Quote - There will be a point in time when someone who started using Daz / Reality / Lux will take up photography and use the techniques he/she learned thanks to Paolo and find his/her results to be very good.

The hardest thing for a Daz user is to let go of all the 'tricks' learned to get a nice image and switch to thinking like a photographer.

I remember well Paolo saying so back in the days I sarted using Reality.

These days I roam the web and look at youtube vids photographers make to show their 'secrets'. Recently I search for 'Glamour photography' and there are many, many vids showing how to set up lighting for that.

THe wonderful thing is that with Reality you can apply those techniques and get the very same result you see in the vids.

I'd say: "Paolo for President"! :)

Absolutely agree with all of that (except that I'm sure Paolo would not want to be president!). I was very keen on photography when I was a teenager. I had a manual SLR, light meter, etc., did a bit of my own D&P and had all the books out of the library. I've forgotten much of it, but what I do recall has been very useful when using Reality. Not only that, I've painlessly relearned quite a bit about photography through using Reality and it's given me the confidence to have a go at doing some profile portraits for our website at work. Having seen what the pros have produced in the past, I think I may be able to do almost as good a job (and save us a lot of money in these hard times!). It may end up being a disaster, but won't cost anything more than a bit of my time.

You're dead right about how it can be a bit of hurdle for people who have got into the paradigm of DAZ (or Poser) lighting—we had someone here recently with exactly this difficulty. It's easier for "dissidents" like me. I could never get my head around the shenanigans and anti-intuitive knowledge required to do good renders in DAZ and Poser's built-in systems. I guess those into fantasy and sci-fi will miss some of the jiggery-pokery that can be done with biased rendering, but, after all, special effects have to be faked in movies for exactly the same reasons that they do in Luxrender, and the solutions are similar: mattes, compositing, etc. Post-effects and clean up are almost as old as photography and movie-making themselves, after all.

Quote - There are some lines under her right breast that look like the mesh "skeleton", would enabling smoothing help this (genesis figure)?

The lines are caused when light hits the surface at a "grazing angle" (which to put it simply, is when light rays are closer to being parallel to the surface rather than perpendicular). The solution appears to be to increase subdivision on the figure in Studio (not in Reality). On Genesis the default is 1 level of subd; as I often use lights at these angles, I set subd to 2 on Genesis much of the time. If necessary, you can set it higher by turning off limits on the parameter slider.

Naturally, this increases memory and processor demands, so may not be practical on slower systems with low RAM (especially 32 bit, of course).

Are these items for Genesis (clothing or poses, perhaps) and by "will not load" do you mean that with Genesis selected the items don't appear in the list of compatible assets under Smart Content? Perhaps the assets you cannot see do not have metadata, or it is incomplete or contains errors. I've bought content from DAZ recently where this was the case and I had to fix the metadata or add it from scratch.

If you can see the products in Content Manager, from there right click its icon and check Categories and see if that looks correct. Then check in the Content DB Editor, click on the item in it (in the Assets tab) and see at the bottom  under Compatability whether it says "/Genesis" under the asset name (assuming it is for Genesis). "Type" is another thing to check here (e.g. "Preset>Pose").

In answer to your second question, I think changing the Content Library tab view to "View as a Tree" is what you may be looking for. This option is available from the menu which opens with the little square icon with the arrow and horizontal lines ("Display the Active Pane Options" button) at the top right of the column which contains all the tabs.

Quote - > Quote - Does it matter if you are on a Mac or Windows machine?  its driver 310.64

Yes it does, two completely different OSes, two different drivers. The point is that nVidia has been getting sloppy with their drivers for quite some time now.

Absolutely agree. I know this is about OpenCL, but I've had terrible problems with recent NVIDIA OpenGL drivers creating holes in meshes in Studio and Blender viewports (more than just holes in Blender—an indescribable mess). I've reverted to the drivers that came with my computer, which are now about a year old. The most recent drivers I tried did not have the holes, but crashed Studio frequently. These are for cards that are supposedly professional. However, I'm wondering if pro 3D applications use OpenGL for their viewports. It's something I know next to nothing about.

