I agree with most of the above, with the exception of using the Timeline to track stuff. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the Timeline function in DAZ is terrible. It's not intuitive, cumbersome and almost impossible to control, especially if you use it and then want to continue using that scene DUF for anything else. I use the timeline a lot for simulating dForce objects and yet, even when I only move the two objects in my simulation (figure with clothes and the plane or object it is meant to interact with) I find the timeline tracks poses and movements for almost everything else in your scene. So when you try and reverse something, shit starts moving around on it's own. Also, when you try and clear an animation from an object, the damn thing will revert to whatever the hell it was prior to opening the timeline. Same goes if you try and reduce the timeline to just 1 frame. Everything in your scene will move to some pre-recorded position. What they desperately need is a big red OFF button that just clears all keyframes from the timeline and leaves the scene as is.
Timeline rant aside (I'm trying to learn animation today.. can you tell? lol) .. Here are my scene managing tips.
1. I save scenes a lot, but 20-100mb files tend to add up, after you have made a couple of thousand renders, so I can't save every little thing over and over again;
2. I use Excel a LOT! I keep a worksheet for each project and on that sheet I track each render I do, including the scene DUF filename, the camera I used and any special settings I tried.
3. Still on Excel... one thing I do that is a life saver, is I have sheets for all my characters, with complete descriptions of every morph, asset and texture I used to create them. This has saved me several times, as DAZ can easily screw character morphs up, when you get rogue stuff interacting and you don't notice it right away. When i have that happen, I can easily rebuild my characters from scratch using the Excel sheets I made for them. Takes just five or ten minutes.
4. I tend to make one complete scene base DUF, with no characters but all other assets and lighting installed. That's my quarantine to build from down the road, when I invariably mess up a scene.
5. I usually lock all cameras in the 6 main axis. I lost track of how many times I accidentally moved a camera when i was in a hurry posing shit. When you have a fast GPU and render on the fly, this isn't as much of an issue, but when you use layers like I have and need camera's dead on for spot renders, it's a must. Just be aware, that if you lock cameras you can't put them in a group with other stuff without messing them up. That's because in a group they revert to a relative position within that group, instead of an absolute position and because they are locked, this tends to throw them all out of whack. If you want to group them, make sure to position them correctly first, then group them and only then lock them, after they are in the group.
6. POSE PRESETS!!!!! Use them.. know them ... live them! lol. Honestly, I'm just discovering how amazing they are. They are almost zero space (like 15kb's each) so you can have thousands of them saved. But they allow you to quickly rebuild a scene when you have messed things up, or to go back and re-shoot things. Another fun thing I do with them, is for when i make alternate versions of the same scene. I save the poses in one version and then apply them to another version, with different characters. Some people think you can't use a male pose on a female or vise versa, but you can... just like you can apply a pose made with a massive giant and put it on a tiny spinner G8F. You just have to tweak the small movements to adjust it afterwards.
7. You can Pose Preset anything! So if you have a three point lighting system, you can save the poses for those lights in one scene and then move them and save the second pose for something else in the same scene. That way, you can easily re-use lights you adjusted for temp, luminance and color, etc. You can also save the camera and lighting as a Scene Subset.
8. In your example of the couch moving thing.. realistically, the DUF is just a snapshot of your scene as is. So if you need to move the couch, you'll have to do it in every scene you saved a separate DUF for. But that's kind of meaningless, if you made the render already... in that case, just go back, laod the DUF, move the couch and Spot Render the fix and apply it to your original Raw renders. I do that for things like facial expressions, eye blinking or minor movents of a character. Make the inital full screen render than just spot render the changes.
9. With the above point in mind, the easiest way to generate new renders for any scene is to just add a camera to your existing scenes. So if Joe and Jane are talking, take several camera angles. You might not use all of them, but it's a much easier and faster way to drive up render count and avoid dialogue where the same render is on screen for like several pages of text.
Sorry for the novel.. I haven't had much time online lately and I am catching up on posting, lol.
