Hi Gang!

In this thread I would like to make it so that new(er) Daz users and seasoned ones can share advice and overall make this thread a good bookmark for those still learning Daz.

Those that are good with the program could maybe share some good advice on making renders, best lighting, etc.

Anyone have advice for the newbies?

I would be happy to add what ever I can.  I have been useing DAZ for about 10yrs.+  I do not know all the ins and outs of DAZ but it is the only 3d program I use.  To most new artest their problem seems to be in how to set up DAZ in the first place so that they are able to find content and use it .  I have posted in the DAZ forum a number of time on how I set up DAZ so I can find what I need. I will be happy to add my $.02 that is $.03 more then it is worth but I do love DAZ and will for a long time to come

well i dunno lmao i think i can help out a hair too since i've been using it since '07 and have a fairly good grasp on it even in ds4.

You are welcome to post any tips you have etc. You don't have to wait for questions :)

Well had no problem with Daz3....Daz4??   Ok question...Why when you open a previously saved scene EVERYTHING is highlighted.. Would like nothing unless I want it

that would be the greaest tip ever I do not like DAZ4 doing it there must be a way to turn it off and use it like daz3

I've never heard of that one -- I'm running DS4 Pro 4.0.3.47, 64-bit Windows 7.  I've tried it with scenes saved in both DS3 and DS4, and neither does that.

Quote - I've never heard of that one -- I'm running DS4 Pro 4.0.3.47, 64-bit Windows 7.  I've tried it with scenes saved in both DS3 and DS4, and neither does that.

I'm using 32-bit Windows XP..That shouldn't make a difference though. Any special settings u use when you open a scene?

I have no default scene load on startup, and no Default Camera created on new scene, but neither of those should make any difference on loading a scene.  I've loaded both by double-click in the content library and File > Open.  I don't have an XP computer that can run DS4, but I'll ask around.

I don't have a problem when I open saved scenes, I'm on XP 32bit. When you say highlighted do you mean as if you are using the surface selection tool?

Am new to Daz 4, I downloaded one of chacomac_comte-mfd-genesis1-67803 and extracted to my Documents/Daz/Studio. I able to find it in my content library panel {to the right} however when it won't load to my selected genesis figure when I double click it or right click load it. what did I do wrong?

That's a texture for the MFD for Genesis, not an item to put directly onto Genesis.  You need to load the MFD onto Genesis, select the MFD, and then apply the texture.

(It will alsdo work with the V4 or V3 MFD).

Quote - Hi Gang!

In this thread I would like to make it so that new(er) Daz users and seasoned ones can share advice and overall make this thread a good bookmark for those still learning Daz.

Those that are good with the program could maybe share some good advice on making renders, best lighting, etc.
Anyone have advice for the newbies?

My first advice will be name things RIGHT...

DAZ is a company who makes DS4 ..so people have to learn DazStudio or DS ..not DAZ

Naming Ds, DAZ is creating a lot of confusion specialy for newbee's ..

So is there a difrence between DS figures and DAZ figures ..

one is owend and made by DAZ company and the other works in DS..

So start with the right names.. and half i done .. 

greetz Chris

 if you wish to get right down to it the name is DAZ3d Studio NOT DAZ Studio

Some people can be so silly

Quote -  if you wish to get right down to it the name is DAZ3d Studio NOT DAZ Studio

Some people can be so silly

Actually I don't think its silly to point out that a post made by an official is worded incorrectly, to me it shows a lack of care, another example that renderosity care little for their Daz Studio customers.

My advise to new Daz Studio user is go to the Daz forums; there is a new users forum that has a great deal of very helpful information in it, you will also find the forum populated by people who know DS inside out and are ever willing to help and encourage.

"My advise to new Daz Studio user is go to the Daz forums" Humm am I missing somthing here? At the top of this page it states: "Welcome to the DAZ|Studio Forum"  

Quote - "My advise to new Daz Studio user is go to the Daz forums" Humm am I missing somthing here? At the top of this page it states:"Welcome to the DAZ|Studio Forum"  

Sorry yes I meant over at the Daz site

a link to the new user forum there

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewforum.php?f=97

Seeing as people are being 'nitpicky' about the name, lets get it right.

The company is called DAZ Productions Inc.

The website is DAZ3D or Digital Art Zone 3D

The program is DAZ Studio or DS for short and that name is trademarked, you'll find it on the splash screen when DS starts, on several of the help menu options and on the help/about daz studio pop up, as well as on the top left corner of the open program.

Things to watch out for when your buying content

Poser Dynamics don't work, hair doesn't show up and clothing loads as a static prop.

