I bought some tuts at Daz on rigging a while back. At the time Daz Studio was at version 4.6 and using the Triax rigging. Now I'm hearing about dual-quaternion skinning. I have googled and searched this site and Daz trying to figure out what is the deal. It seems that this new rigging just works with the the New G3. Is that right? I've updated Daz Studio to 4.8  and all it shows in the figure setup is the Triax and legacy method. So I guess my question is it worth learning the Triax rigging or is it going the way of the Dodo. Will the dual-quaternion skinning be made part of the figure setup in Daz are be accessible only by Daz and their vendors?

 And to add to the above, what the heck is "Quarternion"?????

To a large extent the videos will still be useful - the difference is that there's only one weight map for each joint, so if (as is usually the case) the twist needs to be different from the rotations you want two bones - one for the bends, one parented to that for the twisting. To create a figure like this you set it up in the usual way - using TriAx if you are starting from an OBJ in the Figure Setup pane - then with the Node Weight Map Brush Active go to the Tool Settings pane, Binding tab, set Weight Mapping Mode to General and General Weight Mode to Dual Quaternion. However, you don't have to use general weight - TriAx is still there and can still be used if desired.

Quaternions are mathematical structures for handling 3-dimensional rotations in a way that can be combined commutatively, as I recall (standard rotations give different orders depending on the order in which they applied).

Thanks a bunch RHasetine  :) That's really cleared it up for me. According to the stuff I googled, dual-quaternion is supposed to be better at reducing distortion.  Oh well off to experiment. :D