My Daz questions: As I learn it

[Hamfist]

So I downloaded DAZ 4.12 Pro 64bit.... I'm obviously going to have a ton of questions because I am 100% new to rendering and digital arts of any sort... Yay. So I figured I wouldn't load everyone else's threads with my inane questions so everyone can just avoid my stupid questions by not reading this thread.

fair enough?

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I have a thick skin and a sense of humor, fun sarcasm and light roasting for making stupid mistakes is fine, just don't make me cry, I'm ugly when I cry.... well.... I'm always ugly, but it's worse when I cry (and no one wants to see that).

my FIRST question is.... (probably stupid like most of them will be, remember I've only been using this software for a couple hours) if I select to add an object into a scene, say a piece of clothing or outfit, is there a way to just back out of it? the back button only seems to do major changes like adding a character or shifting pose. my lady is currently wearing every outfit in the directory. pretty funny but not very aesthetic......

On the bright side I have only managed to crash the software 3 times so far by doing dumb stuff.

SECOND question: can I lock the system so i'm not making the controls vanish
? The selection windows on the right and left etc?

that's enough for now I think (and I use the term I think very loosely)

 

[Hamfist]

don't jump! or should she? (warned you total noob stuff) and you didn't believe me and looked anyway, not my fault.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I still consider myself a daz noob since I only use it to create characters, I don't even render using it. so I only know surface layer details.

is there a way to just back out of [adding clothes]?

Not that I know of, it is kinda annoying.

crash the software 3 times so far

I hear that is an issue with 4.12, many people have to roll back to 4.11

can I lock the system so i'm not making the controls vanish

Usually when you learn a program, learning how the user interface works is usually the first step. Something like blender is pretty challenging since things like hot keys depend on what sub window your mouse is hovering over, but with daz I never learned since it sometimes changes since it seems that the majority of daz functionality is just built-in plugins rather than a unified system, so sometimes it is hard to predict how it behaves.

 

[Hamfist]

honestly I think it crashed because I did too many dumb things in a row.

well I will get used to the interfaces eventually. thanks for the feedback. it is appreciated.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I think you should take your time and explore a little bit more for let's say one week and come back when you really hit a wall.

 

[KiaAzad]

if I select to add an object into a scene, say a piece of clothing or outfit, is there a way to just back out of it?

You'll have to right click on each individual item in the scene panel and delete them one by one.

can I lock the system so i'm not making the controls vanish

not really, as soon as you click anywhere in the screen your selected part will change. you need to be careful with your navigation clicks and use scene to re-select the part of body you're working on.

Working with daz3D is pretty frustrating but you'll get the hang of it after a while.

 

[Hamfist]

I think you should take your time and explore a little bit more for let's say one week and come back when you really hit a wall.

Thanks, I don't expect any amount of feedback other than just to gab, if people feel like answering the questions that pop up before I figure it out, Great for me, if not I'll get it eventually. That's why I Made my own thread about it because I didn't want to distract people that are further in or have answered the same question 4,563 times. think of this as free-form idiocy in action, asking before thinking, or after drinking, whatever.

And I Promise I will explore and frik around with it a bunch, if there's a real wall I hit I might create a separate thread for it but this one's just for people idling around that have nothing better to do than feed easy tips to a loser.

 

[Hamfist]

You'll have to right click on each individual item in the scene panel and delete them one by one.


not really, as soon as you click anywhere in the screen your selected part will change. you need to be careful with your navigation clicks and use scene to re-select the part of body you're working on.

Working with daz3D is pretty frustrating but you'll get the hang of it after a while.

Fair enough, I couldn't find a way to lock the panes thanks for saving me from hours more of fruitless searching.

 

[Hamfist]

I going to get myself into trouble in the daz store, I definitely need to learn it better so I'm not buying stuff I wont use. There's so much in there I don't even know where to to start.

BUT my question of the day.

Gen 8 female, how the heck do I change the look of her face? I'm assuming I need to download assets for that? she's generic and ugly. or is there a way to free form edit what exists?

 

[Hamfist]

On the bright side, while taking mental rest breaks from seeing how often i can screw up my render layout in DAZ i got the first 200 lines of the story into renpy with markers for menu decisions and jumps. Gotta admit learning 2 different render platforms and renpy a new to me (albeit simple coding) is a refreshing challenge. This is going to be fun if i cam actually make decent imagery to go with the story, its going to be hilarious.

 

[KiaAzad]

Gen 8 female, how the heck do I change the look of her face? I'm assuming I need to download assets for that? she's generic and ugly. or is there a way to free form edit what exists?

there are two ways to change the look of a model, new skin, and tweaking the shapes. usually skins come with a shape as a character bundle.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I find there are 4 ways to change the face.
1 You can get some morphs for the phase, (I think there are 3 key ones to get but I won't link them just yet since I am short on time today), these work more like a way to tweek faces, but not really design faces (gives you tunnel vision while designing characters).
2 You can get pre made characters, but there are two types. There are some characters that rely on some of the basic face morphs are so you are not getting new faces but rather pre set designs that use the assets you already have, these can be good for exploring ideas, are cheaper, you can get several faces with a single purches, are tweekable, but they may not provide vastly different designs. So characters may still look similar. Then there are buying straight up new and unique characters, these can drastically change the shape of the head since most of the time they are sculpted, but the issue a lot of the time is that no matter how you tweek them, from a few feet away the face always looks the same, ie if you have a face for an older woman, you can't morph the face to fit a younger character, so you can't extract details like the head/nose shape, while ignoring the laugh lines, you get it all or you get nothing.
3 toony characters, I tend to work with more toonish girls, and I find some toon heads work good to drastically transform a head, all the heads really do is change the proportions of head size, eye size relative to the head, and face size relative to the head. This allows for more broader, big picture testing to see about head/face design, often toonish characters will look younger because they have bigger heads, bigger eyes and rounder cheeks.
4 sculpting, for when all else fails. I only use daz for character prototyping, I finish everything in Blender, such as resculpting the face and body. The nice thing with sculpting is you can do both big and small details, both tunnle vision and big picture perspectives.

