Answering DAZ questions!

[Holloweenie]

If you need any help with daz I'm more than happy to answer your questions

 

[Loys]

If you need any help with daz I'm more than happy to answer your questions

Hey Holloweenie ! Maybe you know any decent Daz animation for kisses? Genesis 3 Female and Male figures.

 

[Holloweenie]

Hey Holloweenie ! Maybe you know any decent Daz animation for kisses? Genesis 3 Female and Male figures.

I can't seem to find anything that could help but I would recommend something like this

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and then just hand animate from one of the poses

 

[Loys]

I can't seem to find anything that could help but I would recommend something like this

You must be registered to see the links

and then just hand animate from one of the poses

Thank you Holloweenie ! I think i'll try to use one of these poses.

 

[shao0647]

If you need any help with daz I'm more than happy to answer your questions

Literally, where to start? The documentation that comes with the software is kinda junk. Point me in the direction of a tutorial that's recent/relevant please?

I just downloaded daz3d, Ren'py, and Chat Mapper yesterday. I've been a VN fan for years, and I consider myself a decent writer (lots of experience in other formats), so I finally decided to pull the trigger...

But have no idea how to start rendering characters for the script I'm writing.

Thanks in advance!

 

[PJWhoopie]

Ok... here is one that I think would be simple.

I loaded up a scene... for sake of argument Secret River

Now, I import the character I've been working on...

And here is the question(s)

Is there a way to "pre-tell" Daz where I want it to place the character in the scene... like hit a button, click a spot, then Import my saved scene subset? Or is the imported character always going to come in a 0, 0, 0 ?

Once they're in the scene... is there a easy way to move the character around in the scene, as in, "I think she'd look better on the other side of that rock clear across the scene... click magic button, click character, drag to new location.

The only way I know to move ANYTHING around in the scene right now is to highlight the item/character, and then go to transverse and move the character, 1mm at a time through the scene... ughhhh.

I know it exists, and it has to be pretty freakin simple, but it is soooo simple that folks doing the tutorials NEVER seem to mention it, there just talk about some shader mumbo jumbo and then click on the character and move em, never saying, by the way if you click this thing here, then click on this part/tab/etc here, you can drag anything you want around the workspace....

 

[Holloweenie]

Ok... here is one that I think would be simple.

I loaded up a scene... for sake of argument Secret River

Now, I import the character I've been working on...

And here is the question(s)

Is there a way to "pre-tell" Daz where I want it to place the character in the scene... like hit a button, click a spot, then Import my saved scene subset? Or is the imported character always going to come in a 0, 0, 0 ?

Once they're in the scene... is there a easy way to move the character around in the scene, as in, "I think she'd look better on the other side of that rock clear across the scene... click magic button, click character, drag to new location.

The only way I know to move ANYTHING around in the scene right now is to highlight the item/character, and then go to transverse and move the character, 1mm at a time through the scene... ughhhh.

I know it exists, and it has to be pretty freakin simple, but it is soooo simple that folks doing the tutorials NEVER seem to mention it, there just talk about some shader mumbo jumbo and then click on the character and move em, never saying, by the way if you click this thing here, then click on this part/tab/etc here, you can drag anything you want around the workspace....

Almost all assets will load at 0,0,0 unless a developer messed up the origin on one of their assets and yes there is a very easy way to drag things around quickly.

Click the tool at the top that looks like a cross with 4 arrows then click and drag on the arrows that appear under the character or object that is currently selected. The colored arrows represent the x,y,z axis and the triangles in between represent the entire plane like x+y or x+z.

 

[PJWhoopie]

Ha... it worked! Thanks.

Now along those lines.....

After I move the character in a scene that has a ground of various different heights... is there a button or setting that makes her "snap to" the correct level?

For example If the scene has a hill, and she comes in at the bottom of the hill and I want her at the top... or is it just "eye balling" it and hoping that all is right/even?

 

[Holloweenie]

Ha... it worked! Thanks.

Now along those lines.....

After I move the character in a scene that has a ground of various different heights... is there a button or setting that makes her "snap to" the correct level?