This problem has me rather stumped. Is there anything untypical about your content folders structure? For example, you don't have two "data" folders (where Genesis morphs are kept)? If these morphs are in the same structure as all the other Genesis morphs and shapes that you can see, it seems very odd that they are not being picked up when Genesis loads. Could it be something to do with "permissions" in the morphs' folders? Have you looked in the Daz log to see if there is an error mentioning one of the morphs?

You might look with "Show Hidden Properties" checked, although these morphs should not be hidden (there are couple of linked morphs that are, but you don't need to access those), and whether you can see the morphs using the Properties Editor (Actor/Female/Real World is one place to look).

Oh, and did you install the Genesis Starter Essentials bundle that comes with your DAZ 4.5 downloads? Not sure if this would be relevant, but it's something should be done anyway.

The Tween morphs, for example should be here:

DAZ 3DStudioMy LibrarydataDAZ 3DGenesisBaseMorphsMurgatroyd

Can you see them there?

In Shaping with Genesis selected, the head morphs, for example, are in the Head section, or in Parameters, under Actor/Head. In Parameters you will see them here unless Genesis is selected at the root "Genesis" in the Scene tab, but not if any node (bone) of Genesis is selected separately.

The above is in Studio 4.5, I believe things are different in 4.0 in respect to what appears in Parameters and Shaping. Also, as I seem to recall, in 4.0, new morphs don't appear on previously saved figures (e.g. if you load an old scene) and you have to "refresh" Genesis by reloading the base Genesis figure. I expect you are already looking at a freshly loaded base Genesis, but I thought it might be worth checking.

Otherwise, I can't think of any reason why you cannot find the morphs.

I use 1.2dev directly. At some point while upgrading Luxrender the material preview started working again. I haven't noticed any other issues (don't care what version Reality reports Lux as!). Having to close down Lux and re-open the files in another version is an inconvenience I can do without.

You can make something as simple as a door rotate, as doors do, very easily by moving the axis using the joint editor. This is assuming it is a separate object, which it is likely to be.

Select the joint editor tool and you should see a green and a red widgit in the shape of blobs with arrows sticking out. Move the green one to the edge of the door where the hinge would be using the arrow manipulators. As with a door hinge it will need to be on edge of the narrow side of the door, not in the middle. You can put it on the bottom corner. When you dial Y Rotate (assuming it's an upright door) the door will now rotate from one side, just like a real door.

In the properties editor, if you like, you can rename "Y Rotate" to "Open Door" (right click this property and select Settings/Label). You can also put limits on its rotation here with Settings/Limit.. and lock and/or hide the other rotations if you are tidy minded.

You will need to save the object under Save - Support Asset - Figure/Prop Assets.. to keep these properties.

DAZ don't need any help from "hackers" to take their site down; their own server tech is quite capable of doing it for them. It's down again now, for me and for "downforeveryone". No site I visit regularly, or have ever visited regularly, has had such woes as DAZ. One can only feel sorry for them.

If you have the patience and knowledge to create and package metadata, then, yes, it can be shared. Cridgit is your man for this as he has written voluminous tutorials on the subject and has posted quite a few metadata files on ShareCG (for example for "Elanor" by Mirabilis http://www.sharecg.com/v/58502/gallery/9/Plug-in/Elanor-Metadata).

As far as I know, there is no main "clearing house" and I guess, if anyone is doing this at all (other than Cridgit!) they are uploading it in various places (I don't think there is any at Renderosity). The problem is, of course, the sheer number of products and the knowledge needed to package it for sharing, not to mention the time and trouble. Frankly, I don't think many people are going to be doing it.

I create my own partial metadata for all the products I use regularly that don't already have it. I create enough for it to work on my system (and at this minimal level it is not too difficult or time consuming). However, a lot more work is required to create metadata for sharing, and none of what I have done can be shared because I don't create "products" so there is no "support" file, as I don't find it that useful for my own use and it takes more time.