 

[Hamfist]

Thanks for the replies, very useful stuff.

I'm thinking I will work on learning daz, but due to the potential for spending buku buck in it to do at best mediocre work in the beginning, I might have to use honey select for my first game since its really easy to make very individual characters, I'll have to see how easy it is to generate custom scenes in that, I only played in the studio for like ten minutes before I had to head to work but its really a cut and dry set up for generating different-ish looking girls.

 

[Hamfist]

here's another question: with smart select on only options that work for my model/situation/selection should show right? or am I over thinking this.

well when working with a gen 8 female, it's showing male eye colors (which out of curiosity I tried because I haven't really tried to figure out how to change her eye color yet beyond a cursoryglance) but it did nothing... so didn't break it this time, but it was an under-whelming result. hoping to get away from the dry grey-ish eye color with what comes stock. I'll get there. (you in the back stop laughing I now these are dumb questions)

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Some assets are smart assets, meaning they have tags or some information that tells daz what to do with it. Is this a G8F shirt, yes? then show it when the user has a G8F character selected. However it is up to people to properly tag their products or package them. Then there are other products, such as hair for a G3F that I like. If you de select the smart select box, then it will show all the hair (almost), what you can do with that is select the hair, daz may notice that it is not a G8F labled object, it will not trust it even if it is labled as G3F, because as far as it knows i could have been mislabled, so daz will ask you what model typ it is, and wha kind of transform (I just do full body as the best bet), and it will adapt the modle to your character as best as possible (big breast always screws up daz).

if you don't remember the model type, if you look below the file explore to the details panels (bottom left I think) you can see the file name and file directory, the file directory will say in its name what kind of product it is, genesis 3 female for example.

now there is also the contexnt explore one or two tabs below, you can use this to explore all the files daz has access to. As I said, not all products are labled correctly or packaged correctly, so they don't show up in the smart content section, so you have to manually find the files, add them, and daz again will ask what model it is, and apply the needed transform to try to get it to fit your model.

sorry about the vagueness, I am on my laptop and can't pull up daz.

 

[Hamfist]

no worries I appreciate the advice, I'm mentally wiped today between work and coding the game and trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing in daz I'm pooched for the day. Tomorrow I have given myself the assignment to see if I'll be able to figure out honey select well enough to make fun scenes for the game. I did manage to learn a little about lighting and what render settings work fastest vs look decent on my box. a couple more weeks of this and I might only be bad at DAZ instead of incompetent.... LOL

have a good night and thanks to everyone that is feeding me advice.

 

[Pixieblink]

my FIRST question is.... (probably stupid like most of them will be, remember I've only been using this software for a couple hours) if I select to add an object into a scene, say a piece of clothing or outfit, is there a way to just back out of it? the back button only seems to do major changes like adding a character or shifting pose. my lady is currently wearing every outfit in the directory. pretty funny but not very aesthetic......

That's a DAZ thing. Undo-ing doesn't Undo clothing, you have to manually delete.

Crashing... not so much. I run windows 10 on a ryzen threadripper all day every day and it's pretty stable. Doesn't crash more than once a week.

Maybe an issue with your video cards? DAZ uses IRAY for rendering which is supported by Nvidia video cards. Running another kind of video card can and does cause... issues. To put it politely.

 

[Hamfist]

There's definitely a couple upgrades I'm going to do to my box, that's something I've been working on for a while, video card and processor are next, my video card is decent but struggles with the IRAY renders, I figured out changing to a different render mode eliminated that struggle, rather than 10 minutes for a simple face shot render, it went to about 5-15 seconds. i'm not an overly patient person so I think for the best renders I'll have to learn to que up several renders and let them do their thing when I go to sleep instead of doing rendering on the fly, while I'm trying to create.

 

[Hamfist]

another likely issue is I'll have 15 things running on my computer (couple different browsers with multiple tabs each all with information i'm trying to learn and googling up more) both daz and honey select studio open, as well as renpy editor and the project run through as well as my music playing, either youtube or amazon prime music. my computer is decent but that's a lot even for a decent computer.

 

[mickydoo]

To change the face the easiest way is to go through this

https://f95zone.to/tags/asset-morph/

and/or here

You must be registered to see the links

There are two ways to make them original, the easy way and the Saki_Sliz way. (which is also my way sort of)

If you get a pic of some random model of the net, front and side you can morph it sort of to that shape. Don't worry about trying to exactly make it like the pic, it's just for reference, you will get something unique that way.

The other way like Saki_Sliz is to an external program, my workflow is different, I make morphs in 3ds max to reference pics,
but I have been using max for 10 years, and I am pretty rough when I do it so I can't even teach anyone cos you shouldn't do it how I do it

But it's overkill for the most part, if you can't use blender or whatever, use daz, learning a 3d mesh program will do your head in.