3D Software Help and Assistance. Ask Away.

[mightbearobot]

Hi! I'm new to 3d modeling and ran into a snag trying to port a Blender model into Virt-A-Mate. I've found a number of guides and bridges to go between DAZ and Blender but I'm not starting with a Genesis 2 model and that's derailing me.
I don't know anything about DAZ, what is a Genesis 2 model? All of my searches found models to download but not explanations of what they actually are. I tried opening the .duf file and just saw gibberish.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, especially if there's a guide out there I missed. Thanks!

 

[Boogie]

Hi! I'm new to 3d modeling and ran into a snag trying to port a Blender model into Virt-A-Mate. I've found a number of guides and bridges to go between DAZ and Blender but I'm not starting with a Genesis 2 model and that's derailing me.
I don't know anything about DAZ, what is a Genesis 2 model? All of my searches found models to download but not explanations of what they actually are. I tried opening the .duf file and just saw gibberish.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, especially if there's a guide out there I missed. Thanks!

A quick rundown of DAZ and their various model generations are on Wikiupedia:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[mightbearobot]

Ok, so if i'm reading this right, all of the Genesis 2 models have the same base geometry nodes just morphed to different positions? That would explain the Geometry did not match error I got when trying to load an OBJ as a morph.

Thinking this over, if I export the Genesis 2 model to blender, I should be able to deform this into whatever new model I want and then reimport that? That should work right?

 

[amster22]

Ok, so if i'm reading this right, all of the Genesis 2 models have the same base geometry nodes just morphed to different positions? That would explain the Geometry did not match error I got when trying to load an OBJ as a morph.

Thinking this over, if I export the Genesis 2 model to blender, I should be able to deform this into whatever new model I want and then reimport that? That should work right?

Yes. A duf file is just a script that says: loads this base model, apply this difference morph at x%, apply this other difference morph, etc; in order to create the actual model.

The basic workflow is to export a char obj, modify it in blender and use a tool in daz (morph loader pro) to create the actual delta morph that can recreate the morph when applied to the orginal char.

You can find a tutorial by Jay Verluis here

You must be registered to see the links

The two most important pitfalls are 1/ the char must be exported at base resolution and 2/ the morph must absolutely respect the original mesh: you can only move nodes and if any vertex is added or deleted, morph loader pro will fail.

 

[Yuuki4]

Does anyone know how to find the dForce-morph key-frame? I have this shape on the bow that I really like, but I want it on an earlier frame but I can't find the key-frame for it so I can slate it earlier in the timeline.

 

[amster22]

The only thing that you can do with dforce is to export the obj and to reimport it as a morph with morph loader pro. There is no way to move a dforce morph is a timeline frame.
For the export/import process, see

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Yuuki4]

There is no way to move a dforce morph is a timeline frame.

Oh. Well that's dumb. Then why are they so adamant about running dForce in time-line? It's convenient as fuck to be able to cherry-pick the resulting morph in the time-line, so it really would help if you could just move it to a frame you want it in... in the exact shape you want it in.

The only thing that you can do with dforce is to export the obj and to reimport it as a morph with morph loader pro. There is no way to move a dforce morph is a timeline frame.
For the export/import process, see

You must be registered to see the links

Awesome, thanks for the work around!! <3

Guess I gotta really cherry-pick what morphs I REALLY wanna keep, cuz that looks tedious as fuck once you get A LOT of dForce objects (cries in having meticulously having placed 10-ish cumPRO dForce objects, all of them looking great.....in different moments in time on the time-line )

 

[Yuuki4]

I'm trying to make puddles of saliva, and I think I've finally managed to get a shape that looks fine by combining 2 dForce puddles. The issue I'm having are the shaders. it doesn't quite look like saliva but rather thic goo. The second issue is that when the 2 puddles overlap, Iray goes bonkers and paints everything black (see the red ring).

