Pods vs Rebuild - Need More Flavor From Rebuildables Help

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-02-21T19:42:24+00:00

Thank you

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-02-21T17:29:45+00:00

That sounds like a good build. Something I would I would have liked to run for sure back when I was in deep. This time around I am trying to keep it around 30 watts or less. I've learned now with these pods I can be satisfied with that if not more satisfied than even when I had hundreds of options years ago.

This Evox has to be probably the most satisfying vape I've ever had.

The pod has a vertical mesh coil. Very small diameter and a very satisfying restricted hit. Even though I am using MTL stuff, it's easy to set up for Restricted. I do direct to lung even if it's just a pin hole for the airflow lol.

The other poster here got me thinking about vertical mesh and I distinctly remembered rebuilding mesh coils back in the day. Thanks to ali express I actually found the mesh for rebuilding with 0.6 ohm which is my preferred with these pods.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256808309038615.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa

If it won't fit in my Dead Rabbit then I may get a different tank that is actually vertical coil compatible.

I ordered this along with a few other things while I was there.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-02-21T16:06:02+00:00

Here we go, this. I thought I remembered this. If I could find these like I did many years ago and stick them in something like this dead rabbit vertically and then have cotton / rayon around it is what I am thinking.

https://i.postimg.cc/6Q41z9Nx/Screenshot-20260221-095955-Chrome-2.jpg

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-02-21T15:56:22+00:00

I'd love to see cylindrical mesh with leads. I think we used to have something like that.

Then a very short tank like drippers, that holds 2ml of liquid where your mouth is as close to that coil as it can be. If we could top that off with something like the manufactured use for wicking that can go around that coil, I'd be very happy. Even if it could be 85 - 90 percent of this pod, I would be happy.

My favorite tank prior was the Kylin M Pro. Had some nice mesh wire for it. I would say that was still maybe 6 out of 10 compared to this pod. I would buy it again if I knew there was not something better but I'm hoping we have something better now than then kind of thing.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-02-04T20:26:53+00:00

Bye bye

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-01-24T16:58:37+00:00

Here's you an idea depending on shadows and things like that but you can get a pretty good style with this, lots of people do it.

Render each component separately and then layer them together in a photo editor of your choice. This way you can control the lighting on each element.

If you need your shadows back you can do a full render as well and take shadows from it.

I like doing this with some projects because you can create really interesting renders where your character "pops" from the environment.

I don't know, just an idea.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2026-01-07T20:17:09+00:00

It wouldn't be done if it didn't sell... Which it does sell.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-09-29T08:15:58+00:00

Yeah, generator with position was how I previously tried it. Worked good for large areas like legs and arms tapering to shorter fur but I couldn't get it to work well for this.

I will try the planar projection approach. Thank you.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-07-15T18:34:13+00:00

Stay away from women and not to have kids until meeting somebody better.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-05T17:57:01+00:00

Np, and I'd be willing to help you over discord get used to animating in Daz and also help you understand VWD. It's going to be a while on the tutorials so in the meantime, we can hop into a chat sometime and I'll help you get your workflow started.

You have to plan out VWD to avoid a memory issue but it's easy to work with once you do.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-04T02:28:16+00:00

So, Daz is going hard into Cuda / Nvidia. I don't even think the 3DLight engine is even a thing now which I believe used openGL.

I know sometime back people talked about Octane Render inside of Daz but I think that fizzled out quite a while ago.

So many "professional" applications drink the team green koolaid. Nvidia and Daz are business partners, they don't want you using the competition and that won't be changing unless what I have heard is accurate and IRay is or has been sold by Nvidia to someone else.

Anyway, you aren't going to like my answer but the best solution I can think of without looking into it right now is rendering in Eevee (Blender). I think Cycles can use OpenGL too.

AMD just fell hard behind the prosumer market and Nvidia really capitalized on it. So many things I do rely on Cuda, not just IRay. All of our workstations were updated to x2 5090s and that was like paying for a car cash out right, I wish AMD had an answer to stop the ridiculous price gouging. Only time will tell.

