Make Your Own Nail Colors For Any DAZ Character!

Author: Amber

Tools Needed

• Poser
• Any daz character
• Any paint program such as photoshop or psp

In this tutorial I will show you how to make your own fingernail colors for any DAZ character and make the MAT pose files for applying the colors.

Begin with one of the character templates available here at DAZ. I used the Victoria 3.0 template.

Using your selection tool click on any plain white area of the image.

Then go to Select > Inverse, Select > Modify > Expand > 3 click OK.

Make a new layer.

Choose any color you like, I chose a deep red, #981A29, for this tutorial.

Using your paintbrush tool, any size brush (I used a brush size of 53)…color in the fingernail area only.

Make a new layer.

Using a small airbrush and white color, #FFFFFF, put a small line down the middle of each nail. The line shouldn't touch the top, bottom or sides of the nail, and they don't have to be perfectly straight.

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set it to 6.3 and click OK.

Click on your background layer, create a new layer and flood fill it with white. Go to Select > Deselect. Save your image as a jpg file with a quality of 12.

In Poser simply make sure you are on Vicky's body and go to Render > Materials > Fingernails and load your image.

If you are using Photoshop to make your texture save your fingernail image as a PSD, and on the color layer go to Image > Adjustments > Variations and change the color to whatever you

want and save that as a separate jpg file.

Now we need to make a pz2 file. The only thing that needs to be in the pz2 file is the information for the fingernails themselves.

version

{

number 4.0

}

figure

material Fingernails

{

KdColor 1 1 1 1

KaColor 0 0 0 1

KsColor 0 0 0 1

TextureColor 1 1 1 1

NsExponent 12

tMin 0

tMax 0

tExpo 0

bumpStrength 0.3

ksIgnoreTexture 0

reflectThruLights 1

reflectThruKd 0

textureMap ”:Runtime:textures:nameoftexturehereJPG”

0 0

bumpMap NO_MAP

reflectionMap NO_MAP

transparencyMap NO_MAP

ReflectionColor 1 1 1 1

reflectionStrength 1

}

material Preview

{

KdColor 0.74902 0.54902 0.45098 1

KaColor 0 0 0 1

KsColor 0.498039 0.498039 0.498039 1

TextureColor 1 1 1 1

NsExponent 30

tMin 0

tMax 0

tExpo 0.6

bumpStrength 0.75

ksIgnoreTexture 0

reflectThruLights 1

reflectThruKd 0

textureMap NO_MAP

bumpMap NO_MAP

reflectionMap NO_MAP

transparencyMap NO_MAP

ReflectionColor 1 1 1 1

reflectionStrength 1

}

}

}

You can use any text editor to do this, I used Edit Pad for this tutorial. Then save the file into your

CuriousLabs > Runtime > Libraries > Pose > Folder Of Your Choice. Be sure to save it as a pz2 file! You can just type in nameoffile.pz2 and it will get saved as a pz2 file.

You will need to have the body morph pack where applicable, this depends on which character you're making the fingernail mats for. I used Victoria 3 for this tutorial so we'll apply her “Nails Long” morph which is located in the Pose > !V3 Full-Body INJ folder.

Click the Nails Long Icon and then go to Figure 1 > Body and change your dial to 1.0

And there you go…you've made your own fingernail colors and mat pose files to easily apply them!