For example If the scene has a hill, and she comes in at the bottom of the hill and I want her at the top... or is it just "eye balling" it and hoping that all is right/even?

You just have to eyeball it unfortunately and make adjustments to you character pose to fit the terrain.

 

[Holloweenie]

Literally, where to start? The documentation that comes with the software is kinda junk. Point me in the direction of a tutorial that's recent/relevant please?

I just downloaded daz3d, Ren'py, and Chat Mapper yesterday. I've been a VN fan for years, and I consider myself a decent writer (lots of experience in other formats), so I finally decided to pull the trigger...

But have no idea how to start rendering characters for the script I'm writing.

Thanks in advance!

There's a lot of important stuff you need to know before you can actually create a decent render but I'll give you a step by step guide to building a scene with an environment, character with a pose, lighting, and render settings. I'll also give you some references along the way to help you understand each part more in depth. Even though there is so much to learn, it's all pretty simple to understand and if you practice making a scene each day then you will start to feel pretty comfortable with the software in no time.

Watch this first to make sure daz will run smoothly for you in the view port

You must be registered to see the links

Now I'm assuming you will want to make your own custom character so I'll start with that because that's where my workflow starts. Open up daz and add a basic character model, I prefer to use genesis 8 since they are the current generation but many people use genesis 3 still. I wouldn't suggest using genesis or genesis 2 character since they are very outdated and don't look that great compared to the newer models.



Now that a character is in the scene you should set up some simple flat lighting. This just means even lighting, this way the light doesn't obstruct any details on the character when your messing around with morphs and materials. I like to use an hdri and a front key light. These are the lights I use

You must be registered to see the links

. Since these lights are from a third party market and not from the daz3d market, they can be found under "Content Library" instead of the smart content tab. When adding an hdri you will not see a difference in textured view only in rendered view.



When you add in a light source the viewport will go dark. Just go to the top of the screen and click on "Window" then click on "Preview Lighting" to restore the light in preview.




Now when you look through the iray preview you should have decent lighting to see how your character looks rendered.



Now that the lighting is setup time to create your character. I always start my characters by adding the hair first. Just like when adding the character in the smart content tab I will type in the number for what character gen I want the hair for. Make sure you have your character selected on the right before adding hair or clothing so it knows to fit them to the character.

If done correctly your character will look like this



Next I will change the skin textures since the default ones don't look great. Any character you download for daz will have their own materials that can be used with other models, so in this case I have a genesis 8 female meaning I can use skins from other genesis 8 females that I've downloaded. Go to the surfaces tab and click on materials then type what you need. In this case I type "Skin" and all the skin materials show up. Make sure "Filter By Context" is checked on the bottom right this way only genesis 8 mats will show up in the results.



If you want to change the eyes then just type eyes in the search bar, same thing with makeup overlays and nails, etc. I'm not going to mess with any more materials, I'm moving on to shaping. Just like with the skin, you can use morphs from other characters of that gen. In this case that's what I'm going to do for the sake of time. Click on the "Shaping" tab and make sure it's set to editor instead of presets at the top of the tab.



When I make my characters I always start with the head. Click on head in the shaping tab and it will expand into more options. Select People and head morphs for other models will show up. Normally I would mix two or three head morphs at a low percentage then go in and change all the small details with all the extra morphs I have, but for the sake of time I'm just going to mix two morphs and it's enough to make my character look unique enough to pass.



Now I'm going to add some body morphs to my character to finish her up. Going under actor in the shaping tab, it will expand and you will click on full body. Character body morphs will show up here and you can mix and match.



I'm not going to bother adding genitalia since it's the same thing as adding anything else to the character. Now I'm going to add some clothes. I don't want to waste too much time on this so I'm going to give her a full outfit preset. Under smart content on the left click on wardrobe and expand it, then click on outfits and look through your library to find what you want.



Now the character is complete. She has her own shape, skin, hair, and outfit. Now she's ready to be saved to be used in our scene. You want to go to file > Save as scene subset.



Name the file after your character. I'm going to name her Sherry.



After you hit save another window will pop up asking what in the scene you want saved to that file. Make sure you untick everything except your character.