As for vendors, it is (I presume) now a requirement for products distributed by DAZ, and I think all vendors creating for Genesis really should be creating metadata for these products, but I think outside of DAZ the process is not widely understood and the usefulness of metadata not widely appreciated—and metadata used only by a minority of the market, so vendors don't have everyone clamouring for it.

Quote - Hi! First time posting. I've not had much time in RL to play with Reality, but I lave it. Now I need to learn lighting and how to adjust settings etc. Anyone know of good tutorial? Critism is always welcome. I need all the help I can get. LOL Well here's my first pix. Definetly need help with the lighting. Thanks.

Welcome to the forums, kalazar1! First I 'd like to say that this isn't a bad render at all for an early try, and I think it should not take much to get it the way your want it.

What lighting are you using? There are three main kinds of Reality lights (and I generally recommend you use only Reality lights and not DAZ lights): mesh lights, which are planes set to emit light in Luxrender; Sun, which is a special Luxrender distant light, and is pretty much as the name suggests; and IBLs (image based lighting). They all have their uses, and can be mixed to a certain extent, but I strongly recommend starting out with mesh lights as they really work like photographic lighting or real-world lights, and I find them very intuitive to use. My advice, therefore, would be to start with Reality mesh lights in a classic photographer's 2 or 3 point lighting set up. I use a 3-point set up usually, but often 2 will create good results. If you Google "3 point lighting" you will see lots of diagrams of the idea, of which there are many variations.

The main light (called "key") and the second light (called "fill") are typically either side of your camera pointing inwards towards the subject and in more or less the same plane as the camera. This means that you will not have a straight-on light which will kill all the modelling in the face and other features of your subject. The fill light will generally be of lower intensity, but you can play about with the balance between the two in Luxrender and see the effects in real time. Although it's considered best to get the intensities set in Reality, this generally takes some experience as you are doing it "blind".

The third light is a backlight, which may be directly behind the subject, so that you can't see the actual light (which must also be quite small), or behind on one side and above the camera frame so that it cannot be seen. Backlights are really effective in popping your subject out from the background, but you might want to experment with this once you are more experienced.

Finally, I think it's important, or even essential, to have your character in a 3D set, rather than having a 2D background matted in. This enables the proper use of shadows and real depth of field (DOF). I aways set cameras to DOF and then determine how in or out of focus background objects are by setting the aperature; a large F stop (i.e. a small aperture) will have more of your scene in focus. Having background objects (or extreme foreground objects) out of focus, even if only slightly, adds a lot of realism to your scene. It does, however, mean setting your camera properly. If you are having problems getting your subject sharp, Reality can help you. In your Studio scene tab, select an eye of your subject (for example), or add a null object positioned where you want the focus and select that. Makes sure this is selected before launching Reality. In the cameras tab in Reality, turn on DOF (if it isn't on already) and click "Set Focus". That will focus the camera on the selected object in your scene. You can widen the DOF after that, if you wish, with the F stop setting. I find that I usually need quite a large F stop value (small aperture) for the sort of scene I do, otherwise the DOF is too shallow.

The Sub(tract). Importance Pen is an eraser tool. It simply erases areas highlighted by the Importance Pen.

Quote - > Quote - Anyone tried the Refine Brush feature in the new LuxRender yet, and how does it work?

What is the Refine Brush feature?

It's a new tool in Luxrender 1.2-dev which enables you to define areas of your render so that Lux will prioritize sampling on them (it will still be sampling the whole image, but gives importance to the defined areas). Great to help clear up those stubborn noisy areas in shadow, etc.

You can see the area I painted, and the brush cursor and controls, below. By the way here Lux is running a cloth test scene to demonstrate the new procedural cloth materials that are in the latest build of 1.2-dev.

I've never used Mudbox, but I create morphs for Genesis in Blender. What do you mean by "warp"? I know that if you don't maintain vertex order on export (from Blender to DAZ, in my case) Genesis will "explode" when the morph is dialled. The settings I use to export are to check "Objects as OBJ Objects", "Keep Vertex Order" and "Polygroups" (and the last two settings also when importing). I don't know what the export settings are for Mudbox, but perhaps it's something like that.