Poser procedural shaders don't work in DS, as a result most material settings look crap in DS, so you will need to 'adjust' surface settings if the product doesn't come with DS MAT presets.

Smart Morphs, DS hates these and can break the morphs especially if they are Poser PMD morphs.

Poser 8+ rigging, products like Miki 3 will load, but they start to distort when you pose them, as most of the additions to P8 rigging don't load into DS.

Poser 9+ weightmap rigging, avoid as it just doesn't work, some parts do load but you really don't want to go there.

Those covers DS1 to DS3, sadly thanks to the new system they are using in DS4 there are a couple of other things to avoid.

Geometry switching, this is completely broken and will probably remain broken as long as DS4 treats every mess like it treats Genesis.

PMD morphs, DS auto-loads these when they're called in cr2, pp2 & hr2 files, but if the vender didn't 'weld' the mesh before making the morphs and saving them in the PMD, then DS4 will cause the morphs to explode.

Good stuff, Bejaymac. I wish I'd known this stuff when I first started working in DS. 

A few other things I wish I'd known:

While Poser Lights load up in DS, they usually look terrible. 

"Generation" characters have unpredictable compatibility. Poses designed for most third generation characters (Michael 3, Hiro 3, Stephanie 3, Victoria 3, Aiko 3, David 3) wil work pretty well for all of these characters. So, if you have a pose for Hiro3, it will probably work fine for Aiko3. MAT poses (aka skins) will also work on all characters of the same gender, so a hiro3 skin will work on michael 3. However, some regions must be manually set on aiko3. Like, if you're using a MAT pose of a Victoria3 skin on aiko3, you'll often have to apply the legs manually. None of these characters have any clothing crossover compatability. If it says, "conforming clothing," it only works on that character. It also won't work on characters with the same name from a different generation. So, stuff written for Michael 2 won't work on Michael 3 or Michael 4. This is so obvious to me now, but when I first got the program, I thought Michael 4 was just a new version of Michael 3, not a completely different model. This is further confused by the fact that anything designed for Hiro4 or Freak4 (or Aiko4, Shefreak4 and Stephanie4 on the ladies' side) can be worn by Michael 4 (or Victoria 4, respectively). And Genesis can wear anything, if you buy the right addons. 

Hair figures only work on compatible characters. Hair will work on anybody if you take some time to tweak it. 

That's all I can think of right now. 

One of the things that I had to learn very indirectly was how to set certain shaders to figures/props/etc. For example, there's a great freebie called Cloth FX (I don't recall where I found it at the moment but Google will get you there) that you can use to set clothing items (or any surface, really) as either a leather effect or spandex. In order to do that, however, you first have to select the figure it's going on in your scene tab, then swing over to the surface tab and highlight what surface material you are going to use that shader on.

Now for the hidden part: Holding down control, click on the shader thumbnail in your file list/tree, and a pop-up box comes up. There's two selectable drop down options. The Top box has 'Surfaces' with the option Selected or All. (in this instance, we only want one or a few surfaces of your chosen item with the shader, so 'Selected' is clicked.)

The other box is 'Map Settings'. This is how it will work with the texture map or UV map of the item. The options are 'Replace' or 'Ignore'. Again, this time one would use 'ignore' which the shader with go over top of the texture map beneath, creating something of a dual layer image.

The control part and clicking on the thumbnail to activated it was the important part of all of this.

With DS4 the Surface selection tool also selects the item, so you no longer need the two step process.

Quote - With DS4 the Surface selection tool also selects the item, so you no longer need the two step process.

You'e right, that was a ds3 trick, but I turned that function off as it was super annoying to have your whole screen flare up with yellow. Sometimes Studio4 was not terribly precise while differentiating between a character's surface and the giant wall of pipes behind them, for example.

I have noticed that sometimes it does pick it for you, but sometimes not. Seems like a crap shoot by model/prop.

Speaking of, for anyone who has the same problem, you can go to your tool tab next to your scene tab in the left hand side window and change that from bounding box and surface to bounding box only, should you wish.

I was wondering if anyoe knows if the figure Lulubelle can also be used in Daz? It's a poser plushie lamb- thank you

Ok so I think this is kinda sad coming from a Daz coordinator, but how the heck do I find anything other than Genesis is D/S4?! The only things I can find are the pre-installed content, like the magus clothes, journeyer scout clothes, and genesis, I can't find M5 or any of the Genesis morphs I've dropped lots of moola buying, which I installed two days ago, or any of my 134 gigs worth of runtime, nothing! Please help! lol

Just look in MY DOCUMENTS If you have not set up your own file system then look there  I set up my own files and know where they are trying to hide

Quote - Ok so I think this is kinda sad coming from a Daz coordinator, but how the heck do I find anything other than Genesis is D/S4?! The only things I can find are the pre-installed content, like the magus clothes, journeyer scout clothes, and genesis, I can't find M5 or any of the Genesis morphs I've dropped lots of moola buying, which I installed two days ago, or any of my 134 gigs worth of runtime, nothing! Please help! lol

Try looking in the Content Library tab under "DAZ Studio Formats".