Once your character is saved then you can find her on the left under Saved Files in the Smart Content tab. She is ready to be added to any environment.



Now it's time to setup the environment. I'm going to use an interior environment because they are the most complicated to light. If you select environments on the left in the smart content panel you will see that it will expand and give you filter options for interior, exterior, landscape, etc. Very useful when you have a lot of environment assets like I do. I added in an art studio.



The first thing I do when I open a new environment is delete all cameras and lights in the scene including the sun dial if there is one to setup my own. After deleting the lights and cameras I add in my main camera by clicking on the camera icon in the top left and applying the active viewport transforms.



Once it's in the scene I will go to the top right and change the view from perspective to the camera I added.



Next I will disable the headlamp on the camera to make sure it doesn't emit any unwanted light in the scene. If you scroll down the tabs on the right where you changed the character shape and materials, there will be a camera tab. Go to headlamp and disable it.



Now I'm going to look at the scene in iray preview to see what the lighting is by default. This is what it looks like



The first step in lighting any scene is selecting an hdri. I'm going to use this one from the daz3d market

You must be registered to see the links

.



It doesn't give off enough light with the hdri's default rotation so I can either change the y rotation of the environment map to make it so the main source of natural light hits the window, or I can increase the intensity so it gives off more light.

on the render settings tab on the right click on environment. I changed the intensity from 1 to 2 and changed the y rotation to 150 for this hdri and that let in a lot more light into my scene.



The scene is still to dark to render with natural light alone so I'm going to setup and emmissive plane. Normally I would use a ghost light asset I have but It's important to know how to create these lights because they can be used in any situation to simulate the light of a room. To add a plane go to the top of the screen and click the add primitive button and change it from cube to plane. Don't worry about size because it can always be scaled up later to fit your exact needs.



Next click on the translation tool at the top which looks like a cross made of arrows and drag the plane towards the ceiling or where ever you need the light.



As of right now it's just a shape and it doesn't give off any light so we need to mess with it's materials a little bit to make it an actual light. Click on the surfaces tab on the left and make sure its set to editor. Make sure the plane is selected. On the far right you will see all the shader options. Scroll down until you see emission color.



Click the color and set it to white.



Once it's set to white then new options will appear on the right, this means its now an emissive surface. By default it doesn't give off a lot of light. If I switch back to my camera view and look at it rendered I can see that the scene is a tad bit brighter but not nearly enough.



To make sure we get enough light I like to set my luminance units to kcd/m^2



Now it's very bright so we need to lower our luminance a bit. to make sure the details don't get washed out by light. I found 400 to be perfect for a ceiling light.



next I'm going to make the light a little bit warmer to make it feel more comfortable. I'm going to set the emission temperature from the default 6500 which is white to a more yellowish 5600.



I like the looks of the lighting so far but it's not finished. The last light I'm going to add is the key light. This is going to be the main light that's focused specifically on the characters. There are two other lights that are nice to have but aren't needed. These are the fill light(Which fills in the harsh shadows created by the key light) and the back light or rim light(Which lights the back of the character adding a glow effect around them.) You can learn more about their uses and the 3 point lighting system here

You must be registered to see the links

. I'm going to wait until after I give the character a pose before adding in the key light. So let's get on to posing.

On the right where all the other tabs that we've been using are there is a tab called posing. Click that and make sure your character is selected.



if the tab is in preset mode then you will see all the premade pose assets that you have available for that gen. I will apply a standing pose to her then expand the pose tab and there will be an expressions filter to find our characters facial expression





Now I have a pose and expression setup for her. It's time frame the shot for the render. For a game render you will probably use a 16:9 aspect ratio like 1280x720 or 1920x1080. I'm going to switch the camera to a portrait aspect ratio since this is just a still and not a game render. On the left under render settings I'm going to go to the general settings and change the dimension preset to golden portait. I like to set the height of my portraits to 1280.



I like where the camera is but I want to turn the character to face me a bit more so I'm going to make sure she's selected on the right and click on the parameters tab on the bottom right.



I dragged the y rotation until she was facing where I wanted her.



