keyboard. So this is control plus number three on the keyboard, control for five. And you'll notice the higher number, the more detail we're getting here. There's control plus seven, which is the smooth shading we had before. And add Control eight, we're starting to see the colors in there. And nine is without the lines, which is the view I use a lot of the time, and that's the texture shaded mode. Then beyond that, we've got cartoon shaded mode, which I personally don't ever use. But if we hit Control plus 0 will get the most accurate preview of our scene. This is actually the render preview with the Nvidia IRA renderer, which comes built into Data Studio. And you can find that here as well. And it works a bit like Octane redshift in progressive mode, which is great to get a good look at your character before we export it out to Cinema 4D. But you will notice if we try to move around our scene, even on a pretty high-end machine, this is going to be pretty slow and unresponsive. So I personally only switch to this mode when I need to see the final quality or when I'm ready to check everything before export. But if you're looking for high-quality and speed, there is a fairly new option in here you can use instead. And that's the filament PBR mode, which gives us a good representation of the colors and textures, but it's also nice and fast in the viewport. So I do use this mode quite often as well. Straight out of the box though, it does tend to look a little bit bright and you can see the skin is definitely looking a bit blown out. But we can fix that over in the scene tab here. When we did our first render with the Nvidia irae mode, it actually created these two extra objects in our scene which affect our lighting. And if we grab the tone map object and take a look at its parameters in the perimeter tab and make a bit of room. So we can see this. Just like in cinema 4D. We can find the parameters and settings of whatever we have selected. Down here. You'll see if we grab something else, like our character, for example, we'll get a bunch of different parameters depending on the object. And we've got the classic coordinate tools here where we can move, scale, and rotate our character if we need to. And we'll also get more into that a little bit later on. But if we go back to our tone mapper, we can decrease the brightness in PBL mode by adjusting the exposure value over here. And we'll just bring that down until it's no longer blowing out those highlights about there. It looks good. And if you need to bring these in separately, as I said, they will be created automatically when you do a render an IRA, but you can also add them to your scene up here in the create menu. And here's the environments and tone map or objects down the bottom. Okay, so now that we've got our preview set up, let's take a look at some of the other tools and Data Studio. The Scene menu here functions just like the object manager in Cinema 4D. We can pop up in hierarchies and select different objects, including the bones in our character rig. Or you can select individual assets, like the hair here. And we can hide and show objects with the eye icon. And we can also lock objects with the selection icon. And you can see, I can no longer click directly on the hair now it goes straight to the head instead. Okay, Let's collapse that. And just like Cinema 4D, we can also filter out objects with the search bar here. If we type in here, for example, that'll take us straight back to the hair object in our scene. We can clear that by clicking on this arrow. And we briefly looked at navigating around our scene before you probably saw me move this box around to rotate the view. This just allows us to click directly on the view we want. So front or side view, for example, we can click and drag to move around our scene. And we've also got tools here on which work very similar. We can rotate around with this or move the view with this tool. And if we hover over any of these, the tool tip will pop up telling you exactly what it does. And if there's any shortcut keys applied to it, which is handy. But as for moving around the scene, I'm not a big fan of doing it this way. If you're a cinema 4D user like myself, you will probably find it easier to navigate the viewport with your mouse and the Alt key on the keyboard. And the good news is we can set our controls up exactly like Cinema 4D here in Data Studio. If we hit F3 on the keyboard, it'll bring up the customisation settings. And down the bottom here, we can change our viewport shortcut keys. So to make this work like Cinema 4D or pretty much all other 3D software. Let's select orbit and double-click here. Then we'll hold Alt and click with our left mouse button. Then we'll go to Penn and change this to alt middle mouse button. Finally, let's change the zoom to alt right mouse button. And I also like to have the mouse, we'll go in the opposite direction. So I'll check that as well. And you can also set the keyboard shortcut keys to just about any command in depths 3D up here. But we'll just leave this set to the defaults. You can also customize the menus here and the toolbars as well if you need to. And you'll see in the main toolbar here, we have the same commands listed here as they are along our main toolbar here. And we'll take a good look at these in just a second. But let's accept that. And now we can easily navigate around our scene using the same controls as Cinema 4D, which definitely speeds up my workflow here in Data Studio. We can also jump directly into our different orthographic views like we can in cinema 4D. So front view or side view, etc. Or we can use the keyboard shortcut keys to cycle through these. If we hold control and the up arrow, we get the rearview control down for the front view and left and right for the side views. And we can switch to the Alt key with up being the top view and down the bottom view. Then to return to our perspective view, we can select it here or just hit Control plus P on the keyboard. Another handy shortcut we can use to zoom into a particular part of our model is if we grab the head, for example, and hit control plus F, that'll frame up on just the head, like so. If we want to frame back up on our whole character, we can select the top of our figure hierarchy and press Control F again to frame that up instead. We can also hit Shift plus F11 to switch to full screen mode, which can give you a bit more space when moving around your scene. And we just need to hit Shift F11 again to go back to normal. Or we can click on any of these tabs along here to collapse those pains, which also gives us a bit more room. And we can bring that back by clicking the tab again. And we can also customize which tabs are shown here. I'm personally not a big fan of the viewport tab, which I don't find very useful. We can right-click on that and close the pain. And the same goes for the Environment tab, which just lets us add a backdrop, which I prefer to do in cinema 4D. Let's close that as well. And any changes you make to your layout will automatically be saved. So this is exactly what we'll get next time we open up dance studio. If you do, however, make a big mess of your panels and need to restore it back to the default. We can hit F3 again to bring up the customized menu. And you just need to click on defaults and say yes to restoring the default settings. But we won't do that because I've got it just the way I like it now. You'll probably spend most of your time in this section as you create your characters using the different products in your Smart Content tab. Rather than viewing the products, we can also view these as individual files instead. And under all files, you can see every single element installed on your computer. So not just the product groups. And again, you can filter the files themselves into different categories. We've also got the Install tab here, which shows all the products available to download, which is pretty much the same as we had back in the Smart Content under available and all. Another place you can find products is over in the Content Library, which will let you navigate through the actual folders in your dad's directory. And we can also see a list of products in alphabetical order. Although we currently don't have many products installed as this is a new desk account. Then the tabs down here, we'll come to a bit later on in the course, as well as these tabs over here, which are quite important. But before we finish up this lesson, Let's take a quick look at the tools in our main toolbar here. This is all pretty standard. You've just got your open save and undo commands here. Then we can use this to add a camera to our scene. And if we accept that, it'll show up in our Scene Manager over here. We now have an option to set our view to that camera and set that up however we like, just like we would in Cinema 4D. Then we've got a few of the different lights we can use and deaths, but I'd rather do all my lighting and Cinema 4D as well. So I never use these. We can also create a primitive object, which again is the same in cinema 4D. Let's go with a torus. Like so. We can easily delete objects by right-clicking and delete. Then we have grouping, which is like adding a null in cinema 4D. And the aligned tool we also have in C4D. We can also use this tool to switch to keyboard navigation. So we can move around our scene with our keyboard. Kind of like a video game, which is probably more for environment creation than character design. So I don't personally ever use this. We can switch back to normal controls up here. And we've got a few different selection tools further along, which I'll cover a little bit later. So let's move along here to the spot render tool. And this is like the interactive render region tool in Cinema 4D, which allows us to click and drag our region to render with the Nvidia irae renderer, which can speed things up if you just want to end up part of your scene to preview. Next, we can choose to show the tool settings panel, which when active, is going to give us some extra options depending on which tool is currently selected, which is a bit like the attributes panel in cinema 4D. So you might want to lock that down here as well, because you'll probably need it from time to time. Beyond that, we've just got a few tools related to rendering, which we also won't be using because it will get better results doing all of our rendering directly in cinema 4D. Then down the bottom here, we have our animation controls, which we'll be looking at in depth in another video. And this is similar to the dope sheet in Cinema 4D, where you can add and adjust your keyframes. And the timeline is a bit like the Curve Editor. And finally, we've got our standard file and edit menus. And the Create menu where you can add cameras, lights, and objects, many of which we can do directly from the toolbar here. Then there's tools which are also mostly repeated along here. Render Settings, which we won't be using in this course, connect to your account options. Then under Window, we can find all the different panes we can open. And there's quite a few handy tools in here. The yellow ones are the ones we've already got open. We've also got some pre-built workspaces we can use and some different layouts. We can apply it to our viewport. And that just about covers all the main features in the data interface. So now that you know your way around the software, let's take a look at the data marketplace in the next lesson. 4. Daz Marketplace: Alright, so we might get very far in Data Studio without any damages, assets. So we'll need to head over to dads 3D.com forward slash shop and take a look at their online marketplace where you can see we've got a load of different assets to choose from at quite a range of different prices and quality. If you are a very new to data though, and don't want to start shelling out cash straightaway. They do have a weekly freebies section up here that we can take a look at. If we scroll down here, we get a weekly set of data assets that you can try out for free. Although these do tend to be older assets from the store and generally lower quality like this weird bird thing for example. But still not a bad place to start or check from time-to-time. Another option for discounted assets can be found back in the store in the sales section here, where there tends to be a lot more assets at much higher quality, mostly for sale under $10 each summer, even less than $5, like this one, for example. So that's definitely a good place to hang out if you want to build your library of assets. And other option back here is to join the dad's premium club. And if you get really into using the software, you can sign up for about $5 a month and get a whole bunch of goodies, including big discounts, coupons, and other freebies. However, this doesn't apply to all models in the store. If we head back to the shop and scroll down here to the product filter section, we need to tick this box to filter only the premium club assets. So only this selection of assets will be included in your membership, which do tend to be some of the higher-quality assets anyway. And you can also check for that below each thumbnail, you're just looking for this icon here. We've also got a few other bits of useful information down here. This section tells us which character version we can use. This asset with. This particular asset is hair. And this is telling us that we can apply this hair to Genesis 8.18 and the older Genesis three female models. It's not to say that this wouldn't work on other models, just that this was designed for these specifically. I'd recommend using assets designed for Genesis 8.1 where possible, because they are the newest and most detailed assets available at the moment. And 8.1 is slightly higher in quality than eight. So you could also get away with those assets. So I'd usually filter out anything else up here by just selecting the 8.18 versions whenever I'm looking for assets. So now you know you're getting the best quality stuff. Let's just get rid of that membership filter as well to give us a few more results. We can also sort our list by new arrivals so we know anything at the top of our list is nice and new and usually the latest level of quality. And the discounted items also tend to pop up at the top, which is quite handy. There's a few other filters up here as well, which can help you find what you need a bit faster. Genre is a good one. If you want to create a fantasy render, you can filter that and get some more tailored results. And if there's a particular dance artists that you like, you can also filter that as well. The data originals I actually created by das 3D and tend to follow the highest guidelines for quality. So you'll get some really nicely designed assets in here. And when you started building up a bit of a library of assets, it's also a good idea to hide the items that you've already purchased as well. So nothing you already own, it shows up down here. The other icons here tell us what kind of asset we're looking at. And we can see that this wild woman outfit is categorized under close props. That it's for people or does character figures, and that it was designed for female models. So let's click on one of these and see what other info we get. This product is a de force outfit for Genesis, 8.18 female characters. And we can find out which artists created this over here. If you'd like their work, you can click on those and see more products by the artist. Then we've got details about compatibility here, which you might want to check before purchasing. And you can see that this asset is compatible with the data into Cinema 4D bridge, which we'll be looking at a little later on in the course. So we shouldn't have any trouble sending this over to C4D. We can also access the files to manually install this in your dad's 3D library as well, which will also look at shortly. Then we've got the most important part of this page really, and that's the product shots. And clicking on one of these brings up a gallery of renders showcasing this particular asset. So you can get a good feel of the level of quality and compatibility. And it looks like this item of clothing also comes with a few texture variations. Just keep in mind though, that not everything you see in these images will come with the asset. It's just for demonstration purposes. But if we scroll down a bit, we do get a full list of everything that's included. And right down the bottom, they do tend to mention other products in the store that are used in the demo renders. Say you could also track those down nice and easy if you see something interesting in here. So having a good read through this list before making a purchase is probably a good idea. So you know exactly what you're getting in the download. You can see we'd be getting a bunch of clothing geometry, including the course it, the boots and the skirt. And we've also got some shaping presets for shaping whichever character you choose separately. So this particular item of clothing will fit properly. And there's a bunch of different presets for some of the popular Genesis eight female characters that you can find in the store. So it's probably worth checking whichever character you plan on using is compatible. Although there are ways to fit most clothing to just about any character. And again, we'll look at that a little bit later on. Then we've got some material presets, but we won't actually be using das materials as we'll be exporting to cinema 4D and using Redshift materials instead. But this does include the different texture variations that we saw back here. So these different looks and patterns, which is always good to have. Some clothing assets also come with various prompts to complete the look. This one comes with a staff and Crystal prop, which we can easily applied to supporting characters as well. We also get some poses with this, which we can probably see in the demo images as well. Quite possibly this pose with the crystal staff prop that's also included. And finally down here, we've got some related or similar products we can take a look at. Let's go back to the main shop page and fill to this to only show Genesis eight products. If we scroll down here, you might find something like this where it appears that the same product is in here twice. Only the prices are slightly different. But that's because this cheaper one is just textures which can be used with this product, which is the actual outfit these extra textures are designed for. And if we go inside this one and come down here, you can see that the outfit itself comes with some materials and associated one and for k texture maps. But you'd be able to grab that extra texture set and customize this further if you wanted to. You can also see down here that this particular asset can be found in a bundle, which is another way to buy multiple assets together and save a bit of money. If we go into that and scroll down, we can see what's included in this particular bundle. So we'd get the costume geometry itself along with the extra texture set. And we'd also get this Angelina Jolie looking character called Sharon that this product has been designed for. So be able to get the whole set and basically be able to recreate the character as you see her here, without buying everything separately. And when these bundles are on sale as well like this, you can definitely save some money if you're after all of these items. One thing to keep in mind though, which isn't visible on this particular product. But if we pull this one up, occasionally, you'll come across products like this, which lists other required products, which means you'll need to purchase and install these first in order for this particular product to work. And you probably won't come across this very often, but just keep an eye out for it before you make your purchase. Let's head back to the shop and you probably want to start in the people and wearables section. So have a look through here and grab your first does 3D asset. And we'll take a look at how to install them into your Data Studio Library k. So now that you've bought your first dad's product, we'll head back to Des central and under DAS studio and my assets. Here's where all the products you own will turn up. We can just select whichever asset we want to install, like this, rocker outfit for example, and hit Install. Another way we can do this is directly from within Data Studio itself. Under the Smart Content tab, within all products, we should be able to find that same asset in here. And sure enough, there it is. So if we double-click on that, it'll start installing straight into the library. And when that's done, we can double-click on that, which seems to just refresh this panel and move in store products to the top. So we can double-click again and go inside our product. And now we can explore all the files that are included within Al Rocker outfit. Finally, if you are having trouble installing your products with these two methods, you can also install assets manually. If you head over to my account in the online marketplace and to your product library, we can find another list of everything we've purchased. And if we grab that same a rocker outfit, we can manually download the files over here. And this zip file is the main install fall you're going to need. But some products, including this one, come with a separate templates folder, which can be downloaded separately because it doesn't actually get installed into your dad's library with the main files. And this is basically a template for the assets UVs that you can use to make your own custom textures from. I'll quickly show you what that looks like. These are the templates for the rocker outfit. And you can see we've just got the outlines of each product's UVs. And this one looks like it's for the boots. So you could just bring these into Photoshop and paint in your own textures if you need to. But we'll just stick to the textures included in the main installation folder. We've also got the option to send this file straight to the dads and store manager. If you've got that installed on your computer, we currently don't, but there's a link down here to where we can grab that. Let's download and install the installer manager, and we'll have a quick look at how to use that as well. Here's what the install manage. It looks like once you've got it installed. And again, we've got a full list of all the products we've purchased that are ready to be downloaded and installed. The benefit of this is that we can easily queue up a bunch of these or download them all at the same time by checking each box and just start the Q when we're ready. But if we want to manually install that zip file we just looked at, which is this file here with the data's product number at the beginning. We need to get this into the ready to install tab here. But we can't just drag this in here. Unfortunately, we need to go up here to the settings and basic