I'm pretty sure Genesis Morph* installers will give you a dependency error if you try to install them in the wrong place (same thing as the Gen 4 morphs), so if you didn't get that then M5 is installed properly.

It sounds like your looking at the "Smart Content" tab, which means you probably haven't installed the metadata.

Use the "Content Library" tab instead, first entry on the left should read "DAZ Studio Formats", following the arrows to the right and you should see > My Library > People > Genesis > Characters, in there is where you should find the Character preset to load M5.

The Content Library tab allows you to access your content directories/runtimes as they are on the drive, this is the old school way and my prefered method. It also allows you to 'see'** your content in a Database similar to DS2/3.

The 'Smart Content' tab is the new way of accessing your content, but it's pretty useless if you dont have any metadata for the content, or if like me you dont use the CMS.

*Yep that really is all that M5 & V5 are, character morphs of Genesis and over priced ones at that.

** You need to add it first before you can see it.

Quote - Speaking of, for anyone who has the same problem, you can go to your tool tab next to your scene tab in the left hand side window and change that from bounding box and surface to bounding box only, should you wish.

Ah so that was the problem...

Thank you!

Don't Know whether anyone has asked this befor in any threads, but i would lik to ask this:

I am not able to use " Magnetic clothing " in DAZ  studio 4. ANyone know how to use this and what exactly this stuff do?

Thanks!

The 'Magnetize Clothing' files are mainly for use in Poser.

Victoria 4 was released with a pile of magnets rather than JCM's (Joint Controling Morphs), in Poser these magnets don't work on the clothing you have 'conformed' to her, which is where these files come in as they link V4's magnets to the clothing.

DS users don't really need them as we have an auto-magnetize function already built in, select "Edit > Preferences" and click on the "Content Library" tab, 'auto-magnetize' is either the 2nd or 3rd option.

Magnetize clothing poses are only needed in Poser; DAZ Studio auto-magnetizes V4 clothing.

You can switch auotmagnetise off - you might, for example, want to use magnets to alter the figure to fit into a set of pre-morphed clothing, or to make a set of clothes loose-fitting, for example. If the option is off you use the unnumbered magnetise pose (or my free script, which should still be linked from the index thread at forumarchive.daz3d.com )

Thanks all for your time and valuable inputs

What I do is select the specific light and then replace it with a corresponding Daz Studio Spotlight, Distant Light, or Point Light depending on the effect I need. 

As I am still currently working in 32 bit I rarely use UberEnvironment and other IBL lights as they tend to crash the render process due to the larger number of calculations requried.

For those with little experience, lighting a scene can appear daunting. However, one advantage Daz Studio has over other applications is that you are able to "look through" a light as if it were a camera, so aiming is so much simpler.  When I was doing theatriacal lighting, I would have killed for a system like this.  Would have saved a lot of ladder climbs into the flylines.

There are also good tutorials as well

Lighting also doesn't have to be overly complex to be effective.

For example this scene used a total of only five lights (three distant, one spot and one point).

...bugger, the editing time expired before I could save my changes.

Here are the instructions for viewing though a light:

In DS3, click the down arrows on the Default Camera widget in the viewport.  In DS4 the camera selelction menu is located above the camera cube. Once you expand the menu, you can select the light you wish to view through and click again.  The scene may look a bit distorted, but now you are viewing through the light itself as if it were a camera.

I have been using DAZ Studio since August of 2011, so I suppose you could say I am a new user. Even so, I have already learned a lot, mostly through tutorials and by trial and error. I have noticed that the majority of video tutorials are made by people who are working by trial and error also. Not a good way to make a tutorial. 

At this time I would like to ask if anybody knows where I can get free clothing for Michael 4. It seems that there is a big lack of such clothing. I am not making much money these days. 

...unfortunately, male 3D models have always been on the "short end" with respect to commercial and freebie clothing content.

The two most "active" (as in frequently updated) sources for freebie content are the "Free Stuff" page here and ShareCG.

You could also post your concerns/interests on the Freestuff Forum here as well.

Quote - I have been using DAZ Studio since August of 2011, so I suppose you could say I am a new user. Even so, I have already learned a lot, mostly through tutorials and by trial and error. I have noticed that the majority of video tutorials are made by people who are working by trial and error also. Not a good way to make a tutorial. 