We are getting close to rendering but before that we need to create our key light then change some more render settings to make her come out clear. At the top of the screen I'm going to add a spotlight.



Once I added the spotlight I can switch my view from the camera to the spotlight and if it's selected on the right you will get circles on your screen that will show you where the cone of light is facing. Then you can move around in spotlight view like a camera to get it into a position you like.



Now I am going to switch back to the camera view and look at the light settings which is on the right just above the camera settings tab.



Next I'm going to set the light geometry to rectangle and change the height and width to 50x50.



Once that's done I'm going to switch back to rendered view mode so I can see how bright the light is on her when I mess with the luminance. I set the luminance to 100k and left the temperature at 6500.



And for the final step of this render I will change some more render settings to make sure she gets rendered enough and looks sharp.

On the left under render settings I went under progressive rendering and changed the rendering converged ratio to 99%. The higher the ratio the more the image will be rendered out.



Lastly I will go under Filtering on the left and change pixel filter radius to 1.00 to make sure the image is crisp. And now I will hit render. After changing the pose a tad bit this is the result rendered out 50% for the sake of my time.



This was just the basics of what was needed to make a quick character, save them as an asset, add them to a scene, light the scene, and render. This barely scratches the surface of Daz but I'm sure this is the type of tutorial beginners will be looking for when wanted to just jump straight into it. In time you will be able to understand all the other important parts of what makes a good render. You will still need to learn about all the surfaces and shaders, the other render settings, tone mapping, camera settings, mesh editing, hand posing, animating, etc. but if you enjoy creating stuff then it will be a pretty fun process learning about all this stuff while working on your own ability as an artist.

Here's a little screen preview of what this render would look like with some tone mapping settings, DOF, and bloom.



Hopefully this helped you out, I would love to see what you can come up with.

 

[uhohitsuhoh]

another way to put a character/prop somewhere in the scene easier, you can hold down the left alt key, and drag the prop/character to the location and drop it where you want it to load.

i've got a question i'm not sure if this is the thread for it, but not sure if it warrants a thread on its own.

i recently upgraded my pc big time, mainly to get more out of daz studio. going from a 4 core intel, 16gb ddr3, 980ti, to an 8 core amd 3800x, 32 gb ddr4 ram, and a 2080 ti.

my problem is some characters i've created are very slow to move around, pose, adjust etc. there is lag and delay, even rotating the viewport and adjusting sliders etc. i've noticed its on the characters that have HD morphs added, at least i think so. its strange because i can load a character with tons of alterations and have it work fine, crystal smooth etc. but other characters lag everything out.

i was wondering if you or anyone has come across anything like this, and is there a way to get stuff to run smoother?

this is just normal texture shader viewport, not iray or anything.

 

[Holloweenie]

another way to put a character/prop somewhere in the scene easier, you can hold down the left alt key, and drag the prop/character to the location and drop it where you want it to load.

i've got a question i'm not sure if this is the thread for it, but not sure if it warrants a thread on its own.

i recently upgraded my pc big time, mainly to get more out of daz studio. going from a 4 core intel, 16gb ddr3, 980ti, to an 8 core amd 3800x, 32 gb ddr4 ram, and a 2080 ti.

my problem is some characters i've created are very slow to move around, pose, adjust etc. there is lag and delay, even rotating the viewport and adjusting sliders etc. i've noticed its on the characters that have HD morphs added, at least i think so. its strange because i can load a character with tons of alterations and have it work fine, crystal smooth etc. but other characters lag everything out.

i was wondering if you or anyone has come across anything like this, and is there a way to get stuff to run smoother?

this is just normal texture shader viewport, not iray or anything.

try looking at this

You must be registered to see the links

 

[shao0647]

There's a lot of important stuff you need to know before you can actually create a decent render but I'll give you a step by step guide to building a scene with an environment, character with a pose, lighting, and render settings. I'll also give you some references along the way to help you understand each part more in depth. Even though there is so much to learn, it's all pretty simple to understand and if you practice making a scene each day then you will start to feel pretty comfortable with the software in no time.

....

Hopefully this helped you out, I would love to see what you can come up with.

Holy hell this is way more than I could've asked for! Thanks a ton for the intro!