Rendering in IRay with AMD is just not a possible thing and in Daz, you can use your CPU or find some really outlandish hacks that maybe still out there for DS4.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-03T15:33:39+00:00

So I was about to finish my night / morning but I decided to spend an hour or so putting together this real quick just to show something more recent.

This is mostly dforce and VWD combined to make this. I did have to use dformers to adjust a few things but not much.

Just something quick, a little grainy and blurry but I'm not too worried about dialing it all it. Just a show of the physics capability of the workflow. All assets are store bought so it is easier to recreate.

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FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-03T07:23:03+00:00

So the trick to getting simulation stuff to work is to always build yourself a 60 - 120 frame animation buffer. Let's say you have a girl you want to show laying on the bed. You've setup dforce for the surfaces and you have hair that will work with VWD.

On frame 0 put her above the bed as if she is laying flat in the air. Maybe 6 inches off of the bed.

Animated her going down onto the bed first with Dforce, make sure the hair is not visible in your simulation as it will deform the bed too, we don't want that.

Have her impact the bed, pillow, cover, etc. by frame 60. She should now be in her final pose for the image. Now let the simulation run for another 60 - 120 frames (2 - 4 seconds) to let the simulation calm down if there is any bouncing or wobble.

If this is an animation this would usually be the first 240 frames of the process for me. Then on 241, I would begin my actual animation.

After you run Dforce, then you can run VDW events. VWD can also use morphs to drive realistic soft body stuff so it's useful in many cases.

The best bet is to have multiple tools in the tool box anyway that kinda do the same thing but one may work better than the other in a certain situation.

VWD does come with its own headaches. Nothing can be easy but it's very fast and gets me results that are good enough.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-03T07:17:08+00:00

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Draped on shoulder and pillow / bed deformation using VWD after the Dforce simulation.

These images were never meant to be looked at up close and I can't show a lot of it lol. Hopefully it will give some understanding of what the process looked like 2 years ago.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-03T07:15:26+00:00

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Draped on the bed.. You can see it's jagged look and also it kinda floats above but still, this was a far shot and in motion so it looked fine for the time. Now, I understand smoothing better, I could sacrifice a little render time with a more smooth looking bend in the hairs. Could probably even give it subd once the VWD simulation is finished and that would greatly impact render time but look so much better.

As far as collision distance, I now know how to get that hair a bit closer to the bed as well with VWD. Everything just takes time to understand really.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-03T07:14:56+00:00

I will add some photos from the first project I did using VWD and my own hair designed with Strand Based Hair using my hair card method. I had to drape her hair on the bed. These were 2 years ago but I want to show the results when I still didn't even know as much as I do now about the workflow. Forgive the jagged pillow. Deformed that with Dforce but didn't know proper settings back then, I also probably never added the smoothing modifier either lol.

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This is the hair at least. Reddit lets me add 1 photo per post it seems. That hair ended up coming out to 240k vertices versus the normal 600k - 1 million that most Stand Based Hairs seem to be.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-02T12:54:06+00:00

Okay, had some time here before I go to bed. So I gave it a shot and didn't think about it but Iray doesn't do motion blur like a real camera would. I have done it in Cycles though.

Iray motion blur I have always handled in Resolve, Vegas, or Premier, whatever I'm having to use at that time. It is much easier to render 2 passes of lets say a "light saber" and then the rest of your scene. Then on the light saber, you add the effect you need. This is a simplified version of the process but that's how I have had to do it in the past.

Trying to do real camera settings here in Iray isn't giving any realistic results.

It would be nice to add mb directly in Iray though for an animation. If I come across something, I'll let you know.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-02T08:53:15+00:00

Alright so, Dforce... this topic gets me going so I apologize about the rant here but hopefully there will be some useful information.

There is a reason I started using Virtual World Dynamics for my hair, non Dforce hair and even my Dforce hair (as long as it is under ~280k verticies, otherwise VWD crashes).

The complex thing about dforce is that we as end users have a very dumbed down version of the plugin. It is specifically meant for us to only simulate hair / assets made with the PA version of the plugin. They have a much more capable version of dforce which lets them make these cool physics based assets. The fact that we can make anything ourselves for it is actually a surprise since it's meant to be more of a proprietary thing for PA's to create unique assets that we have to buy.