settings. And we need to locate the package archive directory on our computer, which is in the C drive by default. And if we click this link, it will pull up that folder on our computer. We'll close that and we can drag our product zip files into here. And as soon as we do that and refresh our installer manager, that product will now appear inside here. We can easily install that manually because this is set to delete package. Once installed, it disappears from here, and we can now find it over in the installed tab. And from here, it's just as easy to uninstall any products we no longer want taking up space on our hard drive. So besides the official Dad's store, there are a few other places we can purchase assets for our dads library. The most popular of which is the Render porosity marketplace, which does tend to have some pretty high-quality assets, which is usually quite a bit cheaper as well, then what you'd find on the dad's store. We've also got pho render, which also has some really high-quality assets. And you can even get Luke Skywalker on here and a bunch of other famous characters, uh, probably copyrighted, but still, I'm sure you can have a lot of fun with some of these. This one's nice and cheap and it's even compatible with the latest Genesis eight characters. But one thing to keep in mind when purchasing from these marketplaces is that you can install them via dad's central or DAS studio because they're outside the main Dad's store. So I'll show you the easiest way to go about installing these. If we take a look at this tab, I've purchased this Genesis eight coat from Render porosity, which upon downloading, will usually give us a zip, or in this case, a raw file that we need to extract manually to our dads library directory. So to find that, we'll head back to dance studio and over to the Content Library tab, and will pop open the DAS studio formats folder, which reveals our dads 3D library folder. And you can see the directory pops up there as well. But if we right-click on that, we can browse to the folder location, which takes us right there. And we can minimize this and make a bit of space here. And we need to extract this raw file into this folder structure. So let's first take a look at what we've got inside this archive. We've got the product image than the template file, which is the UV templates we looked at before. Then finally, the main installation zip folder. If we open this up, and I'm using the free compression app 7-Zip to view these. We can now see all of the main asset files inside people. For example. We can see this code is for Genesis, eight female characters. It's an item of clothing. Then we get the artist's name, which is Coba max in this case, then the product name, and finally, the assets themselves and material assets. So if we go back to the base directory here, you'll see that these folders correspond to some of the folders we can find in our library. And he has people, data, and runtime. So all we need to do is grab those folders. We don't actually need the documentation, so we'll leave that. And we can drag these over to merge them into our library. And you can see those assets have now been added to those three folders. And now if we head back to Data Studio, refresh our dads library folder. If we drill down into there and into those same directories. So people, Genesis site, female clothing artists, cobra max. We can now find our code asset, which we can apply to any character within Data Studio. And we can also access the different materials and textures as well. That's the manual installation process. But just be aware that because these assets were created outside the main data store, they weren't show up back in our Smart Content tab, which only shows products from the marketplace. So lets just grab our Genesis eight Stata or Essentials and over two figures, Let's bring you now Genesis eight, basic female character. And to apply our third-party products will go back to the Content Library and to the coat, which gives us options for an open codes or closed coat. But let's just double-click on this one. And that's now been applied to our character. So that's the basics of buying data assets and getting them into Data Studio. 5. Character Design and Shaping: Okay, so let's talk about designing and shaping your characters in dad's 3D. To start with, I've just got our Genesis eight basic male model, which comes free with Data Studio. And you can find that right here. But now that I bought a few other characters from the store, let's see how we can switch characters. If we go back here to products in our Smart Content Library, you can see I've got quite a few new characters installed now. But let's switch our basic male model with another Genesis eight male character. So to filter what we see here, Let's switch on filter by context, which is going to show us everything related to the Genesis eight male character we've currently got selected. We'll enable that and scroll to the top. And here's our base model again. But also the other Genesis eight male models we currently have available, like Josh and Lucas and some more creative characters like moving the alien, this cartoon Genesis eight character and L Wolf man. So if for example, we'd like to swap our basic male character for Lucas while keeping the current pose, clothing, and other settings we may have already applied to our basic model. We just need to select that and double-click on our new character, will get a pop up asking if we want to switch characters or if we want to add Lucas into our scene separately. So we'll select this option to switch this guy out for our new model. And we've now switched characters. And the pose and clothing has also adapted to our new figure. And just before we move on, I think this 16 by nine window is a little bit distracting. So let's remove that. So we have a bit more space in here. If we go to Render Settings and all, we can choose a different dimension preset. I will switch this from custom to active viewport. And now we can take advantage of this full space here in our viewport. So now that we know how to add our characters to the scene and replace one character for another. Let's see if we can customize one of these pre-made figures and see if we can make them more unique. If we pop open the shaping panel here and remove any filters by selecting all. And this is content sensitive as well. So we need to make sure we have our character selected. We can now find all the shaping options listed down here that are available to this particular character. So this one here is for the height. We can adjust that to make our character shorter or taller. Or we can make him a bit more stocky or thin amount of bits with the emaciated control here. If we go over to the active filter here, we can get a preview of how some of these shaping presets will affect our character. And some of these morphs, as they're called, have actually come from some of the other characters we've purchased in our library. So let's give one of these a try. Let's try fattening him up with the heavy body morph. And if we take a look at the top here, we can find some of the other morphs associated with the other figures that we've gotten stalled. And here's the Josh morph from the Josh character over here. And there's also a Lucas morph over here as well. So we can start to blend in different characters and mix and match these to create something unique. And what's really fun if we just reduce this one again, is that we can look down here for the more extreme character morphs. And here's our alien and werewolf morphs. So let's try blending those in. And now we've gone from Lucas to Marvin, the alien. Or we can back that off and bringing the wolf man. Or to make something more unique, we can set this one to 50 per cent and blend it with 50 per cent werewolf to create our own original character. And to refine this even more, we're not limited to just blending full body morphs. If we were to grab just the nose, for example, we can shape just that part of the model. So let's try the nose bridge depth, which doesn't do too much. What about the width? Also a bit subtle. Let's zoom in a tad and we'll try the nose height, which is interesting. There's loads of these. We can try it to really customize the look of our character. Let's see what we can do with the ears. And we can move these into a more l flag shape or make them longer. And you can really go crazy with this. If you do ever find that you've gone too far, we can always reset the shaping by replacing the model with our original character again, by double-clicking this and just applying that to the selected character again. And now we're back to Lucas again. So every time you install a new character figure, you will end up with even more amorphous to choose from over here. So the possibilities are pretty endless. The cartoon morphs that always pretty fun as well. If we apply this, we can get some cool manga kinda looks. So that's the shaping tools. Another tool we can use for shaping the face of our characters is the power pose tool. You can find that up here under window panes. And here it is. We'll just talk l power pose window over here. And this tool is mainly used for posing your models. And we'll take a look at doing that as well a little bit later on. But if we click into the face up here, we get access to the facial posing tools, but we can also go further into this face icon here, which will actually allow us to manipulate the shape of the face as well. And basically, if we click on any of these points, like the ear, for example, and drag while holding the left mouse button down. We can move and reshape that particular part of the character. And if we right-click instead and move our mouse around, we can rotate that selection as well. And if you find the controls for that a little bit fiddly, we can also switch to the universal tool, which gives you gizmo controls like you might find in Cinema 4D, which will allow you to move, scale, and rotate parts of the mesh so you can get some pretty unique looks as well. Let's try manipulating the eyebrows as well. And just move these up a bit to give him a bit of a smug look. Or maybe we could grab the nose and bring this out this way to increase the size a bit. And why stop there? Let's grab his chin and do a little surgery down here as well. And now he's definitely starting to look pretty unique. So that's shaping with the power pose tool. We can also shape our characters with deformers, just like we can in cinema 4D. So with this character selected and we're using Josh this time, we'll come up here to Create and create a new de forma. And you can name it if you like, but we'll just go with the default name. And if we pop our character hierarchy open here, we can find that the former in here now, which gives us a representation of what part of our character is going to be affected by the deformer, which is currently the whole model. But if we grab the controller here, we can scale this down so that it's only affecting the middle section of our character. And we can move this up as well. And I want to isolate it to just the belly so we can deform the shape of that and give him a bit of a beer gut. We'll scale that in on the sides as well. We don't want that to select the back as well. Will also scale that in this way. And just move that till it's only affecting his belly. And now if we click on the D form our base and pop that open, We can now grab this, which will let us start deforming the surface. And if we move this outward, that'll start bulging that belly out like so. We can lift that up a bit as well. And you'll notice the pivot point for the deformation is actually down here at the moment. But if we want to center that up here, we just need to grab the deformer base again and just shift that pivot point to where we want it. And if we switch back to this, that deformation will be from that point. And at this point, I want to affect more of the sides. So we'll go back to our selected here and scale that out to the sides a bit more. Which rounds that belly out of it. And we might do that up this way as well, giving him a bit of a pot belly. Or we could come back to the deformation and bulge this out to the sides a bit more. And I think I'm pretty happy with that. If you wanted to give you other characters the same belly morph, we can actually save this as a shaping preset, just like the body morphs we looked at earlier. So to do that, we will need access to the deform menu, which we can also find up here and pains. So this one here will dock that over to the sign. And to save the deformation that we've done here as a morph preset, we just need to select the root of our character rather than the deformation itself. And over here, we'll check on Apply spawned morph and to remove the deformer. After this, we can also activate delete applied deformers. Then we just need to hit spawn more of we need to give it a new more for name. Let's just call it belly morph. We'll hit yes to this. And when that's done, you can see at a former has now been removed from our stack. And if we take a look under the Parameters tab, under our Josh character, and under morphs, we can now find our new belly morph. We can use this slider to increase that effect or decrease it. But we don't really want it to go beyond that original flat belly shape because that looks a little bit weird. So we can hold Alt and click on the value here to reset it to 0, which removes that deformation completely. And if we click on the little settings icon here, and under parameter settings, we can set a limit on this slider so it won't allow negative values. We'll enable that will change the Min value here, which is currently allowing values as low as negative 100%. We'll just set that minimum value to 0 instead, which is flat like this. And we'll accept that. And now you can see our morph starts back here at 0, and we can only increase that effect to 100 per cent or remove that morph entirely. So our preset has now been applied to our Josh character. But we need to do one more step if we want to be able to use this on our other Genesis eight characters. So again, we'll make sure we've got our character selected so we can export any custom ofs we've got set up in here. Then we need to go to File, Save As. And right down the bottom here from the support Asset menu. We'll select the morph assets. And we can set a directory for our Morph, which has already set to our dads library. So let's leave that there. And if we look down here under the Josh character, we can access the custom morphs. And we'll just select our belly morph. And we've got the option again to name it whatever we like. So we'll call it belly morph again and hit Accept. Now, if we go back to our Smart Content tab, will bring in a different character to apply this to. Let's go with Marvin the alien. And if we want to add another character to our scene and keep Josh in there as well. We'll just double-click into here. Then holding Alt on the keyboard, we can click and drag Marvin into our scene. And we can actually place them wherever we want. So about there looks good. And this time we'll choose, load a new figure into the scene. Now if we grab our Marvin character and take a look at the morphs available, we can now access our saved belly morph. So now we can apply this to him as well. And now he's also got a nice big beer belly and weight control F to frame him up. And we can blend this in with any other most we like to further customize our characters. One final thing before we finish up though, if we take a look at Josh again, you can see that that deformation has popped that belly through his shorts like this. But we can actually use are shaping tools on clothing as well to fix this. So if we grab his boxer shorts here and head back over to the Shaping tab. Under all, we can also find a bunch of morphs to adjust our shorts. And we can actually apply shaping to pretty much any kind of asset in deaths and not just our character meshes. So let's give it a try. If we tweak these sliders a bit, we can expand those shorts out to make them fit around his belly a bit more. And that's just about there already. Let's just widen the sides a bit as well. And we can also come back to our character again and reduce the belly morph a bit until those sorts of fitting nicely again, like so. We'll look at some other ways to adjust the clothing a little bit later on as well. But that's pretty much it for designing and shaping in Data Studio. 6. Clothing and Accesories: Okay, so let's talk about clothing and accessories. In our scene, we have our trusty old Genesis eight male figure. And if we look at these Smart Content tab here and go down to the wardrobe filter, we can see all the different items of clothing we currently have installed. And you will notice we're also seeing clothing for female characters as well in here, which you technically could still apply it to your male characters. But if you want to filter this, so we only see clothing designed specifically for male figures. We just need to switch filter by context on again, which narrows it down to just these four installed products. We could also go over to the files tab here, which is inheriting that same wardrobe filter, where it shows us each individual item of clothing rather than the individual products they belong to that are for our Genesis eight male character. But we'll go back to products view. And I want to address this guy up in a nice suit of armor. So we'll grab the STF bone breakout armor here, which is also designed for Genesis. Eight males will double-click that, which then shows us all the individual wardrobe items included in this particular product. So with our character still selected, we can double-click on one of these to apply it to our character. And that's applied at exactly where you'd expect it to go on our model. And we could carry on applying each item one by one, like so. But most products and dads will also come with the ability to apply a complete set of clothing items and accessories. As we can see up here. This one actually has three wardrobe sets, including the barbarian set, the bone break a set, and the gladiator set. So if we were to double-click on one of these, again without character selected. That's now applied that full costume to our character, which is quite convenient. And we might just grab our tone map up. And in parameters, Let's just brighten up the exposure so we can see that armor a bit better. And that looks good. But I think our character might be a bit too scrawny for the bone, break a costume. So let's grab our figure again and head back over to the shaping controls. And we've got this bodybuilder morph down here. So let's blend that in to bulk, outgoing up a bit. And you'll also notice that the clothing stayed in place and adapted to the Morph, which is great. And aside from the wardrobe items in this product, this particular asset also comes with props, which in this case is a series of weapons. And if we click on this knife, for example, that gets placed at the center of our scene here. So let's undo that and try the sword, which also turns up down here in a bit of an awkward position for our character there. So we'd better undo that as well. If you want to place a prop directly into one of his hands, this particular product also has the ability to do that by clicking on one of these items labeled L, H, or H for left-hand and right-hand, which is pop that into his right hand and tweak the hand pose itself to grip the sword, which is also now parented to the hand as well, which is quite cool. So let's put the knife in the other hand, will need the left-hand version. And there we go. So now that we've got him Ahmed up, let's see if this product comes with any poses we can use. And indeed we've got a few to choose from here. Let's just try this first one. So I'll double-click on that as well. And now he's looking a bit more intimidating. Plus the props and clothing are still parented correctly. And we will look at posing our models a bit more in depth later on in the course, but using the preset poses is a good way to start. Let's see what else we've got included here. We've also got some material presets, which will also look into a little later on. And we have some accessories. And in this case, we've got a few different Nicholas's we can add to our character. But these have actually already been applied because they were part of the bone break. A wardrobe set that we added earlier back in here, which is the full set of everything in this product. So that's how we'd apply agenesis eight assets to a genesis eight character. But we can actually apply older assets to our Genesis eight characters as well. So let's take a look at that. This time we've got the Genesis eight female character in here instead. And over in smart content. Where filtering this by wardrobe again, which shows us everything designed for our Genesis eight female characters. But if we disable filter by content, we now have a lot more assets to choose from in here, because we're no longer only showing items designed for Genesis eight figures. We're also seeing clothing for male characters as well, which we can still apply it to our female characters if we want to. And we've also got items designed for older Genesis characters like this, a raincoat that was designed for the older Genesis three characters. So let's see how we go about applying assets not designed for our current type of character. We're going to inside our raincoat asset and in the wardrobe items, Let's start by adding just the rain jacket. Rather than applying straight onto our character. Getting into triggered the auto fit pop up because does is clever enough to know when you're trying to apply an older items to the wrong kind of figure. But we can use this feature to convert older assets for use with newer characters. All we need to do is tell dazzle which figure the asset we want to apply. It was originally created for. And we know that this is a Genesis three female raincoat. Let's select that. And then it's asking what kind of isomer we're trying to apply. Depending on the item, it might not always fit into one of these four categories. In our case, we could probably go with dresses because I guess it is a little dress like, but what I usually do if in doubt is just leave this set to none and hit Accept. And that usually does a pretty good job of figuring out how to adapt this to our character. Like so. You can see it wasn't quite a perfect auto fit. Her bumps poking through slightly here. But after we pose our character, we should be able to correct that. And also this area here. So let's do the same again and add the socks this time. Again. This is for Genesis three females. And there's no option in here for socks either. So let's just go with none. And that's done a fairly decent job of applying the socks as well. Then we'll do the same for the shoes. I think if we zoom in here, we are getting