Several, uh, six months of not getting much 3D stuff done.
I'd written several short stories, put WIRS into the Reddit Halloween competition.
To my total astonishment, it won its category. Emboldened beyond sanity, I wrote two wry sequels, am working on a third...
( WIRS is in our PF 'Short Stories' forum. I'm posting sequels chapter by chapter on 'Deviant Art' etc; If your preferred search engine cannot find them, PM me... )
In between such, I've been trawling for freebies and sales.
I've a large collection of SciFi-ish props and sets, am always looking for plausible interiors, widgets, greebles and other scene dressings.
One problem is the growing chasm between the
Poser and Daz Studio (DS) environments. Better wits than mine have addressed this. Suffice it to say that Daz' 'Terms of Service' now prohibit their modellers including OBJs, perhaps from fear of 'Second Life' piracy. Everything seems to be DUF/DSF.
Happens there are inexpensive tools which can usually extract a passable OBJ from a plain-text or zipped DSF. However, this process does NOT produce a MTL file, and there is no access to DS mapping, textures etc. In effect, it requires a complete external unwrap & re-map, something I've never had work well. In fact, remembering my efforts from P4 days, I'd say it was really, really hard.
With most models now a much higher polygon count, re-mapping is also harder by an order of magnitude or more...
Daz Studio ( 'free' ) claims to be able to export objects in CR2 or OBJ format.
I've yet to find how to export CR2.
Every month or two, I 'gird my loins' and have another go, fail...
I've tried and tried with even the simplest of models, but DS goes through many, arcane CR2 export options, produces NOTHING at the end. Today, in exasperation, I tried to create a file with a 'unique' identifier, then set Windows' Explorer hunting across my C:, E: & F: drives.
( This took a while as E: & F: both run to ~ ½ Terabyte...
)
I found a classic, longer-named TrekkieGrrrl
Poser freebie, but NOT my exported CR2...
There are three ways of looking at this...
1) It was a Prop so, logically, should not export as a CR2. In which case, there should be a relevant error message.
2) I'm doing something else wrong.
3) All of the above...
Finally, I shrugged and tried to export as OBJ. I could do this via those budget tools, but I thought I'd give DS a go.
To my astonishment, DS by-passed those arcane CR2 export options, produced both an MTL file and an OBJ.
Opened in 3DOC, the OBJ complained about a missing texture. Misplaced, rather, as it was lurking in the freebie's DS Content tree. With that copied to an 'accessible' location, the test object rendered correctly...
I have no idea how this will work with complex interiors, but it sure beats re-mapping complex stuff...
Upside, with the various materials flagged, it means I may be able to pull an OBJ+MTL pairing into a 3D modelling program and hack them about...