So what I'm asking is:

1) Does anyone have a better water-shader than the Daz-water presets they'd be willing to share or have pointers as to how I can make it look ... thinner...? Changing opacity doesn't really help, using the thin water preset just makes the puddles almost invisible :/

2) Does anyone have a workaround for how to avoid the black mess? I was thinking I could make a geo-shell or something and merge the two puddles into one, but I can't figure out how to do that.

 

[Onefiftyone]

Does DAZ run poorly for anyone else, even with top of the line hardware? (I've got a 3090 and a 5950X). I find DAZ's performance to cripple when keyframing no matter what preview mode I use. Anyone end up exporting assets to Blender to do renders instead? Or have any techniques for getting DAZ to run better?

 

[MissFortune]

Does DAZ run poorly for anyone else, even with top of the line hardware? (I've got a 3090 and a 5950X). I find DAZ's performance to cripple when keyframing no matter what preview mode I use. Anyone end up exporting assets to DAZ to do renders instead? Or have any techniques for getting DAZ to load a little better?

I'm running on a high-end system, that's basically a tier down from yours. 10700/3080/64GB of RAM, and I rarely experience any sort of crippling slow down while using Daz. Short of running out of VRAM while working in another program.

What do you mean by keyframing, exactly? Do you mean when dragging along the timeline? Or do you mean, moving a limb/head/joint causes the viewport to stutter/freeze up? If the former, it's going to do that regardless of hardware. It'll usually be slightly sluggish, but never crippling. The latter? Unless there's a bad hair asset or something of that sort, it never lags on me or anything of the like. General rule of thumb is stick to Texture Shaded when animating, everything else is meh in that regard. Stay out of Iray Preview unless you need to see how something looks/make sure there's no obvious clipping anywhere/etc.

Go to Render Settings (Window > Pane (Tabs) > Render Settings, if you don't see it up.), and make sure all three boxes referencing CPU are unchecked. Daz is Iray (and thus Nividia) focused, and using CPU for any sort of rendering is going to make life miserable. What's your RAM look like? Your system RAM should usually be double the VRAM of your GPU (not absolute, but preferred.). What version of Daz are you on? Is there anything heavy running in the background? Open up task manager (split your screens), play with Daz until it locks up again and see if something is capping in the task manager.

Is it only doing it with this one file, or all of them? If it's just this one file, strip the character entirely until it's just the model left. Add the hair, seeing if it locks up again. If it doesn't, move on to the next product - and so forth. If it's every file, then there might be something wrong with the HDD/SSD/NVME you're using. SSD's need about 10% of their capacity free for maintenace, iirc, though I doubt that'd be causing this. I'd still run a disk check/health check on your drive(s) just in case.

Probably won't help a ton but turning off GPU Acceleration can only help when it comes to Daz stability. On Windows 11 (not sure of the process for 10, and it might even be off by default.): Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Change Default Graphics Settings > Uncheck/Turn off "Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling > Reboot.

 

[Onefiftyone]

Go to Render Settings (Window > Pane (Tabs) > Render Settings... what's your ram like, etc.

I have 64GB RAM, 2x 2TB NVMEs. Daz data is on half of one of those drives, the other is my system storage. And I have those render settings.

Or do you mean, moving a limb/head/joint causes the viewport to stutter/freeze up? If the former, it's going to do that regardless of hardware. It'll usually be slightly sluggish, but never crippling. The latter?...

Yeah, this. For the sake of consistency going forward, let's assume I do everything with Texture Shaded at best.

In Blender I've gotten used to how quickly things load and how transforming/rotating joints/limbs in Eevee. It's instant, and I can watch animations even where characters and their clothing are colliding. In Daz, if I delete the hair, clothing and textures off my models, I can properly pose them. But if I hide them from rendering, it's drag, wait a second, drag. It's hover, wait a half a sec, hovered. I don't know if this is normal.

