Rocky Road for Trekkers

Rocky Road Textures for blondie9999's HIgh Tech Trekkers

Contents

• 20 Full Texture Sets for blondie’s Trekkers: 10 styles, each in worn and battered versions
• 185 Boots Difuse Texture, Bump, Displacement, Specular, Specular Colour, Normal and Mask Maps, at sizes varying from 750×1274 for the metal fasteners, to 3000×2300 for the shin plates.
• 1 HDRI TIFF file for reflections in DAZ Studio
• Poser 7 MAT Poses (.PZ2)
• Poser 6 support: please see below!
• HSS DAZ Studio Material Presets for Studio 3+ (.DSA)

Mixing and Matching

Five of the textures were designed so they could be mixed and matched with other items in the Brotherhood/Sisterhood series of textures, and should also work well with Arien’s Mourning Sun outfit for M4. The other textures are independent. You do not need any of the previous items to use these textures, but having them will expand the possibilities for creating completely new outfits by mixing and matching clothing from your library.

Materials and Shaders

To apply the specific high-end materials for either Poser or DAZ|Studio, go to Pose\Rocky Road\, make sure you’ve got your item selected, and then click on the required MAT pose. The Poser materials use advanced shader nodes and displacement, and because of this, require you to render using Firefly, and have displacement enabled. More information at the end of this document.

For an even smoother, “new” look on the Poser textures, apply the free pose below; this will remove the normal maps. This is not necessary for Studio users, as the materials there don’t use normal maps since HSS’s current version cannot read them.

DAZ|Studio

Shaders

As part of a functionality of Studio, you can find the Studio shaders in the same folder as the Poser shaders; just click on the desired thumbnail and Studio will automatically load the Studio shader instead of the Poser one. Be aware that while every effort was made to get them as close as possible in both Studio and Poser, in some cases we preferred to play on each programs’ strengths, and so the ones depicted in the thumbnails might be slightly different from the ones loaded. The set has a material set that uses HSS. You will need the Human Surface Shader to be able to use these HSS materials (available with any of the Elite Textures, and separately as ds_ap47), and also that the render times might be longer than standard Studio shaders. If you are using DS3’s latest version, you should be able to use the materials without any problem or any extra installed; HSS can be read natively by DS4.

Please apply the material poses normally; you do not need to apply HSS beforehand or do anything else, the whole process of loading the different material shader is completely transparent for the end user.

UberEnvironment

UberEnvironment is a perfect companion to the HSS materials. However, be aware that light materials, like pale skin, are very sensitive to “spots” and “dirt” caused by the Ambient Occlusion even when using the 4X settings; you can prevent this by using higher Occlusion Samples and Shading Rate. These settings can be changed in the Parameters Tab of the UberEnvironment figure.

Lighting and Reflections

The metals in this set are not set to raytraced, using instead HSS’s HDRI provided image, or a reflection map, depending on which set of materials is used. This was done as the metal surfaces are small and raytracing would cause longer render times without any significant improvement in realism. However, it is possible to set them to reflect accurately its surroundings. To do this you will have to go into the Reflection section in the Advanced Surfaces tab, and change the Reflection Mode from “Environment Map” to “Raytraced”. Keep in mind that to look at its best, there has to be something in the scene other than the clothing item and the figure for it to reflect. If you find that you need your metals to have more of a glossy sheen, it is a good idea to give them something light to reflect. Set up a few white or light-coloured primitives outside of the camera view, or even above, so the metals have something to reflect; this should liven them up. This is a trick used quite often for car photography and 3D renders, and should work well for you. Raytraced reflections will make your renders longer, but if you want the metal to reflect less, you can reduce the reflection percentage in your surfaces, or you can go back to the reflection maps settings in the provided materials.

For best results:

• adjust the bucket size according to your computer’s performance
• As in Poser, higher Pixel Samples settings produce renders where the textures show much better.
• add Ambient Occlusion to the lighting if you have the processor power to do so, as this will increase realism. Alternatively, you could do a separate AO-only render and composite in Photoshop.