At this time I would like to ask if anybody knows where I can get free clothing for Michael 4. It seems that there is a big lack of such clothing. I am not making much money these days. 

I unfortunately have to say there is a severe lack in the m4 clothing department. However I recommend learning how to make your own. You can make some serious moola doing this. I highly recommend Silo or Hexagon, Hex is free at Daz3d.com currently, and there are some ok tutorials and vids on yahoo. Also the digital tailor m4 startking kit is an absolute MUST HAVE! Go buy it the instant you have a chance!

Attached Link: DOF tutorial at DA

DOF is one of my favorite features in ds4, so I made this simple tutorial to help get a friend up to speed.

DOF in DS4

• Load a new camera
• Position that camera to frame the shot you want.
• Go to the parameters tab and turn on the DOF for that camera (camera 1) in the parameters tab
• What is in focus is shown between the two panels (you will have to switch the scene camera to perspective view to see the workings of your new camera)
• Adjust the focal distance and f/stop till the part of the image that you want in focus is between the two panels.
• switch your scene camera view to your new camera and render

Rawn

I created a character who is standing with one arm up and out in front.  When rendering, the fingers are amazing - crisp, focussed etc. The face and hair however is blurry.  I've messed around with the DOF and the F-settings (I used to be pretty OK with my SLR so I get it), and on screen had the box pretty much as shown above - also tried it a bit tighter.... but my face and hair are STILL blurry!  If I turn DOF off, still the same.

I get the feeling it's me messing up, but bejeezus, I can't find the solution :'(

Any help would be appreciated, I've attached my settings.

Cheers.

Mike 

Could someone please tell me how to lock a camera into position?  I'm

forever moving it by accident.  Must be my newbishness showing

Select the camera and open the Parameters pane's option menu - in DS4, right-click on the tab, or in any version click the button in the pane's top corner. There's a Lock sub menu with options for locking and unlocking - you'd want Lock Node(s).

no worries xandi i've been using DS since '07 and still forget to lock my camera. usually end up with a close but better view in the end half the time

Hi how can i rig a cloth on to a posed character. I want to rig V4 high heel boots on to Genesis. Autofit does not work with high heels. And reshaping the boots to zero pose would cause unpredictable problems.

Using the weight painting tool and polygon selection tool to set the heels to a weight of 1 for the foot bends may help.

On the subject of locking cameras: If I decide to render a scene from the camera view, I switch to that view and use the zoom and pan controls toset the camera into the position I want. Then if I have a character or creature I want to look at the camera, I select the eyes and set the "Point At" parameter to that camera. When I go to the Render feature the default perspective view setting will usually reactivate, so I reset it to the camera view again.

I rarely have more than one camera for a scene unless I want to do an animated scene that switches from one camera to another. 

As for locking a camera into a position, I never do that, since I have not really had a use for a camera to be locked in a certain place.

Just thought I'd throw that in for you.

Thanks for the kind reply,

Since im a newbie, can you break the process for me step by step. It doesnt need to be very detalied, for ex. something like this.

Project V5 High Heel Boots

Put the V5 into high heel boots

Export to modeling software

Import to D|S

Use transfer utility (Which im confused with options )

Choose - Source|Scene item:Genesis||Morph:V5|- Target|Scene Item:BootGeometry||Default|

Check: Reverse Source Shape from target (Or not?)

Fix the weight mapping for heels etc.

Save figure 

For reuse

Put the genesis figure into high heels pose

Than apply the Boots

Is this the process?

Whoah.....I think I have some misconceptions.  I thought that all the renders were done from the camera view, the default.  But you stated that.... if you decide to render from the camera view..... Also...I took particular note of the fact that.... when you go to Render feature the default perspective view setting will usually reactivate....and you have to reset to camera view again.  We can render from the perspective view? 

This might be the cause of the problem I'm having off and on with the render not being the camera view.   Crikies.  I'm going to go look for those options right now.

And thank you for the information!

You are quite welcome. As a new user myself, I am always looking for anything I can find that will teach me about the software. This one, however, I discovered on my own; since I have a need to explore the depths of the program a lot. I kept trying to render a camera view, and could not get the camera view setting to stay on when I went to Render. So I went looking for the reason.

I don't know which version of DAZ Studio you have, but there should be a tool that allows you to switch between views that you see in the scene window. Click on that tool to see a dropdown menu and then click on the view of your choice. It is that simple. If you are having the same problem I was having, do the following:

1. Go to the Render application.

2. Now click on the view tool to see the dropdown menu.

3)Choose the camera view option and click on it.

1. Enter your Render settings.

2. Render.

Whats the best realistic lighting setup for Daz that would incorporate realism with render time thanks?