quite a bit of those socks poking through the shoes, which might be a bit easier to see if we apply some different materials to these. So let's just turn on the materials filter. And we'll go into this a bit deeper in the materials section of the course. But for now, let's just scroll down here until we find the shoe materials. And we'll go with this nice yellow Gumbert material. So let's double-click that, which you'll notice did absolutely nothing. And that's because we actually need to select the item of clothing we want to apply this to from our hierarchy over here. So we'll just grab those boots at the bottom of the list here and try double-clicking that again. And now that material has been applied to the shoes. Then we'll grab this socks and we'll see what material options we have for socks. And we've got a few different patterns to choose from, but I think we'll just go with the plain white socks. So double-click those. And now you can probably see those white socks poking through those shoes a bit easier, but we will fix that very shortly. Let's just finish applying materials here. We'll grab our jacket. And I think that was back towards the top of the list. And we'll keep the outfit color coordinated and give that the yellow material as well. While we're here, let's also see if this product comes with any prompts. And it wouldn't be a rain outfit without an umbrella. We've got a few options. Let's just looks like the umbrella itself, which will pop in at the center of our scene. But I'd rather have this in her hand. So let's undo that. And we've got this umbrella left hand and umbrella right hand. So let's just say our character is left-handed, so we'll apply that. But if we take a look at this, it's not actually anywhere near her hand, which can be a bit of an issue when applying old assets to new models. But we can fix that manually if we grab our universal tool, which if we grab this, will give us the transform gizmo. And we can just reposition this by eye. Down here to her hand. You'll notice as well that this didn't repos our character's hand so she could grip the umbrella and like it did with our previous male character. So we'll have to do that manually as well. So if we grab the root of our character again and head over to poses, you can see we've got the hand poses separately in this product. We need to apply the left hand pose, which is this one. And now she's clenching that fist. So we should be able to slot that umbrella into there. Now, about there looks good. We might as well give this some material as well. So let's go back here and see what options we've got for the umbrella. Let's go with this semi-transparent material instead. Okay, that looks good. Let's quickly pose our character and we'll take a look at how to fix the bits of sock that are poking through her shoes. So let's go back to our list of products and make sure we have the root of our character selected. Then we'll filter by poses. And I've got the April showers poses installed here, which is also designed for older style characters. But let's go in there and see if these are going to work without neurogenesis, eight female character as well. So when picking one of these poses, we want to make sure we choose one that features the umbrella in the left hand as we've got it here. This one with LAH in the title might work. Let's double-click that and give it a try. And it's warning us that some of the values in the pose preset outside the limits of our current character, which usually happens when you try to apply old poses to new characters. So if this happens to you, I'd recommend leaving the limits on as they are. Otherwise, you might get some weird bending and twisting of the characters bones. Let's just leave those on. And unfortunately, it's still didn't quite work as well as we hoped. Her right arm is bending a bit awkwardly back there, but we can fix that manually as well. Let's just click on her shoulder here. And under parameters, we can tweak some of these values, like the Ben maybe to just bring that back out by her side. And we'll grab the next bone in the hierarchy and just twist and bend that out as well. We don't need to be perfect here. We'll look more in depth at posing a little later on in the course. But we'll just tweak this enough so that the clothing isn't intersecting too much. So bring this amount of tad as well. And maybe from the shoulder instead. We'll bring that out. Which looks about right. We'll just twist the hand around as well. So the umbrella isn't going straight through her face? Maybe from the forearm. Okay. That'll do Let's see what we can do to fix the intersecting cloth here and down through the shoes. So let's grab the jacket itself. And actually the surface selection tool here is good for doing this. And now that highlights that part of the jacket and selects it over here. And now if we go to our shaping panel, we can apply shaping to the coat as well under actor. Or better still, the code itself. So just like we looked at in the shaping, listen, we can reshape the clothes and make them fit the body a bit better. In this particular item, we can make the skirt longer or shorter if we like, or we could tweak the belt. And you can see we can swing that either side. We could adjust the sleeve length as well to fit your character's arms a bit better. But in our case, to fix this particular area will probably need to adjust the chest settings here. Let's try this one. And as easy as that, we've now puffed that up a bit and gotten rid of that intersecting. So let's check the back as well. Which looks fine except for this little bit poking through down here. Let's see if we can fix that. Probably under the glutes adjustment here. And that's also sorted that out. So back here, we do still have some weird stuff going on in the armpits, which is mainly due to using older clothes and poses on our Genesis eight character. But let's see if we can fix that as well. If we go up here this time to edit object, and down to geometry, we can try adding a smoothing modifier, which is a handy little tool for making clothes fit to your care a bit better. Okay, that now if we go back to parameters, we now have this mesh smoothing control down here. So let's see if we can use this to smooth this area out. First, we need to choose the object the cloth needs to collide with. In our case, we want it to collide and conform to the shape of our character's body. So that needs to say set to our Genesis eight female figure. And now we can use a combination of the collision iterations and smoothing iterations to smooth this out. So let's just increase these 21 and see if that makes any difference. And it did start to close up that gap. So let's bring those up one more level. And there we go. The clothing is now colliding with the character much more accurately and that's looking much better. Let's move on to the shoes. And we should probably check the socks first to make sure there's nothing weird going on under there as well. Let's collapse this backup and fund the boots in our list here. And we can click the I to hide those. And it does look like we've got a bit of skin poking through these as well. Let's grab the socks and under Mesh smoothing. Let's increase this again. Which did the job. So let's bring the butt's back. And this time, let's swing back to the Shaping tab and see what's shaping options we have on these. We could try the Expand all slider here, which grows those shoes outward, which could be an option. Another option we could try though, is backup here under the Edit menu. Under objects geometry, we want to add a push modifier. And okay, that. And that's also given our boots a bit more thickness. And we can adjust this back in perimeters and mesh offset down here. And by default this is set quite high. But if we drop the value down to something like 0.1 or maybe slightly higher, Let's try 0.3. And there we go, that's fixed it. However, I personally don't use the mesh offset too much because it can mess with the geometry a bit. Most of the time you're probably better off just using these shaping tools. But failing that it's always an option. So that's how we can fit older clothing items on ten new agenesis characters. Let's now have a look at some other things we can do with clothing in dad's. Some clouds can actually be simulated directly in dance studio, like you might do with cloth dynamics in Cinema 4D. But not all items, only items from the store that are de force compatible, like this one here. And d force is basically the simulation engine in Data Studio. So just make sure whatever product you find in the store has that in the title and you should be good to go. In fact, let's just check what other items we have in here that we can run a simulation on. Let's type de force into the search box here. And we've actually got quite a few of these installed now. And these do tend to be mainly new items designed for Genesis, eight characters and above. So you could even do the same thing back in the desk door if you're looking for these items, just type de force up here and you'll get a full list of compatible products. And there's also de force hair available to. You could simulate hairstyles as well. But if you just want to see close, we can click People and wearables and just filter clothing and accessories only, will just need any one of these. And because we're using a genesis eight female character again, we might want to filter that as well. So grab one of these if you'd like to follow along. Let's head back to Data Studio. And the defaults product will be using is this one here, the air winner outfit, which looks great by default, applied to our character. But let's see what happens when we add a pose. Let's filter these by function and take a look at the Flying poses. I think we'll go with this one here and we'll leave the limits on again. And now you can see where we might run into issues. It doesn't look too bad from the front. But if we spin around here, you can see that that dress definitely isn't conforming to the shape of the body so well. And this leg is actually going straight through it. And this is exactly the kind of situation where simulating your clothing is going to help. So to do that, the first thing we need to do is make sure that we only have the objects in our scene that we need to simulate. In our case, that's going to be just the clothing and whatever you want colliding with the cloth, which in our case is going to be the character base mesh. So let's hide some of these accessories that also come with our divorce products because we don't need them to interact with the same as well. In other way we can do this is grab one of these. And under perimeters, down under display, we've got a simulation setting. And if we want to keep this visible, but exclude it from our simulation, we just need to turn it off here, which is a bit like removing a Dynamics tag in Cinema 4D. But to be honest, it's quicker to just hide these. So let's just make sure all that's visible is the gown and the sleeves, as well as our character mesh. Then we'll go over to the simulation tab, which should be here by default. But if it's missing for you, you can find that up here on the window panes. And down here are the simulation settings. In there. All these are the main simulation settings. Before we do anything here, we just want to make sure that the dynamics engine is set to de force. We won't go over all of these settings. Just what we need to get a decent cloth simulation. Ideally, what we want here is to keep this exact pose but get rid of any intersecting and just have the cloth draped down more naturally with the help of gravity. So let's start with this setting here, we'll turn the start bones from memorize pose off for our first simulation, but we'll come back to that in just a minute. Then we've got frames to simulate which you might use if you've applied some keyframe animation to your character, which in this case we haven't. As you can see, there's no keyframes down here. And again, we'll look at that a little later as well. But for now, we just want to keep our modal stationary like this, but just simulate the cloth on her as is. So we'll leave that set to current frame. Then we've got our standard simulations settings like gravity, air resistance, and a few others we'll probably come across when doing dynamics in Cinema 4D, as well as the subframes and Solver iterations, which we can use to increase the accuracy of our sims. But let's just leave everything set to their defaults. And we'll come up here and hit the simulate button, which has done a pretty good job of draping the cloth over our stationary model. However, I can still see some areas of clothing poking through our character, especially down here. And that's probably because the cloth is having a hard time wrapping around are fairly complicated pose. If she was standing straight up with their arms by her side, this might have worked a bit better, but if we want to use a more elaborate pose like this, we might need to try something else. Let's just come back over here and hit the clear button to clear our simulation and reset it to how it was originally. And this time we're going to try simulating with start bones from memorize pose switched on. And basically the memorize pose is the starting pose of our character when we first added her to the scene. Before we apply it, our own posed to her. And we can revert back to that to have a look if we just grab our characters hip bone, which is the top of the bone hierarchy. Then over here we've got a little pause icon where we can restore the figure pose and clicking that puts her back into the original a pose from when we first added her to the scene. With this checked on, our simulation is going to start with our character in this pose. As the simulation progresses, she's actually going to animate into our custom pose and the cloth is going to follow along. In theory, we're going to get a better results and reduce any weird intersecting. So let's try it. We need to grab our character again though and come back here and re-apply our custom pose and leave the limits on again. Then back to simulation settings. And another thing we might want to look at before we resume this is in our default settings. Under advanced, we can just double-check that we're taking advantage of our GPU when we run our simulations. We've got two old GTX 1080 is in here, but just make sure this is set to use your GPU. If you've got a good one and you'll simulations should calculate a lot faster. So with these settings now, let's simulate our cloth again. You can see she's reverted back to that a pose now. And as the simulation progresses, she slowly moving back into our custom pose. The cloth can transition a bit easier and we should get a better result. And it did take a little longer to calculate them before, but I definitely think we're getting a much better result. We've now gotten rid of any intersecting and it's draping a lot more naturally. So nine times out of ten, simulating with these settings are going to do the job. But let's take a look at a slightly more complicated setup. If, for example, your character had a large dress like this and you wanted her in a sitting pose. This one, maybe you're going to get some pretty weird results where the dress is just wrapping around and flaring out all over the place. So let's see how we can fix this with another D4 simulation so that the dress drapes down over her legs and onto the floor and also over whatever she's sitting on, which I think in our case will just be a box. So let's bring in a cube for her to sit on. And we'll just hide the dress for now. So she's in her underwear, which will make positioning the cube a little bit easier. Then we'll come up here and creates a new primitive. And we'll select a cube and accept. Then we'll grab our universal tool, which gives us our transform gizmo. Then we'll make sure we've got our cube selected over here. We'll just scale this down by clicking here on the y-axis and just bring that down into position, which might be easier to see if we switch to the left view. And we'll just position this. So it looks like she's sitting right on top about there. Looks good. And we will tweak the positioning of the hands as well in a second. But let's go with this for the box, we'll switch back to perspective view. And we'll also need to rotate the box around a bit. So that's not going through her leg like that. So we'll grab this handle here and just point that in this direction. And finally, just pull that back this way. And I think that should be fine. Let's bring in a plane as well to use as a floor. So our dress has somewhere to fall onto. So back up here and grab the plane this time, which defaults to five meters wide, which I think should be fine, except that we might just rotate this around as well so that it's in line with the cube. Okay? So like we did in the last example, we want to simulate this from a straight standing pose, transitioning to this sitting pose. And this time we're going to do this with animation. So let's come down to the timeline here. And we know that this is going to be the final position of your pose. So let's go ahead to frame 30 at the end of our timeline. And it will set a keyframe at this sitting position. So we need to come back up here to the hip bone. And we want a keyframe, all of the bones. So we'll right-click and under Select, we need to select the children, which selects the entire bone hierarchy, which is also shown over here now. Then still on frame 30, we'll make sure we have objects selected here. And we'll click this icon here to add a keyframe. And it doesn't look like anything happened. But there is now a little black line on the timeline here indicating that a keyframe has been added. And now if we go back to frame 0, we need her to be in the standing position again. We'll grab just the hip and back here will restore the Figure Pose again, which has put her back in the original oppose. But it's also put a right inside the box which we don't want. So we'll also need to move it over here for this keyframe. So grab the gizmo again and drag her back over here. And if you find that it's not being very responsive, it's probably because we've got our hair visible in our scene, which tends to have really high polygon counts, which can slow your system down quite a bit. So we can actually hide that for now because we don't want it to be part of our simulation either, because it's only going to slow things down even further. So I'll hide both parts of the hair mesh here. And moving this should now be a bit more responsive. So I will just try and position our character parallel to the box. So it's nice and easy for her to sit down. Will just spin around a ten. So when she's animated, she's going from here straight back onto the box. And actually, as the dress is quite long, we might just cheated a bit and have our starting position slightly up above the ground, so there's space for it to hang down. So now sugar from up here, slowly over to the sitting position. And hopefully doing this will prevent any limbs crossing over or intersecting bits of cloth. So we just need to keyframe this as well. So right-click again on the hips and select all the children. Then still in object mode, we'll add another keyframe at two all the bones. And now if we scroll through the timeline, we get a nice smooth transition from standing to sitting. I think we're ready to simulate this. Let's collapse this up. And we can probably hide her eyelashes as well because we don't need those to be part of the simulation either. Then we'll bring back the dress and we can hide her underwear as well because they also don't need to be part of the simulation. But we do have one little problem here. The dress is going through the box, which could potentially break now simulation. So we will need to fix that with our character selected again. We'll bring that forward a tad until the dress is outside the cube. We just need to select the children again and overwrite that keyframe back on frame 0. And we'll just scroll through the timeline again to make sure that's all good now, which I think it is. So let's head back to the simulation settings. We can just click here to collapse the tips panel there. And this time we want start bones from MRIs pose switched off. But under frames simulated, we want to change this to animated, use timeline play range, which as the name suggests, will use the keyframe animation from L timeline. So we'll do one last check that we only have the objects visible in our scene that we want to be part of the simulation. And then we'll hit simulate. And there you go. We're getting some nice looking folds increases in that dress and everything's colliding nicely with the floor and the box. And just to finish this off, we could grab our active Pose tool and just tweak those hands so that they are actually touching the cube, like so. And again, we'll go deeper into posing a little later on in the course. And finally, we'll just turn the visibility back on for all the other objects in our scene to complete the setup. And that concludes our look at clothing and accessories in deaths. 