Finally, remember that good lighting is essential to obtain good raytraced reflections. If you are using Studio’s default lighting, or very low levels of light, or light that doesn’t shine onto the metal, it won’t have the same look as a properly lit scene. It might also be a good idea to include a specular-only light, as it will help liven-up your renders, in particular if you are using an IBL or GI style of illumination. Also, as mentioned above, make sure that you are using the right level of samples to avoid jaggies, “dirt” or “spots”; if necessary, raised samples and shading rate, both of your lighting figure and in your overall render.

Poser

• always use Firefly, and the manual settings
• enable raytracing if you are using raytraced shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections or refractions; a setting of 1 bounce will suffice if only the former two are used, otherwise use 2-3; this set uses both AO and, raytraced reflections, so the latter will be a better choice.
• for the displacements to show, displacement needs to be enabled; minimum displacement bounds of 0.020/0.030 are recommended; some of the materials in this set use displacement so enable it when rendering.
• if you are on P5-6, disable texture filtering, and always set the maximum texture size to the size of your bigger texture; for Mourning Sun, this value shouldn’t go below 3072px. Reducing this value will result in muddy or blurred renders.
• for draft renders, your min. shading rate can go to 2, but for final renders, always reduce this to 0
• similarly, use a value of 2 or 3 for the pixel samples for drafts, but you can go much higher up when doing final renders; anything between 3 and 5 might be a good compromise for screen usage, although for very smooth or detailed renders you could go quite higher; be aware, though, that this will increase your render times

Poser 6

This texture set uses 24-bits pngs for displacements. Some versions of Poser have problems reading and interpreting these accurately. Before using the set, you will need to convert all png files to jpgs, and then also install the extra materials offered below so these new displacements are read properly. Normal maps are also not read by Poser 6, and this, combined with the 8 bits jpgs, can give a slightly different look to the displacements than those obtained on newer versions of the programs.

DOWNLOAD POSER 6 MATERIALS

Troubleshooting

• items look dull or odd when rendered: if you’re using Poser, check that you are using Firefly to render. In Studio, make sure you have HSS correctly installed. If you’re using a third party software like Vue or Carrara, edit the material to suit your application better
• Studio surfaces show no bump, or some other surface oddity: the very first installation of HSS was flawed, and installed items in the wrong place; re-download either your Elite textures or HSS and reinstall
• can’t find the Studio-specific materials: Studio mats can be found within the same folders as the Poser materials; Studio will recognise them and load them instead of Poser’s. Just select your material as normal. If you want to use the HSS-enabled material, use instead the ones in the relevant HSS folder

Required and Related products

• Required product:one of the following: High Tech Trekker Boots for M4, High Tech Trekker Boots for V4, High Tech Trekker Boots for Genesis, all by blondie9999
• Optional Products:
  • Shades of Atlantis: Wild Brotherhood (ps_tx2662b)
  • Shades of Atlantis: Arcane Brotherhood (ps_tx2451b)
  • Dawnrazor: Mourning Brotherhood (ps_tx2797b)
  • Imperial Brotherhood (ps_tx2851b)
  • Rogue Brotherhood (ps_tx2881b)
  • Ludus: Sword Brotherhood (ps_tx3035b)
  • Midnight Brotherhood (ps_tx3035b)
• Related Products:
  • Wildenlander Version 4
  • Wild Sisterhood
  • Wild Sisterhood Court
  • Sword Sisterhood
  • Shades of Atlantis: Cobalt Hierophant by Luthbel
  • Wild Hearts: Wildenlander for M4 by Luthbel
  • Mourning Sun by Arien
  • Paladin and Paragon by Luthbel
  • Jack of Hearts by Luthbel
  • AD Gladio by Luthbel
  • Midnight Hunter by Luthbel
  • Shades of Atlantis: Anunnaki by Luthbel
  • Highlander: Wildenlander for Genesis by Luthbel

Freebies

Download the Poser 6 materials

Download the normals off material for Poser

Products used in Promos

Coming up