DAZ - Problems slicing and dicing a scene

[seamanq]

I recently purchased 22 Parker House from Daz 3D, and I am trying to make renders of certain parts of the interior for backgrounds. Normally, in a property as complicated as 22 Parker House, I make a copy of the full set, then delete the parts that I do not need, which makes the rendering process go much faster. For the "house" layer of this property, this does not seem to be an option. While the "parts" of the house are individually selectable and can be hidden, any time I try to delete any of the children, it only gives me the choice to delete the entire house. If I was working in Photoshop, I would figure that the entire house is grouped, and ungroup it, but I don't find an option to do that in Daz 3D.

Does anyone have any idea how I can delete unused assets that are offscreen, because with this property, it is making my renders take hours when they should be easily accomplished in much less. Thanks for any assistance.

 

[Rich]

One way to do is is to use the Geometry Editor tool. Select portions of the item that you don't want with the tool, then right-click and "Hide Selected Vertices", then right-click and "delete hidden vertices." (Those may not be the precise names of the menu items - I'm AFK at present - but that's how you can do it.)

 

[seamanq]

I turned on the Geometry Editor tool, however when I try to click the wall that I want to get rid of, it does nothing and won't select it.

 

[Rich]

The Geometry Editor tool won't, in general, select an entire wall or anything like that. At least, not just by clicking on it. You'll probably find people more expert at this over in the Daz forums, but here's my uneducated overview:

The tool's default operation is to select the polygon you click on, which is usually a very small portion of an entire object in the scene. You'll see tiny little yellow cross-hatching showing you the polygon or polygons you've selected. If you right-click with the tool selected, you'll get options for Selection Mode. The default is "Drag", which means that anything you click and drag over gets selected. There's also "Lasso", which allows you to click and drag a path around what you want to select, and "Marquee", which does a "click and drag rectangle."

Beware - when you're using these, you're selecting everything underneath the mouse, including the "back sides" of things.

An alternate approach you can use is to select the object you're dealing with in the scene view, select the Geometry Editor tool, and then open up the Tool Settings window. This gives you lists of face groups, regions and surfaces. Depending on how the prop is designed, it could be that things you want to get rid of have their own surface, face group or region. In that case, you can use the little eyeball to hide all the vertices for that part of the object and then delete them that way.

At the end of the day, the magic is:

1. Find vertices or polygons you don't want
2. Hide them, either via surfaces thru tool settings or by selecting them then right-click > Geometry Visibility > Hide Selected Vertices
3. right-click > Geometry Editing > Delete Hidden Polygons
4. Just for safety, right-click > Geometry Editing > Delete Unused Vertices (in case you have loose vertices left after the above)

 

[seamanq]

I will have to find another asset to play around with this on, as I sent 22 Parker Road back. Just too much hassle for something that should have been much easier. I will look around and see what I have to see if I can do this on other assets, however. Thank you for your kind and detailed response.

 

[Rich]

You're not alone with that complaint about 22 Parker - there were a lot of negative comments on the Daz forums about it as well.

Best of luck finding something that will work for you.

 

[seamanq]

No worries. My story is set in a four-plex, so I just took one of the rooms from the other apartments that were already furnished and replaced the furniture. In one case I had to, because in one apartment two of the daughters share a bedroom, so I put a bunk-style bed in that room so the girls wouldn't have to share a bed. And renders for those were much faster, on the order of 30-45 minutes for 100% rendering.

 

[DreamLab Studio]

I totally feel your pain. When I've been shopping around for homes or just rooms I've run into a lot of packages where you weren't able to remove individual walls or even separate parts of the furniture (like a desk with chair was just one piece).

For the home/room structure I've been using the Creative3d package which you can find here:

You must be registered to see the links

For furniture and appliances I've been using more flexible Daz packages I've been able to find as well as 3D furniture files in .obj format such as this:

You must be registered to see the links

I should also say it's very useful to get some basic skills in Blender, or whatever full 3D program you wish to use, so you can modify existing 3D objects to make them more useful for you.

 

[seamanq]

I'm only 2 weeks into Daz 3D, so I think advancing to Blender or some other full 3D program may be beyond me right now, considering I am also learning a game development platform like Ren'py at the moment. Nothing like being a Pop and Pop shop, as my wife says.