I don't know exactly how people set up scenes, but I like to use keyframes on the timeline to sequence my renders and see how they'll look in a sequence, from image 1 to image 10. For example, lets say I have 2 characters in a room. I'll keyframe the poses of each character for image 1 and 2 on frames 1 and 2, but the more frames I add, the slower bending/rotating joints becomes until DAZ locks up and freezes. Once I get to 8 frames, I've needed to create a separate save and delete all but the latest keyframe, then reload the file so I can continue to pose my characters in the scene. I don't know if this is normal, or if there's an easier way, but this is my biggest issue.

Other than that, I guess what I'm asking is, are you able to preview animations in the timeline?
...Ever? Like, down to barebones, untextured DAZ assets?
If I want an animation preview I have to render it, because the preview is maybe 0.0001FPS if I'm lucky.

 

[papolk]

Normal behaviour.
Daz sucks when it comes to animations.

 

[DinoOrange]

Im thinking of trying to see if I can make a quick demo of a game with 0 experience of how to make one. Is it easy to get used to or will it take quite some time. Ive got a free week soon so I would like to try. Also does anyone know of any good tutorials that can get me started. Thanks a lot for any replies. (Planning to use Renpy)

 

[tripod70]

Im thinking of trying to see if I can make a quick demo of a game with 0 experience of how to make one. Is it easy to get used to or will it take quite some time. Ive got a free week soon so I would like to try. Also does anyone know of any good tutorials that can get me started. Thanks a lot for any replies. (Planning to use Renpy)

A week will give you about enough time to get Renpy loaded, and maybe figure out where some of the things are on the HD. DAZ on the other hand a bit longer

 

[Lewd4D]

I just upgraded from DAZ 4.15 to 4.20 (because i made a clean install of windows) and now my skin settings are not working correctly anymore. It looks like the SSS increased. Was something changed with the SSS and translucency?
I install all assets manually and just copy pasted everything back as it was before. No textures are missing.

 

[Vaioretto]

Hello! How to make it so that after transferring assets to a new device, Daz Studio recognizes them and adds them to the library.

 

[Boogie]

Hello! How to make it so that after transferring assets to a new device, Daz Studio recognizes them and adds them to the library.

You can place assets anywhere you like, just need to let Studio know where they are. Go to the Edit menu, then Preferences. In Preferences go to the Content tab and the click on the Content Directory Manager button. When there click on the DAZ Studio Formats link and the Add button will be available under Directory.

You can see in my example I have separate folders for DAZ store content, one for freebies and another for content from other stores. You can make as many folders as you like, even on different drives. Just need to added them here.

 

[Jan23489]

Greetings, I am currently trying out the current daz studio 4.20 and right off the start, I got a very simple question:
How do I change the font size? The default view is hurting my eyes.
The font is really small, presumably due to my 2560x1440 resolution. But turning down the resolution is not an option, this is a graphics program after all...

At least I managed to change the theme from "darkside" to "Main Street" through the Window tab. But still, having some plain old black-on-white contrast would really help. Is it not available?

Thanks for any help!

 

[amster22]

Greetings, I am currently trying out the current daz studio 4.20 and right off the start, I got a very simple question:
How do I change the font size? The default view is hurting my eyes.
The font is really small, presumably due to my 2560x1440 resolution. But turning down the resolution is not an option, this is a graphics program after all...

At least I managed to change the theme from "darkside" to "Main Street" through the Window tab. But still, having some plain old black-on-white contrast would really help. Is it not available?

Thanks for any help!

There is no way to change the font size. This is an old request from users. It is said that Daz Studio 5 ( that was scheduled for september 2021, so we can reasonnably expect it for september 2023) will allow to change the font size, thank to the use of QT5/QT6.

 

[WarpedGaming]

ok next question. With a model such as the Bookstore from that village is it possible to make changes to it? It seems to be just one model and I cannot make changes to individual parts - like the sign above the door or the lettering on the windows.

Have you tried the "Geometry Editor Tool?"

WarpedGaming