7. Hair: Okay, let's see what we can do with hair assets in dad's 3D. Again, we're using our Genesis eight female model in our scene. So let's just filter by context so we can see all the hair products that are designed for this model. And I think we'll go with the Clio here, and we'll go with the Genesis eight version. So as usual with our character selected, let's double-click that. And that's looking cool. Although it is looking a little transparent in the Viewport here. So let's first click here and turn off the floor, which makes things a little easier to see. We might also switch back to texture shaded mode. Okay, that here's a bit easier to see. Now, some hair products come with their own materials, accessories, and in this case, poses as well. So to make your hair look a bit more dynamic and not just falling straight down, we will need to select the hair object from the hierarchy and apply a more interesting pose. Let's try this one, which probably suits the body pose a bit better. Although I feel like the hair would probably be more to this side if she turned her body like this. So maybe we'd be better off with something like this instead. That's better. So that's our basic hair posing. One thing I'll also mention that I've just noticed that this product is that some assets also have a Lost and Found filter, as we can see here. And basically, this is just where anything that doesn't have any metadata will end up. So it's probably worth checking because sometimes poses will end up in here like this because they don't have any tags or don't fit into the different filters. Let's also take a look under the materials where we've got different options for coloring the hair. So let's maybe go with this blue option here. So again, making sure the hair is selected. We'll double-click that. And that's looking pretty cool. Let's have a look at manually posing our hair as well. If we click on one of these painted plots of the hair, we could manually rotate that out a bit more or with the active Pose tool here, which again, we'll look at more in depth in the posing section of the course. We can click and drag these out. Its influence all of the plants together in a bit more of an organic way. Or we could try that on the main body of the hair as well. And this bit as well. Or we could go back to the root of the hair. And under the Parameters tab, you can see we've got the name of the hair here. And under the active filter, we get a load more sliders we can use to tweak the different parts of the hair. So let's try this first one, which lifts the crown of the head up and down. Or we could adjust the hairline, try some of these ones. We can also head over to the Posing tab and click on actor again, we will find even more options to control the hair. And the fringe controls down here are quite cool. Then down here will allow us to twist those braids or flare them out a bit. When you're happy with the hat, it's probably a good idea to switch back to the IRA view to see how things are looking when rendered, just to make sure the hair is sitting the way you like it. We might just increase the exposure a bit in the tone mapper again. So we can see that a bit better. That's the standard way to pose your hair. But we can also simulate here dynamically as well. So let's take a look at another example and see how to do that. So just like clothing and dares, we can simulate assets that are de force compatible. So under our hair filter, let's do a quick search for de force, which we currently have five different hair products installed. And I've actually already applied this one to our Genesis eight character here. So let's head over to the simulation settings and reset this back to the defaults. So we're starting fresh and we'll try stimulating our hair. And just like we did when simulating cloth, we need to remove anything in our scene that we don't want to be part of our Sim. Like the boots for example. We can do that by switching off the visibility or down here under display simulation, we'll just turn off visible in simulation. And we'll do that on all the items of clothing in our scene. So that we're only left with the character and the hair. And the hair is actually in two parts. This bit is the main hair geometry. And this is the scalp, which if we take a closer look at by hitting Control, F, is just a separate geometry that has this texture applied to it. So we don't really need that in our simulation either. So I'll switch that off as well. So now we've only got the de force here and now character geometry included in the sim will frame this up again. And we could run this as is from our memorize pose, which like we looked at back in the clothing lesson. We'll go from the original oppose to the current pose, which will actually be quite slow on here. So that's one way to go. But we could also clear that and switch that off so that the post stays like this and the hair settles straight down into place because of gravity. So something like this, which is also quite slow. So let's stop that there. Or another thing we could do to get this hair to match the pose a bit better. It looks like she's jumping downward in this direction. So it'd be cool if we could push the hair back this way. So let's clear this. And if we come up here to the Create menu, we can probably do this with a d force when node, which is similar to the wind force in cinema 4D. And we'll accept that. And if we zoom out of ten, we can see the window down here. So we could grab that and move it wherever he wants in the scene. And I might just angle that upward a bit. So it's pointing in the direction of her face. Then we'll take a look at the Windows settings in our wind node. And these are very similar to the wind settings we'd expect to find in Cinema 4D as well. But before we go changing any of these, Let's see what the default settings give us. Let's simulate this. And the hair just drops straight down again like it did before. So it doesn't look like the wind is affecting it yet. Let's cancel that and clear the sim again. If you want the hair to be affected by the wind in dance studio, we actually need to make sure it's within the area of influence here, within these bounds. So let's just try repositioning this directly in front of her face. About there should do it. And to be completely sure, our hair is within the windowed area of influence, Let's just enlarge that by increasing the diameter setting here. And there's also a falloff control which can adjust this outer area as well, just like we get in Cinema 4D. But we didn't really need to do that for this same set. Let's leave this as is and re-simulate. And we'll stop that there. That wind is definitely starting to push the hair back in this direction. But I think I want it to be a bit more extreme and even lift upward a bit more. Let's grab the wind again and rotate it upward a little bit more. And will also double the strength to ten and clear and re simulate that. And actually, I'll just double-check that our hair still fits within those bounds. And we'll just bring it down to ten and try that. We'll stop that there. And it's definitely starting to get there. But if we take a look from up here, you can see that that wind is blowing air up here and pushing this part of the hair around here. And the same on the other side, which looks a bit weird. Ideally, we want this part to be blowing backwards as well to make it look like she's falling down. But the problem is our character mesh is actually blocking the wind and preventing it from affecting the hair directly behind the head. So the wind is only going around the sides. So to fix that, we need to do is grab our character and back down in the simulation settings. We can just remove her from the sim so the wind will only affect the hair. Will clear that and try this again. And we'll stop that there. And now if we take a look from the top, that means now going straight through and pushes all the hair in the direction we want. And I think that's looking a bit more realistic. Cell will fire off an IRA random. And that's pretty much the basics of hair in DAS studio. 8. Materials: Okay, so let's take a look at textures and materials in DAS studio. In our scene here we've got the Victoria 8.1 female character. And if we pop this open, we've also added a few items of clothing, including a top and some leggings, which are part of this x fashion spring set. And along with the clothing geometry, this product also comes with a bunch of material variations. We can apply it to the close. And we've got quite a few colors and styles we can choose from. So if I grab the top, for example, let's switch this red color out with maybe this purple variation. So we just need to double-click on that. And it's now been applied to the geometry. We can easily cycle through these until we find the look we like. And as we did in the previous lesson, if we want to get a better look at this, we can switch the view mode two filament PBR, which gives us a more realistic representation of how those textures actually look. Aside from the hair, of course, which looks a little bit weird in this mode unfortunately. And we can also take a look at the material attributes of any object down here in the surfaces tab. And this is the current material. Apply it to our top. If we click on, shows us the material attributes, which is very similar to what you might find in cinema 4D and redshift. And if we roll over the base color, which is like the diffuse color in Redshift Materials, we get a little preview of the image texture that's currently plugged into there, which is that white shirt variation. And if we click here, we can actually swap that texture map out for any of the other maps currently used in our scene. Or we can come up here to browse, which pops up the directory where our current texture is located, which is in our dads library in the project folder. We could choose a different texture from here, or we could grab the current text jump, which is this white one here, and customize it further outside of their studio. So we could open this up in Photoshop and paint in our own design if we wanted to, we could grab any of the other textures from this particular product. And we even have all the maps from the other items of clothing in here as well. Let's just close this for now and take a look at what else we can do within our material. If you wanted to do some simple color correction within Data Studio, we can tint our textures by turning the diffuse overlay fully up to 100 per cent, which then gives us the option to select a diffuse overlay color. And if we click here, we get our color swatches pop up. So let's choose a nice bright green. And now she's got a green top. And if we undo that and turn off the overlay, we can click back on our diffuse texture map. And at the top here, we've got a layered image editor. So let's fire that up. And we'll click here to fit the texture to the window. And this is like a mini Photoshop directly within their studio. So this is our base texture layout, which we see here. But just like Photoshop, we can add a new layer, which defaults to this black color. But if we click there, we can change this to that green color again. And we can now blend this green layout with our base image. So we could blend it with the opacity slider here, like so. Or if we put that back, we can also use the different blending modes, like we'd be able to do in Photoshop. So let's try the additive blend, which adds a little green tint over that. Then we can just accept that. And she now has a slightly greener top. So it's nice to have the extra flexibility right here in Data Studio. But let's just undo that. And like any other 3D material system, we have all the other channels you might expect, like bump and normals, as well as reflections and roughness and that sort of thing. But we won't go too deep into that because we will be creating a materials directly in Cinema 4D with a red shift a little later on. So for now, let's just grab the leggings, which currently black, and switch that with our blue denim material preset here. So we've got our clothing materials sorted now. So let's take a look at applying textures and materials to hair. Will grab the hair object we've gotten now seen, which if we go back to our products list under here, is this one up here, the FE punk hair for Genesis, eight female characters. And inside there, the materials. This product comes with quite a few different texture variations. So let's pick one of these, maybe this multicolored blue look. So we'll double-click that, which has applied it, but it is a bit hard to see in this view. So let's come up here and fire off an IRA render to get a better look at this. And again, it's a little bit dark here. So let's grab the tone map up and just increase the exposure. I think I'm pretty happy with the hair. Let's move on to skin materials to finish our character off. Let's switch back to filament again. So things are a bit more responsive and will compensate for the exposure again as well. Now agenesis eight female character is actually Victoria, 8.1, who like most other characters and does also comes with a bunch of skin and body materials as well. So if we go and find her in our product list on the figures, here is Victoria 8.1. And inside here, in materials. Let's see what we can use in here. We can actually pop this open and filter these further. Let's show all the textures only, which gives us options for eye color. So without character still selected, let's zoom in a tent to her eyes. And we'll try a different eye color which updates those. But I think the blue eyes might be better to match the rest of the outfit and the hair will double-click this one. And we'll see what we've got down under the feminine filter. And this is where you can find the different options for character makeup. So lets just grab one of these and apply some makeup to our character's face. And I think that matches our character nicely as well. We've also got some options for eyelashes, so we'd need to select the eyelashes geometry before applying that. And I think this is thick eyelashes, which I think we already had applied. We could go with thin eyelashes, which is maybe a more natural look. Let's just go back to thick. I think it matches the makeup a bit more. And what else do we have in here? We've also got some cool tattoos with this particular character. So let's just zoom back out again. We might try this tattoo, upper left, which I'm guessing should be applied here to the left arm. We just need to remember to select our character again and not the eyelashes. And double-click that to apply. And now she's rocking a cool flamingo tat over there. What's cool about this is that this is actually marked as layered, which means it's applied as an extra texture layer over our base texture. Meaning if we were to select the arm here and take a look at the surfaces tab, the L Victoria 8.1 character and arms. This will give us the material applied to the arms. And if we look at the texture map applied here, There's our tattooed arm. And if we click on that and head back to the layered image editor and zoom to fit again. You can see how Teddy has been applied to a separate layer above the skin texture. So we could disable that or edit it further directly in here if we wanted to or if we close this. Another way we can remove Ted Cruz is to just select our base character again. And often we'll have a tattoo removal scripts included in the product, which we can just double-click to run and remove that particular tattoo were also not limited to using only materials from this particular character. If we come back here, we can choose any other products like the nefarious character here, for example. And under her materials, Let's make sure we still have our Victoria figure selected and we can replace our Victoria materials with one from NFL. Let's try her base skin material. And it looks like we've completely replaced our character, but this is just the skin texture from this figure applied to our current Victoria figure. So you can come up with some very unique looking characters by mixing and matching materials and textures. And when you combine this with the shaping and posing tools as well, there's really no limit to what you can create. So that sell fairly quick look at materials in DAS studio. 9. Posing: Let's take a look at how we can go about posing our characters and dance studio. So one way might be to pop open your character hierarchy and find the individual bone you want to pose, like the left collarbone here. Then under parameters, we can access the transform controls and just twist, rotate or bend that into position. But that's obviously quite a slow process. So instead, we could grab the universal tool here and select any bone and use the transform gizmo to rotate or position these bones like so. And manipulating the pose this way is definitely a bit faster. We've also got this tool here that I might just demo on the shoulder bone. These blue, green and red rings here correspond to the red, green and blue transform controls over here, which is basically the x, y, and z axis of each bone. So if we click and drag the blue ring that rotates the bone on the z axis, the green on the y-axis, and the red, the x-axis. All we can tweak a combination of all three accesses by dragging the sphere around here in the center, which can help pose the bone a bit faster and more organically. Another advantage of using the universal tool is that we can use pinning, which is represented by this little thumbtack icon here. If we grab a bone and click on this, we can choose to pin the translation, which is the position. And we can pin the rotation as well. Now if we grab another bone, maybe one on the other side of the body. If we move that around, you can see that are pinned, bone stays locked in place. Whereas if we were to unpin those and try moving that again, that whole top part of the body is being pulled in that direction as well. So aside from the universal tool, another good tool for posing is the active Pose tool here, which works much the same way. We can still click on any bone and move it easily into place. But the advantage of this is that we get a few extra options. If we click here on the tool settings, we get this extra penalty related to our active Pose tool. And this tool also lets us use pins in a slightly different way. If we grab a bone, we can pin this into place easily by clicking toggled pin. And that's represented by the red pin icon here, which again will allow us to manipulate other bones, keeping the pin bone in place. We also have accuracy controls in here, which allows us to slow down the movement of the bones as we position them. So if we make this more accurate, you'll see that moving the bones is now much slower, which allows us to very carefully pose each bone and get them into more intricate positions. Or we can take this back the other way. And the bones become very loose and free flowing. And we can add multiple pins nice and quickly with this tool as well. We just need to grab another bone and toggle the pin on there as well, which will allow us to manipulate the lower half of the model without affecting those arms. And removing pins is just as easy. We just need to click unpin. Or if you do prefer this method of posing, you might want to set a keyboard shortcut to toggle your pins on and off, so you don't need to come back and forth from here. So to do that, we just need to hit F3 on the keyboard to bring up the customization window. And if we scroll down to the power pose section, you can find the Toggle pins section in here. And if we right-click on that, we can set a keyboard shortcut, which asks us to set any key we'd like to use. In this case, I'll go with the letter P, which is apparently already set to another command. But I think it would just overwrite that and hit Yes and accept that. And now if we grab a bone and hit P on the keyboard, we can very quickly add pins to where we need them. And if we hit P again on the same bone, they'll also be removed. So that'll definitely speed up. You'll posing workflow. That's the active Pose tool. If we have a mess up our pose completely and need to reset all of the bones. We just need to click up here and restore fig up pose. Or without character selected, we can hit Control Shift S on the keyboard, which puts her back in the original oppose. So let's move on to the next posing tool, the power pose, which has its own tab here. And if you don't see this, you can also find it up here under window panes. And power pose is right here. And in there we have this representation of our character where we can easily choose any bone we like. To manipulate the pose. We can use these controls down here. If we click on a bone and drag left to right, Let's going to rotate the bone back and forth. Then dragging up and down is going to bend it. And if we right-click instead and drag side-to-side, we get that same rotation. But holding the right mouse button and dragging up and down, we'll twist the bone. So you might find that this is an easier way to do your posing. You'll also notice that some of these controllers look a bit different. We've got a circle, a circle with dots around it, and a diamond one here as well. The diamond allows us to reposition the entire model Nice and easy. The circle with the dots around it means we can select multiple bones. So this one, for example, is for the whole right arm. We can manipulate that altogether and you can see it's bending as well. And if we switch to the right mouse button, we can twist that as well. So we can get some pretty quick poses out of this. This point in the middle here lets you move both legs together at the same time. And this one does both arms together as well. And I think this one rotates the head. And that leads us to the head controls here. With the head still selected, we can hit Control F to frame up on that. And we can stop posing the facial expressions with these controls. We could drop that eyebrow and maybe raise this one. And this one controls the direction the eyes are pointing in. Then we could grab the chin and open the mouth or use these to give her a bit of a smile. And we can use this one to make her a wink. Like so. Let's click back here to the main body controls. And we also have a separate controller for the hands. So that's frame up on her left hand, which corresponds to the left hand here. So we can grab the circles again and manipulate each finger bone. Well, grab the circle with dots and tweak the whole thing got together. So we can really quickly pose these and this one in the middle effects or the fingers at once. And here's the thumb. And this definitely makes posing your hands much easier. I think that's the main posing tools available in deaths. But a lot of the time, it's easiest to start with a pre-made pose from our pose library. So lets just grab a different character and take a deeper look at that. We now have our Charlotte eight character back in the default pose. So let's take a look at the products we bought that include poses, which we can find here in the smart content. But I find it's a bit easier to find things over in the Files tab. Because now if we look at poses, it shows us every pose available rather than for each product, so we can quickly find the pose we like. And I also think there are a bit better organized in here as well. So that's fine, uh, posed by function. And maybe an action pose would be cool for our Charlotte character. And we've got some jumping and kicking and punching poses in here. So let's try one of those. And as usual, we'll leave the limits on. And that looks pretty cool. So we can really quickly and easily try a few different poses. Let's filter this by jumping poses and give this one a go. And that's a bit Trinity from the matrix. We can also filter these by region, which means part of the body. So here's the full body poses. Let's try this sitting pose. Nice. Then we have partial body poses. And we can show only poses for the arms. For example, if we just wanted to change this left arm, we could grab a left arm pose from in here. Let's find something dramatic. Maybe this one. And that's only affected the left arm, like so. We have poses for all the other body parts. So let's go into legs and we'll just apply a different right leg pose. Further down. We also have facial expressions. So let's just frame up on her face. Because a lot of these expressions are designed for different characters. They're not all going to look great on Charlotte here. But let's give it a try. Let's try this angry face, which definitely looks a bit goofy on our character, but still not a bad starting place. Let's try another one. Okay, that one's definitely a bit creepy. Let's