I'm kind of at the point where I realize my ideas of wire frame level manipulation in 3d on every object was left drowning in a mud puddle back by the first left turn onto daz lane... (pardon my bad jokes)
So I started out with Rhino cad and using design software to make machines. This includes setting lengths, using tools and tricks to make the parts you want. Then I started using blender, which you can use sculpting, tricks, tools and what not to make a mesh, but if you are making game assets or just want to make fully custom assets, eventually you do have to do wireframe level work, vertex by vertex. After I got use to it, I haven't been able to go back. It is like, the tools get in the way, but once you know how to work with a mesh, you push the tools away and do it yourself, it can be so much faster even. like pushing your kid away and doing their homework for them >:3
so what programs are people using to create assets for daz I cant see them doing it in daz unless theres a hidden controll panel for wire mapping (or whatever you call it)
OK so here is the thing to understand about how daz works on a fundamental level. Daz starts you off with a 3D model, which has a particular shape. This model is also rigged, meaning that it has a skeleton, and a weight map has been made for each bone (weight maps is how you tell a mesh what bone controls what part of the mesh). In order for characters and assets to be compatable with daz, to allow you to blend them together and mix and match them, clothes must use the same skelecton and weights, and characters must use the exact same mesh, All you do is use a program like z brush (the most popular and the two program also share a dedicated file format to share just between the two), resculpt the body, import it back in, and then run one of the tools that autofits the skeleton back onto the mesh, and that is a character. as for cloth assets, it must be done using both a tool that I don't know (to get a weight map for the mesh) and the clothing must be made in some other program. I think z brush is the most popular, because it has cool tools fo adding effects like, stitching, but do so using a brush stroke rather than manually adding it in. Then you use tools like quad remesher to remesh the sculpt to be more friendly to use in animation, and port it into daz. I am pretty confident most people use z brush, because sure you could use Houdini, blender or maya to make assets, but you make them from scratch, mesh (or auto mesh), textures, fit scans to textures, etc, but in z brush they have a whole suit of tools that make it easy and convincing, and you don't need to worry about using textures or scans, it has tools that can greatly help with making materials, and you can edit them further in substance painter but z brush is good enough. After that maybe throw it into blender or Houdini to apply some effects to further refine the materials, then throw it into daz, use some magic tool that perfectly weight paints the clothes to follow the skeleton and call it good.
hell I havent even figure out how to change the breast size without adjusting the whole torso...
Breasts are the biggest pain in the back, especially big ones
actually I find I have more issues with the smaller boobs.
I do more cartoonish characters, so I need my boobs to be in all sorts of sizes, big and small. Breast factory is my absolute favorite but I have many other morph packets that are for the boobs and body as well. Now the first issue you will see with boob are morphs that make them big, and as a result this messes up the clothes. What I'll actually do if I want to have a character with exaggerated boobs is i'll actually make the character at first, keep the breast the default size or only slightly bigger, I'll export to blender, and then I'll make the boobs big and export that as well. with the small shirt, I'll use physics simulation to get it to fit on the body, with the idea being that the shirt is obviously not going to fit, but the attempt to make it fit over the boobs will help show off just how big the boobs are. Now this isn't the true issue I have, because if I want to I can be lazy and just sculpt the glitches out of teh shirt, it take 5 seconds. The real issue is having characters. If you use daz characters, the almost always reshape the chest and breasts. The moment this happens, it messes up all of your breast morphs. So Breast factor that has this nice morph for flat or small boobs, is now really distorted and it is impossible to do small boobs. In blender it is possible to take 2 characters, combine them together as a shape key, and fade between the shapes of both. What you can do with this is make a slider of the default shape, that morphs the body to match the shape of your unique and custom character. What I would like to do is weight map this, I want to erase the morph effect on the boobs so that the characters have the default boobs and you can use any morph you want, but so far I haven't seen a tool or program that is able to do this, it is so simple, foundational tech is there, but no one has implemented it yet and I'm still new to programming in blender so I can't code it.
lastly, looking at the dress you linked, I think you are suppose to use the dress for standing up poses. Now I don't mean poses that have the character standing but rather... sometimes if you get a nice pose pack, poses will be broken down into upper and lower body, as well as whole body. I think you are suppose to use this with pose packs that let you just pose the upper body. the legs just stay normal as we don't need to see it, we just need to see you standing in a pretty dress.
