Forum: DAZ|Studio


Subject: Two newbie questions -DAZ 4.9-

peregrino05 opened this issue on Jan 22, 2016 ยท 31 posts


Miscreate posted Fri, 22 January 2016 at 7:21 AM

Hi, Peregrino.

Firstly, regarding using images in DAZ Studio, they are usually used as backgrounds and I'm assuming that that is what you are referring to. There are two ways to do this. The first is to simply load the file as a backdrop. There is an icon on the taskbar that looks like a mountain with a sun overhead that will produce a popup when clicked that will in turn allow you to browse to the location of your image and load it. The disadvantage of this approach is that the image will follow your camera around and appear centred in the viewport regardless of the relative positions of your subjects. It cannot be scaled or moved, which may not always be desirable. The second way is to add a primitive to your scene such as a plane, and add your image to it as a surface in the Surfaces tab. The advantage of this is that you can now scale the image and/or move it around in your scene to your liking. It is an actual scene element and will also relect light and accept shadows if desired.

As for content, much of the content sold here at Renderosity is in Poser format. It should still work fine in DAZ Studio, except that it is packaged within a runtime folder. New users often mistakenly install the runtime folder in the wrong place, by placing it in the existing runtime folder that you'll find in your content library. It should be copied to the folder above that in the folder hierarchy, whereupon you will be asked if you want to merge the runtimes and to which you should answer "yes". Some products, such as those designed for the Genesis figure and newer, will contain DAZ Studio files and folders that are not in the runtime folder hierarchy. These go into your content library folder, too. I recommend that you create a folder somewhere convenient on your fard drive to temporarily store files before moving them to your content library. Since invariably the products come packaged as compressed archives (i.e. "zips"), they'll need to be uncompressed anyway, and I always like to do this first so I can have a look at the internal folder structure and confirm where things go.