try a more neutral one. Anyway. I think you get the point. Let's take a look at some other things we can do with the pre-made poses. What if we decided we really like what this left arm is doing? And we wanted to copy that exact same pose over to the other arm. One way we could do it is grab the root bone of the arm, which is going to be the shoulder here, which is actually the left collarbone here. If we right-click on that and select the children, which selects all the bones in that arm. We can then click here on the Options icon and use the symmetry function, which gives us this pop-up here, where we can specify how we want the symmetry to behave. I think in our case, we'll need to take a look at the direction which is currently set to mirror left to right, which is exactly what we want because we're going from the left arm across to the right. So all we need to do is hit Accept. Now the pose from the left arm has been copied to the corresponding bones on the right arm. And another thing we could do is grab another pose preset, maybe from the jumping section here. And if we wanted to, we can apply a full body pose like this and have it only affect a particular parts of our model. If we grab a leg, for example, and select all the children again of that right thigh. If we want that leg to inherit only the bent leg part of this jumping pose, or we need to do is hold control and double-click on here to bring up the pose preset options. If we switch the node type from root to selected, where basically telling dares to only apply this pose to the leg which we've selected. We also need to set the propagation to select it only as well. And if we leave the rest as is and hit accept, only the right leg parts of that pose has been applied. And you can see that now matches this. But the rest of the model stays how it was. So that's a pretty handy tool for quickly mixing and matching different poses together. So let's talk about a few ways we can reset our model if our posing goes horribly wrong. One way we can do it is by grabbing our character and down under the options here, we can select restore, figure out pose, which restores that original a pose. Or we can undo that and grab our active Pose tool. And now if we click anywhere on our character, we get now posing tools up here. And if we click on this icon, we can restore the pose from here as well. And another way we can do this is with our character selected. We can go back to the Options. And this time under 0, we can 0 our figure, which gives us that exact same starting a pose. But what this actually does is set all the transform values on every bone back to 0. Which at this point is exactly the same thing. But the reason why you might want to reset the pose instead of zeroing everything out, is that you can actually set your own custom default pose, which at anytime you could restore to. Rather than having the a pose as the default pose we can reset to, let's make it our current pose. So to do that, we just need to go back here again with our character selected. And this time we'll choose memorize, memorize our Figure Pose. And now if we go back to posers and just give our character a different pose. If at any time we wanted to revert back to our memorize pose, or we need to do is come back here and Restore Figure Pose, which now gives us the memorize pose instead of the appose. We can also restore partial poses as well. If we wanted to restore just this leg, we just need to select that again. And the children will just 0 this out, this time by choosing 0 selected items. And all transforms on that leg are reset to 0, which straightens it out like so. Another thing we can do is save the current pose as a preset that we can then use to pose any other figure we like with our character selected will need to go to the Content Library. And under Data Studio formats will export our current pose into our dads 3D library by right-clicking on there and creating a subfolder, which we'll call custom poses. And then we can right-click on our new folder and find it on our computer by clicking browse to the folder location. We can copy this location so we can save our new pose preset into there and easily find it again. So we'll close that. And again with our cactus selected, we'll go to File, Save As, and we'll save a pose preset. And we just want to put this in that same folder we created. So I'll just paste the directory into here and we can name it whatever we like. I'll just go with something like Cool Pose and save. And we do want to save the pose from the current frame. So that's fine. And we'll just make sure that we're saving the post data from all the bones and hit Accept. And here's our new pose preset with a thumbnail of our character as well. So now if we reset our character pose again, at anytime, we can double-click on our custom pose to apply that again, we can use this exactly the same way we would with a pose from the data store. So we can apply it to any other character we want. And we could also share the pose with someone else as well. Okay, so let's take a look at some other tools we can use for posing our characters. If we come up to Window. Paine's, let's open up the puppeteer tool, which has been docked over here. Basically, this is going to allow us to store a series of different poses and blend between them to create a custom pose. So let's start with a few poses from our library. If we go to function, Let's try dancing poses. And we have this product installed, which has some dance moves, will go in there and see if we can find those. Here we go. With our character selected. Let's apply this first one. Now, over in our puppet TO window, we can click anywhere on this grid, which gives us a little dot that represents the current pose. And then we can add another pose. And so we don't get this pop-up every time. Let's just take this. So does remember is our preference. And now we can leave the limits on, which will now be on automatically by default. And now with our new pose, Let's click in here again to capture that pose. Then we might go with something a bit more extreme, like this move here. And again, we'll click to add that pose to our puppeteer as well. And we'll add one more pose. Let's go with this one here and add that as well. Now, if we switch to preview mode here in the puppeteer, if we click on this dot, we switch back to that first stored pose, which was this one here, then the second pose and the third pose, etc. And the cool thing about this setup is that we can also click and drag between these two blend from one pose to the next. And we can even get a blend of all four poses, which is a really quick way of coming up with interesting custom poses for your characters. Plus you could also use this to store a bunch of poses quickly for easy access. We can also take a look at the puppeteer options here and add another layer, I k. And that gives us the second grid here. So maybe this time we'll just do a series of upper body poses instead. So let's hit Control Shift F on the keyboard, which is the shortcut to reset our modal back to the a pose. And this time we'll select some poses by region, partial body and upper body. Let's grab this one and store that pose, which we need to do back in edit mode. Then we'll do this one. Install that. And this one. And we'll just do three this time. Now if we go to preview again, we can blend the poses together on this layer as well. And if we switch to record mode and pop open the animation timeline down here. In the record mode, if we now click and drag between our stored poses, you can see that that's now being recorded two keyframes on our timeline. If we rewind that back to the start of the keyframes, we can play that back as an animation. So you could use this to create some funky dance moves or just as a way to come up with some cool poses. So that's the basics of posing and dads. And that should lead us nicely into the next lesson, where we'll look at animation. 10. Animation: Does Studio also comes with some basic animation tools. So let's take a quick look at those in this lesson. Over at the bottom of the screen here, we've got the animation timeline that we briefly looked at earlier and another tab called Animate light. And if we click on this, this is actually a paid plug-in for DAS studio, but the light version is free and comes pre-installed. However, it's not quite as feature-rich as the paid version. But let's see what we can do with this anyway. Basically, this is going to allow us to quickly and easily apply it pre-made animations, some of which we can see down here directly onto our characters. We're currently looking at the dance category in which we have various dance moves we can use. And you'll notice if we roll over any of these, we get a live preview of each move directly on our selected character. Although, because it is a preview and not yet applied to our model, the playback is a little bit jerky, but we can improve that by hiding any unnecessary geometry in our scene. So the Preview can calculate a bit faster. So if we pop the character hierarchy open, Let's hide the heavier objects like the hair especially, and the jacket. And now if we roll over these, it should play back a bit more smoothly. So we can go through these and find an animation we like. Or we can come back here and choose a different category, which again is fairly limited in the free version. Let's try fighting. And we've got some cool boxing moves and these animations that actually from motion capture. So they're pretty high-quality as well. When you find one you like maybe this kicking animation, we just need to double-click on that to apply it to the animate light timeline. And if we now play this, it's only playing up to this point here. So we just need to slide our end point to the end of that clip. And now we'll see that whole motion. Then wherever we put our little playback mark on the timeline, we can come back down here and insert another animation clip, maybe from dancing in. It will double-click on this first one. And that gets added right where the playback Marco was at the end of our kicking animation. So again, we'll just extend that endpoint out and play that. Now we transition between kicking and dancing fairly seamlessly. So it's a bit like motion clips in cinema 4D. And if you want a bit more control over the animation, we can bake these moves two keyframes, which we can then manipulate over in our timeline. So all we need to do is right-click in here and select bake to studio keyframes, and we'll hit yes to that. And now if we switch over to the timeline, we can now see all of those baked keyframes in here. And if we play this through, There's our animation. And it does actually play back even smoother now that we've baked it down. So we couldn't bring our hair and jacket back. And the playback should be a lot better. Alright, So now that we've got our keyframes, we can also fine tune our animation as well. So if we just move this up a bit to give ourselves a bit more space. We can also click here to bring up the dope sheet. Similar again to what we'd find in cinema 4D. And if we go into here and maybe grab the characters hip bone on the properties, let's just tweak the animation of it and maybe not have her walk so far forward when she goes for that kick, which is along the z axis here. So we need to find that in our transform trachea down under the Z Translate. And from these keyframes, we can see that the hips starts out in the center of our scene, then moves forward on the z axis when she does the kick and returns back into the center, I have a walk not quite as far forward. Let's just get to the closest point to the camera about there. And we'll bring this keyframe down on the z axis back toward the center. So she doesn't walk toward us quite so far about there. Then we'll click and drag to select all of those keyframes in front of that position. Then right-click and delete selected keys. And then, so that movement is a little smoother. Let's just bring this up, attend to make that more of a curve and we'll play that back. And just like that, she's no longer walking so far forward to do that kick. So one of the animation tools here aren't quite as comprehensive as they are in Cinema 4D. You can still do quite a bit directly in DAS studio if you need to. So let's close this up for now. And if we want to remove all these keyframes and get rid of the animation, all we need to do is grab the root of our character and select all of the children. And down here in the timeline options, we can clear animation and just choose Clear figure. And now if we rewind this and close this all back up, we can now hit play. And all the keyframes have now been removed. We can start fresh if we need to. We can also animate our characters in a more traditional way as well. By first changing the mode down here to object, then selecting our character. We can actually animate or Tween between poses. So let's grab some dancing poses. She'll probably be easier to find under files instead of products. So back to dancing. Let's have our characters start in this pose on the first frame of our timeline. And if we click this in object mode, that will set a keyframe. Then if we go ahead to the end of the timeline and grab another pose like this crazy one here. That should now automatically add a keyframe for us, as you can see here. So if we now play this back, we animate from one pose to the next, which is a little slow for my liking. So let's grab this keyframe. Right-click. Then we can copy selected keys. And we'll have this pose a bit sooner on the timeline on frame 60, where we can right-click again and paste keys. We don't need this key frame anymore. So let's right-click and delete selected keys. And now if we play that, the animation is happening a bit faster. And we can also key-frame are transformed values too. If we want to find soon, I'll pose animation. So maybe we could grab her head here and hit Control F to frame up on that. Let's hand animate her smiling as she does her dance move. So we'll go back to frame 60 and we'll give her a nice big smile, which we can find over in the Posing tab. And with the head already selected on the post controls. Here is our smile control. Let's bring that right up. And maybe this one as well. And there's a nice big goofy smile, which again should be key framed automatically. So if we scroll back to the start, we have no smile. And as we play through, she starts smiling as she gets into her crazy dance move, like so. So that's how to manually animate your characters. Let's take a look at one more way to animate in dance studio. And that's by simply buying an animation preset from the marketplace. In this scene, we've got our Genesis eight male character, and I've installed this guitar animations pack from the data store. And under the animations filter, we've got loads of pre-made animations inside there. Or if we go to files instead, we can see all the animations we have available in our library, not just from that particular product. And you might also notice that some of these animations start affecting your character as soon as you roll over them. While others like this one here don't. And that's because these animations with the preview, our four animate light. So rather than being applied to the timeline here, those animations will show up in the animate Light tab here, like we looked at earlier. So these animations corresponds to what we have down here in this menu. If you want the animate light animations on the animation timeline, you'll just need to remember to right-click and bake the keyframes. But let's undo that and we'll apply one of the animations from our guitar product. And it's asking us if we want to extend the timeline to fit the whole animation. So I'll hit yes to that. And now if we go back to the animation timeline, here's our guitar animation baked in as keyframes. Let's play that back. And now guy is playing a bit of a guitar. So you probably want to grab a guitar prop as well to go with this, which I'm sure you'll be able to find in the data store as well. And that is about it for animating your characters in dass. 11. Daz to c4d: Okay, So the best way to get your dares characters into Cinema 4D is back here in the dad's shop over, under bridges and file formats where we can find all of the plug-ins for our favorite 3D packages, including trusty old cinema 4D. So let's click that and you can read all about it on this page or scroll straight to this section and click here for the product page itself. And it is free, which is nice. And there's a few videos here showing how to use it as well. But let's just add that to the cart and checkout. And now when we opened as Central again, we'll get this pop up asking if we want to install the plugin, which we do, then just make sure you've selected your version of Cinema 4D and the correct directory, you've installed it too, which will likely be in your program files. Okay, Then we'll hit Done and Open Data Studio. And now we can access the plugin up here under Scripts, bridges, and dads to cinema 4D. And if we pop over to Cinema 4D, we can find the plugin right here in the toolbar, which looks like this. And we'll take a look at exactly how to use this plug-in when we create our own character in the upcoming lessons. 12. Character Creation: For the class project, we're going to create a classic portrait style render. So we'll build a character from start to finish in dance studio and send it over to Cinema 4D. We will get it ready to render in Redshift. So let's start creating our character over here in the figures tab where I've got the bad Bina eight character installed from the data store, but feel free to use whatever character you like. Let's go in there and find the figure itself and add to the scene. For this example, we weren't bothered with morphs or shaping or anything like that. So I'll leave the character customization up to you. So let's move on to clothing. So down under wardrobe, we're going to give our character a classical kind of look. I've got this fancy dress outfit here. So let's go in there. And this is the shanty really chic outfit. And I will post all the products I use in the resources PDF if you want to use the same assets, I do. So let's apply the full outfit, which includes the shoes and the dress, by clicking on this one. And she's looking classier already. Grabbed her head now and hit Control F to frame up on that. And we'll move on to the hair. So just making sure we have the character selected. Let's take a look at what here we have available. Again, we're going for that classic look. So this braided hair should do the job. We've got a few options with that as well. Now character is a genesis eight female, so we'll go with the Genesis eight version. And I think this one comes with the hair geometry and the braided part separately. So let's apply that. And you will notice here takes a lot longer to apply than most other things in dad's. Because here it does tend to be pretty geometry heavy. And you can see what I mean if we change the view to wire shaded mode. There's loads of polygons in there, which unfortunately means Das hat can be quite slow to work with and even slower to render, but we'll deal with that later. Let's put this back to texture shaded mode. And to give you a character, a bit more personality, we're going to add some flowers in her hair. And conveniently enough, if we take a look at the accessories of this particular product, it actually comes with a perfect flowery prop that we can use in both Genesis 38 format. So let's apply this one. I don't think you could get more classical looking than that. Now, it's probably a good time to start posing our character. So again, we'll go back here and take a look under poses. And it looks like our dress also comes with some poses we could try, but I'm looking for a very traditional portrait pose. Let's take a look in this standing pose collection. I also have installed on here. And I'll just scroll through these and see if I can find something that might be a good fit. I think something simple like this one might work. So let's give that a try. And we'll leave the limits on. I think that doesn't look too bad. Although the hand is going through the dress. But I think I'd actually prefer to have her arms up here instead so we can frame in a bit tighter on our portrait. So let's see if we can find a better pose for just her arms in here. I think something like this might work. And we do have the option to apply this only to the upper body. But it's going to change the head and shoulders as well, which I'd rather leave as they are. So let's apply this pose only to the arms. So we just need to select the top-level bones, which are going to be the shoulder of both arms or the color as they're called here. Let's select the left and right color, like so. Then we can right-click on those, select, and we'll select the children. So now we have all the bones in both arms selected. And we can do our trick from back in the posing lesson by holding Control and double-clicking on our pose, which brings up the pose options here. And to apply this pose to only the selected bones, we just need to change nodes to selected and propagation to selected only, except that we've now reposed just those arms. And I think that will do nicely for our classic portrait pose. But just to check, we might like to try framing this up in front of a camera to make sure our composition is going to work. So let's head over to Create, and we'll create a new camera. And we'll leave the default settings as they are. But we do have the option to copy the position of the current view to our new camera. Let's do that and hit Accept. And there's our new camera at the bottom of the object list. But we are still looking through the perspective view. So let's switch to our camera, which is in the exact same spot because it inherited the view that we already had. But now we can grab this guy and under the camera parameters, we can set this up roughly the same way we will later in cinema 4D. And because we are going for a portrait style render, the lens choice is going to be fairly important. I like to use a focal length of 80 millimeters for portraits because it tends to give you less distortion and is a bit more flattering on our model. We want the Bina here to look her best. So let's just frame this up roughly. I think slightly side on like this should work. But it might be nice if she's looking a bit more toward the camera. And let's just adjust her eyes slightly so I'll grab the character base again. And to pose the eyes will use the power pose tool we looked at earlier in the course, which can be found up here. And we'll just make this a little larger and head over to the facial controls. If you remember, this little dot in the middle here controls the direction the eyes are pointing in. So let's grab that and just shift them slightly more toward camera. And that gives me it makes it a little bit hard