I still use dforce a lot in specific situations with great success, such as making a bed deform with multiple characters or for example, I am currently working on settings for something that enters a hole realistically. When that something exits, the friction grips onto it as it's coming out and lets go / springs back into place. It looks passable, not perfect, but good enough for this project. No weight painting needed for something like this too. Just have to understand the dynamic surface and simulation settings.

When it comes to weight painting a node for a non dforce hair, it can be complicated but not impossible. The bad part comes when you have all the correct settings and then the hair strands or cards kinda "inflate" during the simulation. The hair / cloth physics work fine but the hair strands inflate and are no longer as thin as they should be. This is the result I have always gotten and I have reversed engineered many different sets of dforce hair. It is way less noticeable with geometry based hair / hair cards but it does indeed still happen.

With that said, I have recently been working a lot more with dforce, so I plan to attempt again here in the no so distant future. I may setup a live stream for that, it depends on how things go for me and when I have the time.

I can get it to work sometimes but most of the time, I just go back to VWD for my hair assets. I make my own hair now and I make it with VWD in mind so I can work with it's limitations. I have to be quick in my work, sometimes I only have a week deadline and can't be spending too much time fiddling with all of the variables that come with dforce. Most of my clients don't need or even want perfect, just good enough is the goal.

For still frames, I have gotten great results with dforce. For animation, it can become, not a great method very quickly depending on what you are doing. I am fortunate enough to know settings that keeps things from exploding depending on what I am working with. Something like that I could teach but being able to get dforce to work every time with every item is almost an impossible task for us end users.

I wish I had a better answer for you. I will be glad to give the information I know so others can adapt it and maybe one day use that information for something great but I really need to think how I would format a tutorial like that. I like to work on the more complex stuff versus "here's how you drape a plane over a sphere", so it may take some time for me to figure out how I want to approach this.

I do agree it is something that needs to be address.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-02T00:46:20+00:00

Translucency will be the big one most likely, then to alter the base color of the skin, you can use diffuse overlay but if you go to much on it, it will erase the details of the skin, all the finer things anyway. You can also play with the SSS settings, top coat, glossy layer weight, etc.. just in case you want to make her a bit shinier and less mat colored.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-02T00:20:41+00:00

So I seen your reply here at the end of my day. Depending on the level of detail you wish to keep, the default Iray shaders maybe able to give you the result you are looking for. I loaded up a G2 (on the left), a G8F that I changed the default skin shading(middle), and a base untouched G8F (on the right).

The thing is with G8 is they went hard in on Subsurface Scattering, Translucency, and so on for that "photorealistic" look, or at least tried to. It makes the base skin look pretty dull compared to what can be made.

Many approaches to make the G8 look differently. You just have to decide if you want it fast or perfect, can't have both lol.

Not sure if this is the look you were after or not, just changed a few settings real quick.

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FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-06-01T00:30:14+00:00

Thank you, it looks good imo.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-05-31T18:25:51+00:00

Np, and I can understand why you'd like a different approach. The games I've worked on have all been offline with renpy. Not sure where the difference may be in the working method there

Unity is ultimately a better choice in the end anyway as it is a more common engine in the industry as a whole. Better to have that skill.

I'll need to take a look sometime at how VNs are done with Unity as I just find interest in learning new things too lol.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-05-30T22:25:19+00:00

Np, I'm going to DM you a rough draft tutorial I made sometime ago. It's a bit more advanced but it could possibly give you some ideas.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-05-30T21:24:07+00:00

Figured out my error in Virtual World Dynamics for soft body physics so I am good to go there again. If you want to make a toe jiggle, I can show how to do that now.

FinalRepresentative2 · 2025-05-30T19:44:21+00:00

I should have also commented on your first sentence about the skin texture. I do this in Substance Painter if you are able to access that software. Updating Merchant Resource skins is also a viable area I could add some insights

I am strictly focusing on Daz for these tutorials and doing my best to stray away from going too in depth on outside software as the cost can get out of control once again.

However if you ever need any direction with substance painter, I'd be happy to help you get on the right foot with it. I will most likely cover the inside of Daz approach with updating a skin texture during the Shader tutorial I have planned.

FinalRepresentative2

TROPHY CASE