 

[PJWhoopie]

+1 to the KUDOS to this in depth how to. Bravo

I would like to ask though...

"I'm not going to bother adding genitalia since it's the same thing as adding anything else to the character. "

If you get the time, could you do a walk through on that? The reason I ask is that I have run into occasions where the model I am using doesn't come with Gens... (DAZ doesn't really make the Gen ad-on available unless you get a Pro Bundle...)
So when I get my G8, add the G8 Gens, unless there is a gen mat included, I don't know how to make the grey girly bits the same skin color as the rest of the model.

I hope that makes sense...

 

[Yonamous]

+1 to the KUDOS to this in depth how to. Bravo

I would like to ask thought...

"I'm not going to bother adding genitalia since it's the same thing as adding anything else to the character. "

If you get the time, could you do a walk through on that? The reason I ask is that I have run into occasions where the model I am using doesn't come with Gens... (DAZ doesn't really make the Gen ad-on available unless you get a Pro Bundle...)
So when I get my G8, add the G8 Gens, unless there is a gen mat included, I don't know how to make the grey girly bits the same skin color as the rest of the model.

I hope that makes sense...

You can do it manually by copying the torso textures and adding it to the gen textures, but the best solution is to go with something like Golden Palace, which when added with a lot of the golden palace add-ons can give you so may gen options, shaping, of the labia minora and majora and changing the colors of it as well as the anus. The reason I suggest Golden Palace is because of how simple it is to use, it even labels the stuff in steps and tells you what to do.

 

[uhohitsuhoh]

try looking at this

You must be registered to see the links

thanks man. it seems i've already ticked the boxes for best performance tho :/

I don't really have the money but im thinking of maybe upgrading my cpu again? i can offload the 3800x for 200 through sellgpu.com, so if i get the 3950x for 750 i can delude myself into thinking i "only" paid 550. that one has double the cores and threads but a slightly lower base clock.

do you know which matters more for DAZ3D? im still a noob on this side of things i come from a music production background, and i know single core speed is all that matters in music production, but in video production more cores matter. i just assumed since this is a visual medium cores mean more.

i just want to get the most out of my 2080 ti honestly, i stupidly thought that that would make daz run like the wind, and while it makes rendering a breeze, getting scenes to the point of rendering is still a slog. feel like im just throwing money into a pit and the only solutions i can think of is to throw more lol

 

[recreation]

Ha... it worked! Thanks.

Now along those lines.....

After I move the character in a scene that has a ground of various different heights... is there a button or setting that makes her "snap to" the correct level?

For example If the scene has a hill, and she comes in at the bottom of the hill and I want her at the top... or is it just "eye balling" it and hoping that all is right/even?

You must be registered to see the links

and

You must be registered to see the links

 

[nexer]

Hi,
Daz facet are plane or kind of 4 vertex curve?
Thanks !!!

Must be a plane. I'm quite sure. But, vertex coordinates are local/bones relative?
Interesting is how DAZ counts the vertex. They aren't consecutive.

 

[Holloweenie]

thanks man. it seems i've already ticked the boxes for best performance tho :/

I don't really have the money but im thinking of maybe upgrading my cpu again? i can offload the 3800x for 200 through sellgpu.com, so if i get the 3950x for 750 i can delude myself into thinking i "only" paid 550. that one has double the cores and threads but a slightly lower base clock.

do you know which matters more for DAZ3D? im still a noob on this side of things i come from a music production background, and i know single core speed is all that matters in music production, but in video production more cores matter. i just assumed since this is a visual medium cores mean more.

i just want to get the most out of my 2080 ti honestly, i stupidly thought that that would make daz run like the wind, and while it makes rendering a breeze, getting scenes to the point of rendering is still a slog. feel like im just throwing money into a pit and the only solutions i can think of is to throw more lol

I honestly don't know much about ryzen performance with daz since I only use intel. I use an i7-8700k and everything runs very smoothly for me but I still only use my gpu for rendering.

 

[wolfgangmami]

Hi I'm doing genitals with dicktator asset but in the unity genial texture doesn't match with body how can I fix this