to see, but we can get rid of that by switching to the selection tool. And now we can see those eyes a bit easier. So about there it looks good. And I think we can call el posing done. So let's add some jewelry to our character now to complete the look. So rather than going back here where we have all of our official dad's products, I've actually grabbed some jewelry from rendered porosity, which is one of the third-party marketplaces we looked at earlier. We can find those assets over here in the Content Library, under your dad's 3D library. And the people, I think some of these assets are a bit older. So I think we can find out necklace on the Genesis three female clothing. And this is the name of the artist. And he is the jewelry set. So again, with our figure selected, let's add the Niklaus. And we need to tell dads that this was originally for a Genesis three female modal and accept. And hopefully that's automatically fitted to our Genesis eight character. And I think it's done a pretty good job. So let's add a little pendant at the end here. This one here should work. And same deal without fitting again, Genesis three. And that fills in that area a bit and helps draw the eye to the face a bit more. So next, these arms are looking a bit bare. So let's add some bracelets, which again, I've sourced from Render porosity. But this time I think they were for a genesis eight character. So if we go in here under accessories, the artist name is renin, and here's her jewelry set. So start with the bracelets here, which looks like that. So let's grab this one, which has been applied to her right arm down here. But I also want a bracelet on this arm as well to make that closer to the camera a bit more interesting. So let's try this one, which unfortunately has also been applied to that right arm. So I will need to find a way to shift that over to the other arm. And I'm sure there's a few ways we could do that. And we could definitely just do it manually over in Cinema 4D. But I'll show you a little trick you can use to do it right here in Data Studio. First, I want to store this pose so we can come back to it whenever we want. With our model selected, we'll click on the Options here and memorize, memorize figure. And that'll store the pose for us. Then I want to reset our figure out back to the original oppose. So we'll go back in here. And this time under 0, we'll 0 the figure. And now she's back to that original pose, which is going to make moving things from one side of the body to the other a little bit easier. So if we grabbed that bracelet, which is actually down here at the bottom, I think we need to move this across in the x-axis. But if we zoom out of ten and grab our universal tool, you'll see that the transform gizmo is way down here. And if we try to move this, it doesn't seem to do anything. And that bracelet just stays in place there. And that's because if we pop this open, I'll bracelet is actually tied to a set of bones in here, which is how it's connected to our character rig, and therefore we're not able to move it manually. So what we need to do is convert this to a static piece of geometry, kinda like we can do in Cinema 4D when we connect and delete. The way we do that in dance studio is with it selected. We'll come up to Edit figure and the rigging. We need to convert figure to prop. And when we do that, you can see that the icon has changed. And this is now a single mesh object without any bones attached. Which means we can now grab our transformed control and move this wherever we want. But we're not actually going to do this by hand. The easiest way is to just flip this straight across on the x-axis with it still selected under the transform controls. Here we want the scale controls, and we'll scale this on the x-axis. And also if you don't see these here, you might just need to come back up to the Options. And under Preferences, just make sure Show hidden properties is checked on. So let's grab this and to flip it across, we'll need to change this from 100% to negative 100 per cent. And now we've got over on the other arm. But there's one final step we need to take and that's to parent the bracelet to this part of the arm. So it follows along with our pose. And we do that just like we would in cinema 4D. The bone is called left arm bend. So we just need to come down here and grab the bracelet and just bring that up here and drop it under the bone. We want to parent it to like so. So now if our character moves, the bracelet should stay in place. So let's restore our pose and see if that worked with our character selected again. Back in here. This time, we'll restore and restore figure. And because we memorize the pose earlier, she's gone back into that exact position, and the bracelet has indeed followed along with that left arm. So to finish up, I'm just going to give her some earrings as well. And I think there's some matching earrings we can use from that same set. So again, with her selected, we'll apply these top ones. And I think we can say our character is now complete. But before we start exporting anything, I just liked to come up here and do a quick IRA render just to make sure everything's looking good. And I think I'm happy with this. So let's get our character into Cinema 4D in the next lesson. 13. Character Export: Okay, So we're ready to export our character out to Cinema 4D now. But before we do, it's probably not a bad idea to remove anything in our scene that we don't need. Firstly, if we zoom out here, her legs aren't going to be seen in our final render, which will just be this area here. So we can probably get rid of her shoes. So let's delete this stuff first by right-clicking and delete selected items and don't worry about losing the camera will recreate that as a Redshift camera later on in cinema 4D. Then we'll track down those shoes. So let's pop this open and I think the shoes or this one, the heels. So we'll delete that as well. And now our character is barefoot. And I think that's ready to export. So grab the root of the figure and we'll find out desk to Cinema 4D plug-in which you will notice has moved in the latest version of dance studio from the scripts menu, which has now gone over to File Send to. And you can now find that here. We'll click that, which brings up our export window. So let's go through these. Firstly, we have the asset type and you can choose from Skeletal Mesh, Static Mesh, or animation. And I've actually tried just about every combination of these. And the only one that seems to work with pre-post characters is actually animation. Even though we don't actually have any animation in our scene. But for best results, I usually just go with this one. So let's select that. Then if you like, you can choose to export the morphs as well, which I usually don't bother with. But just for demonstration purposes, let's enable that and set up some office so you can see how this works. And it will export most from our character only, will collapse these up except for our baby, not eight character, which will pop open. And I don't want to export all of the morphs because that'll take forever. So let's just do the head morphs. So all of these different facial expressions. So we can grab any one of these and hit Control a to select them all. Then we just need to add them for export. And we'll accept that. And we can also bake our subdivisions here if we want to. But I like to export the lowest level of subdivision as possible and smooth things out in Cinema 4D if I need to bother with this one either. And finally, we've got the advanced settings, which led us fine-tune the FBX export settings, which in this case we don't need either. Let's go with this and hit Accept. And it will stop the export process here in Dez. And because we're exporting our morphs and some pretty high resolution geometry, especially in the hair. This is actually going to take quite a while, but I'll speed up the process so you don't need to sit and watch that. Okay. So that's done. And it actually took about seven minutes to do on my laptop. So it's not exactly a quick process. However, if we weren't exporting hair or the morphs, it probably would have taken just a few seconds. Anyway. It's now telling us we need to head over to Cinema 4D to complete the import process. So let's hit okay, and do that. And over here in the latest version of Cinema 4D, if we installed it correctly, we should be able to find the dance to Cinema 4D plug-in up here in the main menu. So let's fire that up. And all we need to do to complete the import is click on this genesis characters button right here. Because we're trying to import a character as opposed to an environment or prop. So let's click that. And it does look like nothing's happening. And it actually seems like Cinema 4D has crashed. And if we take a look at the task manager, it even says that Cinema 4D is not responding, which is usually something that happens when it does crash. But this is a little bit misleading. It is actually calculating in the background, but it can take a really long time. Again, that's probably because we've got the hair in there as well as the morphs. So the best thing to do at this point is to go and grab a coffee and just let it do its thing. So I'll go and do that and we'll be back when it's done. Okay, and our input is finally done. It actually took about 20 minutes in the end, which is the most annoying thing about this plugin, especially when you're not quite sure if it's worked or not. But anyway, it's now asking if we'd like to fix the bone orientation, which can help if you're importing a character in an, a pose. But if you've already paused your character and dad's like we have, this is more likely to just break everything. So we'll say no to that. And we'll Okay that. And it'll take another few seconds to finalize the input before finally asking if we'd like to save the textures as well, which is definitely a good idea. So let's do that. We'll just make a folder called portrait and save that. And you might occasionally get a warning like this about a missing texture. So you might need to find that within your dad's library folder in order to re-link that up. So just take note of the missing file name. And we'll open up our dads library, which we looked at in an earlier video. Then we just need to do a quick search for the missing image, which is this guy here. And to find a way that's hiding, we can right-click and go to Open file location. And if we now copy this directory, we can go back to Cinema 4D and re-link this by hitting yes and pasting in the directory where the images and just selecting it from here. And that should collect the image along with the other textures and save them to your project folder, which again will take a few more seconds. And now our character has finally been imported, bones and all. And we might just hide the skeletons so we can see the model a bit easier by setting the filter preset to animation, which hides all the rigging bits and pieces. And our character isn't looking too bad. If we take a look up here, we've got our morphs and our character rig. And if we click on here, we can find all of those facial morphs we chose to export. So we could carry on tweaking the pose from here within Cinema 4D if we wanted to, let's maybe make her a bit angrier like so. We'll give her a bit of a smile instead, which is a bit creepy. So you do have the added flexibility of tweaking your character outside of deaths. But exploiting all of this stuff is definitely going to bloat up your scene and make things slower than it needs to be. So I definitely prefer to finalize my pose back in deaths before exporting. So you can keep your Cinema 4D scenes as streamlined as possible. But I thought I'd show you this anyway. We also have our bones and Regan here as well, which again, isn't really needed unless we plan to repos our character. But one benefit might be if we grab the weighting tag here on our main character mesh, we could decrease the weight back to 0 and put that part of the character back to the original, a pose, which might make editing your model a bit easier if you need to. But again, I'd also prefer to do that back in does. Another thing we can do is add an IK rig to our character by clicking this button. And yes. Again. Now we have a more traditional style of RIG where we can grab these controllers and move the limbs around. Which again, doesn't work so well on already posed characters. So your best using this option on a pose characters instead. However, the eye control here should work pretty well. Like so. The dads to Cinema 4D plug-in gives us some extra options when exporting our models, but it's definitely not perfect. And there is actually one really big problem when importing this way. If we hide the IK rig for a second and take a look at our character, especially down here. You'll notice that the arm and quite possibly her other joints are looking a bit weird. If we go back to dance for a second in frame up on that elbow, it looks like it bends very naturally here in the elbow is nice and sharp, but are inputted model definitely doesn't look like that. No matter what I tried, I wasn't able to find a way to import this correctly with the dads to Cinema 4D bridge, at least not for the Genesis eight characters I tested. But I did come up with a bit of a workaround if this does happen to you. So let's save this for now in case we need to come back to it and we'll head back over to Data Studio. So the best way to export a pre-post character like this and keep all the limbs looking exactly like they showed, is a bit of a hack. And it's actually by converting our character into a static geometry mesh before we do the export, which means getting rid of all the bones and the rig itself. So we could do that the way we looked at in the previous lesson, where we could grab an object and come over to Edit Object rigging and convert prompts to figure, which is what we did with our bracelet before. But that would take quite awhile to go through all the objects and might also lead to other issues when we try to convert the character itself. But what we can do instead is run a little script that can quickly convert everything into geometry for us. So if we head over to this page on the desk 3D website, and I'll leave a link to this in the resources PDF. We just need to download this dot d s, a file down here, which will convert our figure to props and help keep the shape of our mesh when we go to export. So download that and we'll head back to Dallas. And back here, we just need to make sure that we have our character selected. And I've just got our script off to the side here. And you can see I've just saved that in a script folder on my computer, but you can put it anywhere you like, because all you need to do to run this script is to just double-click on it. While you've got desk Studio open, you can see that's just run inside does on our selected character. And we've now turned everything into mesh objects with that same icon we saw back in the last lesson. So with that extra step done, we can now select all of these objects and head back to our desk to Cinema 4D bridge. And this time we need to go with static mesh instead because we're not exporting the rig anymore, just the static mesh geometry. We won't bother with the morphs this time, because now that we've converted our figure to a prop, they won't actually be any morphs. Plus we're happy with all the posing we've done in days already. So we don't need to make any changes in cinema 4D. So we'll leave that off and we'll hit Accept. And straight away you'll notice that the export process was much, much quicker, only a few seconds as opposed to seven minutes. So let's hit okay, and head back to Cinema 4D. Then in a fresh scene, Let's finish the input. But this time, rather than importing a Genesis character, we need to use the environment and prop button because we've converted the figure to a prop. So let's click that. This time, we didn't need to wait 20 minutes for the input to happen. That literally only took a few seconds. So let's save the textures again. Okay? And again, we need to relocate that missing image. So I'll quickly just link that up again. And now finally, if we zoom in, we can see that that is exactly how it should be. However, everything is not quite perfect. If we take a look up here, something strange has happened to our earrings now, I will take care of that in just a second. But I just want to show you the difference up here as well. If we take a look inside this null, you can see we no longer have any bones or parts of the Rig. Just a group for each of our different objects. So just to keep everything nice and tidy and as simple as we can make it, let's take all the mesh objects out of these nulls. So let's right-click in here and choose unfold, or we can expose all the objects in here. Then we'll click up here on filter and filter by objects and just hide the null objects for now. So now we can easily select all of the geometry without the null is getting in the way. And we'll hit Control X to cut those. Then bring back the nulls and Control V to paste the objects back into our scene outside of the nulls. And we can then hide the filters and grabbed the nulls that we no longer need, and just delete them, leaving us with just the mesh objects. So now this is nice and tidy. Let's look at fixing those earrings. And I'm not exactly sure why these didn't import correctly, but I do tend to find this happens with non dairy products. So anything bought from the external stores, like render porosity for example. But if something like this does happen to you, it is fairly easy to fix. I would suggest just trying to export the earrings again by themselves, maybe even as an OBJ export. Or what we'll do here is just grab them from our previous export. You can see they seem to have worked fine in here. So let's grab one of these. And you can see there in here somewhere. If we just go to view and scroll to selection, that takes us straight to the earrings. So we'll grab both of them. And actually, let's also delete the materials on there. Then we'll grab both again and hit Control C to copy them. Then we can head back to our new scene and just paste them into here. And you can see those are in the correct position now. So all we need to do is move the materials from these ones onto these cell, grab the bad ones which are down here, and move them to the top. We'll move the material from the bed, left earring to the new one. And the same for the right hearing. Those look good now. So we don't need these anymore. So grab those and delete them. And now we finally have our character correctly imported. We'll save that and get things ready for redshift in the next lesson. 14. Redshift Prep: So now that we've got our character imported into Cinema 4D, Let's start getting things ready to render with Redshift. So let's start up here in our render settings, where we'll switch the render out from standard to Redshift, which is going to give us our Redshift menu up here. But while we're here, let's also set up our scene a bit. I want a nice big resolution for our portrait. So let's make it 2160 wide by 2720 high, which gives us that nice portrait shape. And as far as the redshift settings go, Let's just leave this on the basic preset for now. So we'll close that. And if we take a look at our materials, you can see that there's a load of them in here. And it looks like it's doubled up on some of these during the input for some reason. So if that happens to you, we can easily get rid of the duplicates up here under edit and delete unused materials. And that's now looking a bit more manageable. And if we click on one of these, you'll see that they've just been imported as standard Cinema 4D materials. So we'll need to convert them to Redshift Materials before we go any further. And you might have noticed back in our dads to C4D bridge that there's an option to convert materials for a few different renderers, including redshift. However, if we try to do that, we get this little warning saying that the conversion may or may not work. And if we okay that, and yes, indeed, it doesn't work. Nothing happens at all actually. And that's because the latest version of Cinema 4D and the latest version of the plugin don't seem to want to work with Redshift. It does work fine with octane and V Ray though. If you'd prefer to use one of those, this is definitely an option. But for all you Redshift uses out there, we're going to need a bit of a workaround. So let's close this now. And we'll do our material conversion with a red shift instead. So hit Control a to select all of our standard materials. And if we take a look down here in the Attribute Manager, we can see all of the active channels across all of the materials. And I know for a fact that our character doesn't have any lights and meeting materials. But for some reason some of the materials have an active luminance channel. Said before converting these, I like to just disable that to avoid any issues later on. And now we can come up to our Redshift menu here. And under materials, Let's go to Tools. And we want to convert and replace or materials. So let's do that. The conversion process is going to take a few minutes to go through all of those materials. So I'll just speed this up for your viewing pleasure. That actually took about five minutes to replace all the materials and update all the thumbnails here. And she's definitely looking a bit different here in the viewport now that we've switched over to Redshift materials. But we'll fine tune everything a little later on. So let's leave this for now and we'll start organizing our scene in the next lesson. 15. Scene Prep: So before we go any further, I just wanna do a bit of housekeeping and tidy up our scene a bit. So let's first bringing a camera and get our scene composition locked back in. Head back to the redshift menu and add a new standard Redshift camera and will activate that. And we'll come down to the object tab and set up our focal length. Will use the same 80 millimeter lens we had back in dance studio, which is a great focal length for portraits. Then what is frame this up like we did before? Somewhere about there looks good. And we can always come back later in tweak this if we need to. So now that that's set up, let's tidy up our objects here. I think the naming straight from dad is a little bit confusing. So let's simplify this. This is our main character geometry. So rather than Genesis eight, female shape, Let's just call this character. Then we've got our bracelets. So we'll just call them bracelet left. And a bracelet, right? Then we've got the Pendant, necklace and the flowers and the braided part of the hair. Then we have the filler object, which if we hide, it doesn't look like it was even visible. Let's move it out a bit and see what it looks like. We can actually see the gizmo though. We'll need to center the access points with the Access Center tool. And now we can move that up from behind the hair. And it is just an extra layer of hair, which I guess is just to give this a bit more volume, but it's barely noticeable on our character. So I think we could probably get away without it. So actually delete that, which should slim down our scene even more, which is always good. Then we've got the heaviest object in our scene, which is the hair itself. So I will just rename that. And next we have her skirt, which in this particular framing we don't actually see. So again, this pro Bono much point keeping it because the more we have in our scene, the slower the render. So let's scrap that as well. Then I'll just quickly rename these last few things. I think you get the gist of this now. I'll just put these into groups to make it even easier to find things. We'll put our character at the top, followed by the characters eyelashes than the hair and flowers can go after that. And the jewelry and accessories together at the bottom. And then to keep things even more organized, Let's put these into layers. So we'll add a layout for character elements. And the character and her eyelashes can go in there. As well as the materials belonging to those, which you can see with these selected, all of their associated materials are highlighted in here. So we can easily grab all of those and plunk them onto that layer as well. And that gives us a handy tab we can use to isolate only those materials. So we'll show our remaining layer list materials and carry on with the rest of the objects. Will put the dress on the layer called close. Along with its material. Then the hair and braid can go onto another layer, which we'll call here. Along with their many materials. It looks like we missed the dress, so I'll put that in here. Then we'll make another layout for flowers and put all of that in here. Then we'll do one more for the jewelry. And in there goes everything else. So let's see if we have any materials left. Just what was on the objects we deleted before. So we don't actually need these anymore either. So I'll just do an edit, delete unused materials. And now we have all of our materials organized into these different tabs, which is going to make life much easier later on. And having things on layers also means we can solo all the different objects as we work on them to keep things running nice and fast. So before we finish up, let's add one more layer and call it seen, which is where we can put all of our miscellaneous seen objects like our camera. And later on when we create our lights. And I think we'll do exactly that in the next lesson, where we'll start letting our scene with a redshift. 16. Lighting: Okay, so let's set up some lighting so we can get a better look at our character. So let's start over in the render settings. And under Redshift, let's switch over to the Advanced Settings. We'll increase our sampling threshold to 0.1 so we can render a bit faster. If we need to do any bucket rendering, then we'll go through these one-by-one. Let's leave motion blur switched off than in globals. If you've got an RTX graphics card, you can enable hardware ray tracing, which is also going to speed up your renders. Then in the GUI tab, I find using the brute force method for primary and secondary rays tends to be the fastest, at least with scenes like this anyway, then we don't need core sticks in our scene. So switching this off, we'll also keep things running nice and fast and we won't bother with any external compositing. So let's just disable the AOVs as well. And we'll close that for now. And we'll fire off a render to see what we've got so far. And it's definitely not looking that great to start with. And I can see we're having some problems with the edges of our texture maps as well, but we will sort that out a little bit later. But for now, let's see if we can give this some nice dramatic portrait style lighting. And I think for this particular end up, we'll aim for almost a classical painting. Look and use what's called a Rembrandt lighting setup. Head up here to our Redshift menu. And under lights, let's bring in an area light. Then we'll switch views here in our viewport and make this a perspective view so we can see our whole scene. Then we'll change the shading so we can see things a bit easier. We can now start to position that lights in our scene. But every time we move, the lights will need to wait for the render view to catch up, which can make setting up your lights a bit of a slow process. But I'll show you a few tricks you can use to make this a bit more responsive. Firstly, we could switch this over to clay render mode, which basically ignores all the materials, which allows the render to resolve itself a bit quicker. And you can see it's almost real time now. But I think there's an even better way to do this. If we just switch back to regular mode. We can instead use the RT or real-time mode, which takes a little while to load up. But when it does, we literally get full real-time rendering. And if we move this around, it's now updating instantly, which makes setting up our lights super fast and easy. So let's go ahead and give our portrait a nice dramatic look. And as I mentioned before, we're going to use the Rembrandt lighting technique, which the Dutch artist rembrandt used a lot in his portrait paintings. So we're going to try and angular light so that it costs a little triangle on our characters CI KIA, which should hopefully give us that classical kind of look. So we could just grab this and move it around till we get the right angle in our viewport. But there is another really quick way to get our lights into position that I use from time to time on this kind of thing. And that's to actually look through this light so we can easily point it directly where the light needs to be. So with it selected, we'll go to Cameras, Use Camera and selected object as camera. Now we can see exactly what our light is pointing at from the perspective of the light. And we can orbit around just like we would with a camera and easily adjust the direction of the light. So I'm just going to frame this up on our model from the top-left and try to cost that triangle of light onto her left cheek. Because we're getting live feedback now, this should be pretty easy to do. From about there, we can start to see that triangle of light appearing here on her cheek. And I might just grab that area light and decrease the intensity of it. We can also change the dimensions of the light to sharpen or soften those shadows. At the moment, our light is two-by-two meters, which is giving us these fairly soft shadows. But if we were to scale the light down a bit and just compensate for the smaller light source by increasing the intensity or exposure. You can see that triangle becomes a bit more pronounced and our shadows are a lot more focused and shop. And I don't think we want to go that dramatic. So let's soften them up again by bringing the size up to maybe 80 centimeters instead. And again, let's reduce that exposure. And I might just bring the light a little closer to the model as well. And I think something like that is fine for our key light for now. Maybe just slightly less intense. I wouldn't worry too much about finalizing our lighting just yet. It is usually a bit of an iterative process. So we'll probably come back and tweak this laid out once we fixed our materials. But one thing I will do is add a bit of a fill light to fill in these completely black areas. So we can still see some of those details. A quick and easy way to do that for portraits is just to come back up here and add a dome light, which is definitely filling in those dark areas, but probably a bit too much. And we also don't want it to be visible in the background. So let's scroll down here and disabled background visibility and will also decrease the intensity about there. Just so we can see a little bit more of those shadowed areas. So it's not completely black. So I think that's a pretty good start. But I'd also like to choose a bit of a focal point for our portrait. Draw the viewer's eye to this area. So they're drawn more to the face and the Niklaus. And we can definitely achieve that with a lighting by darkening the less important areas of the image. So we're going to use what's called a flag to block some of the lights and keep the focus where it needs to be. Let's go back up here. And because we are still looking through that area light, let's switch this back to the default camera. I want to place our flag down here in-between our lights and the character. So let's grab our area light. And as a flag, we're going to use a simple plain object. And if we hold shift when we bring that in, it becomes a child of our light and inherits the position of the light, which might make it a little bit easier to get into place. But it does look like the orientation is a bit off, which is why it's chomping through her head. So we'll rotate that the right way by changing the orientation here to negative Z. And we'll scale that down and move it out a bit so it starts blocking that light. But because of that plane is gray by default, it will cost bounce light into our scene, which we don't want. So just like a flag in real-world lighting, we need this to be black in non-reflective. So let's create a new redshift material and apply it to our plane. Now rename it to flag. We can do the same to the material in there. Let's make it black and remove the reflection. Will reposition this to block some of that light. And if we keep an eye on this area, Let's bring this a little closer and slowly start raising that in front of the lights. Like so. The closer this is to the light source, the softer the shadow it's going to cost. And the closer to the subject, the sharper the shadow. So I'll just put this about here. And that's now cut off some of that light from the lower part of the image and made this area more of a focal point. And I think that should be fine for our initial lighting setup. But before we move on, I just want to head back here and add our lights to our layer system. We can probably move our flag out of here now and grab all of our new lighting objects and add them to our scene layer to keep things nice and tidy. So we'll leave that there and move on to the materials in the next lesson. 17. Character Materials: Now that we've got our lighting sorted, let's switch off the RT mode and fire off a render to see how things are looking. The first thing we need to do is fix these seems that are showing up on the edges of our texture maps on the character. So to keep things running nice and fast, Let's just solo only the objects in our scene that we'll be working on. So we'll solo the character, the clothes, and the scene objects so we can keep the camera and the lighting. And that's definitely clearing up a bit faster. Now, let's also switch over to our character materials tab, and we'll start by tweaking some of these. And so we can see those materials a bit better. Let's also set up another camera a bit closer to our subject. So let's duplicate this camera and rename it to closer. We'll look through there. Then we'll switch over to the viewport. And I'll zoom in a bit closer to her face about there should do. So back in the render view, we can see what might be causing that problem with the texture seems it looks like it might be because the bump is way too intense. So we'll need to tweak the skin materials. So let's start with the face material. But you'll notice that texture is repeated across quite a few of these different materials, which we don't really need. Fewer materials the better really. So let's merge some of these together first. For this texture, I want to keep the face and the lips as two separate materials. But I'll grab the face and holding Alt. I'll drag it onto these other duplicates, like the E is, for example, to merge those together. And we basically just replacing the A's material with the face material. So all that geometry will share that one face material instead. And we'll do that again onto the other face material, which is the eye sockets. And we'll just bring out face material back over here again. Then we'll do the same process to the leg materials, will hold Alt and drag that onto the similar toenails material. We can control both of those with the one that material as well. Then the same with the teeth and mouth materials. And actually because our character has her mouth closed, we don't see the teeth or the inner part of the mouth. So in this case, we could probably just delete this material because we don't want anything in our scene that we don't need. Then we'll merge the arms into fingernails. Then for the materials, you might like to keep some of these separate, especially the iris, because it'll give you the flexibility. It's you come in here and add a color correct node after the diffuse map. If we shift the hue and maybe increase the gamma as well. You can easily recolor the eyes like so, which can be handy to make your renders a little bit more interesting. But for l random, I'll just stick to the original eye color. So to reduce the amount of materials again, I'll just merge these together, which brings us back to the original brown eyes. And finally, we'll grab the eye moist jump and merge it with this similar cornea. And the second I moisture material. So now that we've reduced these materials down to just what we need, Let's sort out the intensity of our bump maps. So let's grab the face material and take a look at how this has been set up. We've got a bump blender here, which is blending a normal map and a bump map together. And if we take a look in these, you can see that the height scale is set pretty high. So lets just grab our normal map and reduce that to 0.01 and the bump map to 0.02. And straight away, That's looking a lot better. But we can still see the same back here. So we'll have to fix all the other materials the same way. So we'll grab the torso material and will decrease the normal map and bumped values in here as well. So 0.01 for the normal map and 0.02 for the bump. And as soon as we've done that, we're no longer getting that same at the back of the head. So we'll do the same for the lips, 0.010.02. And that's looking good. Let's switch back to our main camera. And this is all looking good now, we just need to do the same to the arms as well. So I'll quickly do that. And that's that sorted. We've also got the legs material that we could fix as well, but because of the legs aren't going to be visible in our final render. We could just delete this material as well. But what I might do instead is just disconnect the bump blender. So the bump on the legs isn't calculated, which will also speed up the render slightly. Let's move on to the eyes. Let's switch back to our close-up camera. And you can see how eyes aren't looking great either. We've got some fireflies here and the eyes are also looking a bit bloodshot. And again, I think that's because the bump is Y2 intense on those as well. So let's grab our merged pupils material. This time, we can probably just remove the bump completely rather than decreasing the intensity because we're not going to be rendering the eyes up close. So let's remove that extra detail by just disconnecting this as well. And that looks better. We can also start using our render region tool as well to get a faster render on the area where working on. And I can still see a few fireflies on here. And I think that's because our moisture material, which is applied to the geometry over the eyes, also has an extreme bump map. Let's disconnect that as well. And now those eyes are rendering faster and looking much better. And finally, we'll move on to the eyelashes here, which doesn't have any bump, just an Alpha map here. But I think looking at this, those eyelashes have imported fine, so we probably don't need to tweak those. Let's just turn them off and on again to check that off. And that's on, which I think looks fine. So I will switch back to our main camera and disabled the render region. And as seen as definitely rendering faster. Now, we could leave this as is for our character's skin. But we'll take this one step further in the next lesson by adding a bit of subsurface scattering. One thing I just wanted to mention before we move on is that sometimes when we convert materials from dads to redshift, like we did earlier, you might find, if we go into one of these, what the face, for example, and check the reflection map that's been imported and piped into the reflection color here. For some reason, it's actually put a duplicate of our diffuse map instead in here, which is the same as this map here. But if we take a look at the collected files from our imports in the project folder, you can see here's our diffuse map. But we've also got this specular map, which really should be in place of the diffuse map in our reflection channel. So if that happens to you as well, you can easily just replace that map by dragging that into here. To overwrite that, you'll need to do that to the other skin texture maps as well. So I'll just grab these specular map for the torso as well and replace this. So just a heads up if you run into the same thing. But in my experience, this only happens on some models from the store. And it really just depends how the materials have been set up back in days. So I'll go ahead and fix those and I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Skin SSS: Okay, So let's add some subsurface scattering it to our character's skin here. And before we get into the materials themselves, I like to add a nice bright backlight behind our character so we can see how the light will pass through the thinner areas of our model, like the ears here, which will make setting up our subsurface effects a bit easier. So back to the redshift menu. And we'll bring in another area light, which doesn't show up over here because we still have these three layers soloed. Let's just switch off all the soloing fan-out, which brings back everything in our scene. And we'll do the inverse of that by hiding everything we don't want to see. Instead of soloing what we do want to see. So we'll hide the hair, the flowers, and the jewelry, and we're left with everything else, including the area lights we just added. So let's rename this to sss light. We want to position this behind our character here. So we'll do the same trick that we did before by going to camera, use camera and selected object as camera. And if we frame up on our character, we can now orbit around to reposition this light from its perspective. And it might help if we start the render view again a bit to the side at the moment. So let's just move around behind her a bit more until we get this nice rim light happening back here, which should allow us to see any light penetrating the ear when we set up the subsurface effect. So let's do that. We'll switch back to the node editor and start on the face material. And if we take a look over here, we're currently plugged into a plain old redshift material, which does have some subsurface scattering properties over here. But for skin, we've actually got a better option. And that's the redshift skin material, which is specifically designed for this kind of thing. So let's bring one of those in. We'll make a bit of space. And you can see this is using a very standard setup for skin, where we've got shallow, mid and deep color inputs for the subsurface effect. So let's connect this up to the output first, which if we take a look up here under Tools, I've set that to the shortcut key d. So if we hit D on the keyboard, the selected node connect straight up with the output. And we should see that update over here. And we might just do a render region on the face only because subsurface scattering can be a little bit slow to render. And at first, it's looking a little bit strange because we are currently allowing that light to penetrate a bit far into our character. You can see the radius scale is actually set to 100 centimeters, which is huge. So let's drop this down to something more realistic, like maybe one centimeter, meaning the light can only penetrate the skin up to a depth of one centimeter, which definitely looks a bit more realistic. Next, we'll change the mode from ray traced to point-based because that tends to calculate much faster, although it is a little bit less accurate. But I think we'll be able to get away with that. And to be honest, that gets us most of the way there already. And we can even start to see a bit of that blood red coming through inside the ear. And the default settings in the skin material or almost perfect right off the bat. So all we really need to do at this point is pipe our diffuse texture map into the mix here. So we're not losing the texture detail as we are here, because we are currently using solid colors in here instead. Let's come over here and grab our diffuse texture and just move it up here. And we want to pipe this into the shallow color here because that's the outer layer of skin. And then we'll take that same diffuse texture and tint it this color for the mid scanner. And then we'll tinted red for the deep scatter. So let's make a bit more space here. One way we can print out a few sitemap is with a color bias node. So I'll bring one of those in as well. And we'll need two of these. Holding Control will drag out a copy. And we'll rename this top one to mid. And this one will be out deep scatter color. If we pipe just our diffuse texture map into the output, we can see what that looks like. And it's got some nice skin details in there. And if we then pipe it into the mid color bias node, it goes a bit darker at first, but we want a tint it this color back in the skin material. So I'll copy that. And back in here, we'll paste that into the bias. And now the diffuse texture has been tinted that color. So that's the mid layer sorted. Let's do the same for the deep scanner. Will connect that to the output. And we'll get back here and copy the red color and paste it into the bias here, which now ten sit read. So back in the skin material, we can now connect these up. So we'll link this back to the output and replace our three scattered depths. So a pipe the diffuse texture directly into the shallow color. Then the mid color bias needs to go into the mid color. And the red tinted version goes into the deep color. And we've now got the extra detail and back from the diffuse map. But it's all looking a bit overly read at the moment. So let's make a few adjustments here. Firstly, the shallow weight needs to be a bit more dominant than that. So let's bring that value up to one, which decreases some of that red. But I think we might need to drop that red layer down a bit as well. And back that mid color off as well. And so we have a nice mix of the different depths. We've lost that red in the ear now. So we might need to increase the deep scatter radius as well. And if we bring this up to the extreme, we should probably switch over to bucket rendering so we can get a more accurate look at this. And you can see we've got that red subsurface effect back in her ear. But it's obviously way too intense and also spilling out into the face as well. So let's bring this back down a bit. And I think I'm pretty happy with how that's looking. So that's the subsurface effect all set up. We just need to pipe the rest of our maps into our new skin material. So the bump blender needs to go into the bump input and the reflection map can go into the reflection and color and will also put that into the secondary reflection color as well. And if we grab our skin material again and take a look under reflections, we can increase the reflectivity with these sliders here if we need to. So let's try bringing up the whites on both of these. And maybe a bit more. And now her skin is looking a bit more wets or oily, which I think could work. So all we need to do now is take this same setup and apply it to the other skin materials. So let's quickly do that. Let's grab these three nodes and copy them. And just grab the torso diffuse texture. And we can probably pause this for now so it doesn't slow things down. And we'll paste those nodes into here. And pipe that into the shallow color and into the mid and deep color bias nodes, which are already connected up correctly, then will relink the bump blender and the reflection map like we did before. And finally, we'll connect the skin material to the outputs to replace the standard redshift material. So I'll just do the same for those remaining skin materials. And with that done, let's switch off the render region and fire off another bucket render. And now we have a much more realistic looking skin complete with subsurface scattering, which allows the light to penetrate the skin as it would in real life. So we can now switch off our SSS light. And we're ready to move on to the next lesson where we'll sort out l, jewelry and clothing. 19. Clothes and Jewelry: So let's sort out the clothes and the jewelry. So we'll need to enable those layers over here. And we'll disabled bucket mode and go back to our progressive rendering. And I want to zoom in on this area. So let's switch over to our viewport and to our camera view. And just switch to the close-up camera we made before. And what is frame this up so we can get a better look at the dress and the jewelry. We'll need to do a few things here. Firstly, it looks like the bump is also way too intense on the dress. So I will need to reduce that and probably brighten the dress up a bit as well. Then with the bracelets, I'd like to switch this dull brown looking material with a nice gold shader. And the same with the Niklaus and dependent, as well as the earrings. And I'll also give the diamond in here a bit of a red tint. So it compliments her lips a bit more as this and her face, the focal points of the image will also need to fix this intersecting part of the bracelet here. And then Nicholas also looks like it's floating a bit there. So I'll move that a bit closer to her body and will probably do the same with the dress as well. And we might also need to smooth that out because it looks a little bit bumpy and places, especially here. So let's start over here in the closed materials, which there is now only one shader. So let's grab that. Which like our skin materials, is also using a bump blender, which has a normal map set to 0 for some reason. And a bump map at negative 0.8 height scale, which I think is a bit too intense. So let's add another 0 in here to decrease the bumper effect, which looks a bit better. But I do think it's looking a bit dark. So let's grab the redshift material itself. And because they dress fabric is quite thin, we can use the backlighting translucency setting to allow a bit more light to pass through it. So let's crank this all the way up to one, which looks good to me. Let's move on to the jewelry materials. And this first one here is for the necklace. And it looks like that's also got a bump blender, which is giving us this striped pattern, which I think is probably fine for this particular material, but I do want it to be a nice, shiny gold. Let's grab the RS material. And the easiest way to do that is to just use one of these material presets in here. Let's choose the gold present. And that's changed some of the settings, mainly in the reflection. And given us this nice golden material on the chain here. So that's sorted. Let's have a look at the next material, the bail here, which is a very basic material without any maps plugged in at all. And I think this is for this part of the pendant here. So that'll need to be gold as well. So let's do the same thing again and use the gold preset. And that's done now. And I think to keep things nice and simple, we can probably just reuse this material on the rest of the jewelry. So everything gets the same gold shader and we can reduce the amount of materials we have in here. Many of which look like duplicates anyway. So let's grab all these black materials, which I presume should actually be gold. But that might have been lost in the imports or material conversion. But with those selected, we'll go to Select and select material tags or objects, which if we go back to the attribute manager, has selected all the instances of those particular materials and we can now easily replace them all without gold bail material by just dragging that into the material slot here. And now all of those parts are now sharing that one gold material. Which means we can now get rid of the materials we've just replaced by going to edit and delete unused materials. Which leaves us with just these four materials, which is a bit more manageable. So let's just rename this to gold so we don't confuse ourselves later on. And it looks like these two specular materials might be duplicates as well. These must be the material for the diamond independent here. So let's just merge these together as well. And we'll take a look at that. And to speed up the render will use the render region over just that part of the Niklaus. And actually that's a bit small there. Let's just go back here and zoom in a bit closer and reposition this. So all I want to do to this material is tinted slightly red. So let's get back in there and grab the RS material. And we'll head down to the refraction transmission section and just make the color a nice shade of red. And a little will go a long way here. So just tint this ever so slightly. There, it looks good. So we'll close that, disable the render region and switch back to our main camera. And we'll do another bucket render. I think those materials are looking good. Now, let's fix this bracelet and tidy up the dress geometry and move the Nicholas a bit closer to her body. So let's disable bucket render. And we might actually just turn this off for now. While we work on these. Then we'll go back to the viewport and switch our perspective mode, which is still looking through the perspective of our SSS light that we set up in the previous lesson. So let's get back to the default camera. And we'll zoom in here and switch to a wireframe mode. And we'll start by fixing the placement of this bracelet. And currently the access point is a bit off. So let's center that by hitting Shift C to bring up the command window. And we'll type access and grab the Access Center tool with the default settings here. Let's execute that to center the access to the object, which is going to make repositioning this a bit easier. So I'll just move this up and out to fix that intersecting geometry. So that fixes that. Let's move on to the necklace, which also needs to be repositioned a bit closer to the body. So we'll grab the pendant part first and sent to the axis on that as well. And so we can see what we're doing. Let's hide the dress for a second. And we'll just move this in closer to the skin and maybe rotate that a tad as well. There should be fine. We just need to do the same with the chain. So let's grab the Niklaus and we'll try centering the axis on that as well. And just move this down. So it goes through the loop on the pendant. And that should be fine. I think. Let's bring back the dress and zoom back out a bit. And we'll see if we can smooth out these lumpy bits and make the dress conform to the body a bit better. So back in the command up, Let's find the smooth sculpting brush. And we'll decrease the strength of the brush to about 20. And we can start smoothing out that mesh. Especially over here. We just need to make sure that we don't smooth this through to the skin like that. So we'll undo that and just do this fairly lightly. Then up here. Let's close this for now. And we might be able to see the problem areas a bit easier if we switch the render back on and go back to the main camera. The necklace is definitely looking better now. This part of the dress is looking nice and smooth. But I just want to push in these parts of the dress so they cling to the body a bit closer. So we could just try smoothing this again. But I think this might be a bit easier to do with another sculpting tool, the Grab Brush. So we'll grab that. And if we decrease the brush size a bit, that's going to allow us to easily move the mesh closer to the body. And this works just like the Move brush in ZBrush. Again, we'll be careful not to push the dress into the body just a bit closer to get rid of those bits that are sticking out. And we'll do this side as well. And just keep an eye on things over here. And we might need to do the belly as well. And this bit's still flaring out a bit. So we might need to decrease the brush size a bit more. And just move this in a bit. And it's nearly there, just a little bit more. And this can be a little bit fiddly. And we'd better fix this bit as well. Okay, let's move on to the belly. And we'll just tuck this in a little bit closer as well. And maybe at the back here as well. I think that should do it. Let's switch off the render region and we'll do another bucket render. And I think we can call the clothing and jewelry done. You could come in here and fine tune this further to get it super snuggle nobody, but I think we'll leave it there and move on to the next lesson where we'll sort out her hair. 20. Hair Prep: All right, let's move on to our character's hair will switch off the bucket rendering for now, because dad's hair can be very slow to render unfortunately. Then we'll hide the jewelry layout and show the hair layer. And if we take a look at our hair materials down here, there are loads of these, which again is contributing to the slow render speeds. So the first thing I wanna do is try and reduce the amount of materials by merging some of these together as well. And I can already see there's a bunch of duplicates in here. So let's come over to material here. And we'll sort these by name, which might make finding the duplicates a bit easier. We'll start in merging any similar materials together the same way we did in previous lessons. And I think we can merge all these braid materials. If you're having trouble doing this. It might be because the render view is active. So let's disable that for a second. And this should be a bit more responsive. Now, finished merging those. And this one looks a bit different, so we've got to keep that one and same with this one. But these hair fine materials all look the same. So we'll merge those as well. And these two, and these, and this one is definitely the same as this one. So we'll plunk him onto there. And finally, these guys here. So that's looking a bit more respectable. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is go into each of these and disconnect the imported bump blender. Because in this particular scene or the bump actually does, is slowed down the render. But if we disconnect this, it renders faster and it doesn't actually look any different. Cell skewed ahead and do the same for all of these, will fire off a render to see how that's looking. And it'll probably be faster if we just grab the region around the hair. We might do a bucket render instead so we can see the finished product. And it's not looking too bad, maybe just a bit too dark. What we can do is just grab the materials with the alpha channels, which are the main strands of hair. And we'll also pause the render for now. If we take a look at each material, we can add some backlighting to these as well, because they are just 2D strips of hair and therefore very thin. Light should be able to penetrate those. So let's crank up the weight. But instead of using this default gray color, I'll pipe the diffuse texture map into there, which looks something like this. So plug that in here into the backlighting translucency color channel. And again, I'll do the same to all of these materials that have an alpha channel. Then we can grab all of them. And we can check the backlighting settings on all of these together. And just make sure the weight is all set to one. And we'll fire off another render. And that's looking a bit brighter. Now. Let's move on to the flowers. So I head back to our layers and activate the flower layer. And for speed will switch back to progressive mode. And we'll take a look at our flower materials. And just like all the other materials we've imported, the bump on these is way too much and not really needed. So I'm going to disconnect those on these as well. We'll go through all of these. But these last two materials are identical. So I'll just merge these as well. And doing that should speed things up again for us. So let's bring the region up on the flowers and try another bucket render. Again. I think these are looking a bit too dark as well. And because flower petals are quite thin, we could probably brighten this up the same way by adding some backlighting. So do the same thing again and connect to diffuse texture, which looks like this, up to that as well. And do the same for all of these. Then we'll grab them all and set the backlighting weight to one. And then only it looks like half the flowers a brighter now. So there might be a missing material which might explain the flowery looking material back in the hair materials. So I guess we'll just do the same thing to this one as well. And remove the bump on that too. And that seems to fix that. So now that we've got all of our materials sorted out, let's come back to the layers and turn everything back on. Then we'll disable the render region and fire off one last bucket render to see our whole character. And I think our character is coming along nicely. Now, let's leave this then. We'll add the finishing touches in the next lesson. 21. Finishing Touches: Okay, so let's make some final tweaks to get our portrait ready to render. So start by adding a bit of a backdrop behind our character to fill in that empty space. So let's bring in a plane. And we'll rename it to backdrop. And we'll move that into place over in the viewport. And I might just switch off the bucket render as well. And our plane is pointing in the wrong direction. So over in the attributes, Let's switch the orientation to negative z. Then we'll grab the Move tool. And I just want to put this back behind our model. So we'll push that back a bit and maybe go to our four views. So we can scale this in and see how it's looking in the main camera view. And just scale it down a bit and move it up a tad. So it fills that space up here in the camera view. And that looks fine in here. So let's add a new redshift material for this name, that backdrop as well. And apply it to our plane. We'll set this up over in the shader graph. It's currently just this flat gray color. But I want to give this a bit of texture. So I have an image off to the side which will just drag into here. And I'll share a link to this in the resources PDF as well. It looks something like this. We're going to plug this into the diffuse color, like so. And it's definitely looking a bit bright back there. I want it to be pretty subtle. So we'll need to darken this down. So between these two nodes, let's add a ramp node. And we'll pipe our texture into the input and the out color into the diffuse color. If we set this to Alt mode, this is going to allow us to remap L color range. So rather than having this white as the lightest color, Let's bring this down to a dark gray and straightaway. I think that's looking much better. But I'm not too fond of that big glossy reflection of one of our lights up here. So let's grab that material and bring the reflection weights right down to 0. Just so we can speed up our render previews while we make these tweaks. Let's hide our hair and flower layers from the render. And that should be a bit faster now. So the backdrop texture has a few nice-looking paint splatters at the bottom here, which I wouldn't mind making a bit more visible as well. So let's go back here and just move that up a bit. And so we're not stretching it too much. I might just scale that down a bit as well. And that's looking a bit more interesting. So next, I might make her lips a little bit redder and glossier and bring out the red in the jewel here. So I can make those a bit more of a focal point in our image. So let's head over to the character materials and grab the lips. And back in the shader graph. Here's the skin shader we set up earlier, which will keep, we just want to read up the lips by increasing the saturation of our diffuse map here. So let's add a color correct node and plug that into here. And the color will replace the shallow color, which is the outer layer of skin in the skin material. And now if we just isolate those lips, they've got a slight red tint to them at the moment. But if we bring these Saturation scale up ever so slightly, I think they stand out a bit more now. Let's also make them a bit more glossy over in the skin material. Under reflections. Let's just increase these glossiness values. And that looks good. So let's move the render region over the diamond and we'll make that a bit redder as well. To match those lips. Over to jewelry, we'll grab that specular material and we originally tinted it here in the transmission color. So let's do the same. And we'll just bring this down into a more intense red. Maybe not that far. Just so it's matching a bit closer to the shade of the lips. And I think that's fine. So another thing I'd like to do with portraits is add a little glint to the eyes. So let's do that right here in Redshift by adding another area light. And we'll head back over to our perspective view. And obviously, if we move this around, it's going to affect our whole scene here, which doesn't look so great. But I actually only want this to be reflected in the eyes and not to omit any lights onto our character. So to do that will turn off the render for a second. We need to figure out a way to isolate just the eyes. And dads modals tend to have an extra layer of geometry around the eyeballs, which is currently what I moisture material is applied to, which gives them that glossy look. So in order to restrict our highlight to only that geometry, will need to separate that part from our model. So let's do that. We'll grab our character and switch over to polygon mode. And in order to select the full geometry surface around the eyes, will go to select and fill selection. And then it's just as easy as clicking here and holding Shift and clicking the other one to select the outer layer of both eyes. And now we need to split these off as a separate object. So we'll right-click and do a split. And if we look up here and hide the character, you can see we now have these separated from the character mesh. Let's rename this two eyes so we don't get confused. But if we show the character again, splitting doesn't actually remove the geometry from the original. And you can see those faces are still there and select it on here. But because we've made a copy and we don't want two sets of these intersecting. We can just delete those faces now. And now we just have those two separate parts just to keep things tidy. Now, I covers a fairly simple, so we can also delete all of these extra tags. Now, we only need to have that I'm moisture material on there. And now we can grab the highlight. And to have this only affect that separate IMS, we can go over to project and set the mode to include and just drag those eyes into here. And now if we check this out, everything goes back to normal except our eyes, which are now showing our highlights in the reflection and we'll position now I liked to give us a slight glint in the corner of the eyes. So we'll use the same trick we did earlier by looking through the light, which should make positioning this a bit easier. And we just want to point this toward the eyes and rotate it until we're happy with the reflection, which will keep an eye on over here. And the reflection is actually quite large at the moment. Because if we take a look at the dimensions of our light, that's also quite large. But if we shrink this down to maybe ten centimeters, we can make that reflection much smaller. And we definitely want to keep this effect nice and subtle as well, just enough to bring a bit of life into the eyes. And I also find switching the light shape to disk. Can round those reflections out and look a bit nicer as well. And you could also adjust the intensity and exposure of the light as well to make those more or less visible. But I think I'm pretty happy with this now. So let's turn off the render region again. One last thing I want to do before we render this is just to darken this area down a bit more, so it's not so distracting. So back in the default camera, if we grab our flagging in, we'll move this up ever so slightly to cut more of that light away from here. We really focus on just this area here. That's looking better now. So let's finish this by re enabling all the layers. And we'll do one more bucket render. And while that's rendering away, Let's go and pop open L Post Effects. We can start adding the finishing touches to our image as it's rendering. Let's enable photographic exposure, which instantly brightens things up. But let's go in here and play with the f-stop to get the right exposure. About there might work. And we might also enable the color controls and add a bit of contrast as well. What else do we have here? Maybe a little bit of vignetting as well. Again, to really draw the eye toward the center of the image. We might also decrease the saturation ever so slightly. And maybe a tiny bit more contrast. And feel free to play around with these and see what kind of looks you can come up with. But I think we'll just add a little bit of bloom as well to give our character a nice soft glow. And again, we don't want to go too crazy with this. There is nice. I think we can finally call it a portrait done. So all we need to do now to finish this off is hit Render. And that brings us to the end of the course. So now it's time for you to create your very own character and render off your next masterpiece here in cinema 4D. So have fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you create.