My Daz questions: As I learn it

[Hamfist]

At this point I should call you obi-wan.... lol

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I dont really have a decent collection of assets for like an apartment scene

I don't think anyone really does.

I mean sure, one can find an asset with maybe everything in it, but then assets like those tend to get overused and if a lot of your players recognize the asset, which destroys the magic of your art, in a way it breaks immersion, the art becomes less abotu your game and its world and more of players recognizing how the game was made, they mentally go off track.

I'm lucky and was able to get a butt ton of assets I wanted and needed to design my own perfect house and stuff, but it is not nearly as fun as making characters. making an apartment or a park is called environment art, and I feel it tends to be most people's weak point, including myself. It's not that is is hard, I have seen some users do magic with minal effort, just planes, boxes, and textures and this one guy could make a 2 story house with a pool. Once he explained how it was made, you could see it in the art (a real house has trimming and other details, his was just a simple wall and floor with good textures he bought), but before that illusion was broken it looked totally like a premade and bought asset. the issue with making enviorment art is just the fact that you could make anything, the canvas is blank and you don't know what to do. Yes you could play around with asset, rocks and trees, table and beds, But then, hardly anyone actually notices the background and characters are more fun anyways, so it is a mixed bag of what people actually end up doing or buying. but you can get away with doing some pretty simple things. maybe just one wall or a corner of a room as a background.

I'm lazy so I gave up doing scenes really, I only make basic mock ups for test renders as I focus on figuring out how I want to do characters (in terms of my final art style), I'll worry about scenes and making a game once I have my characters figured out. See, you think you are going to mess around with characters, and then use some assets to make a game. No, you are going to play around, learn, share some stuff, and the moment you make something, bring something into existance, you start to have an ego, from the moment you shared that image, you must feed your ego addiction. Because you learned more and think, I could do better, so you go back and go through everything again, but before you finish you stop and again think you can do better and then your rinse and repeat, and you never finish anything eventually you find a compromise between time invested and quality, and that is when you have found your first art style and you start publishing things more regually (I haven't gotten to this stage yet with 3D art but I did with 2D art... but then I found 3D art and stopped 2D art)

My only recommendation for scenes in daz is to use large light sources to fake the light bounce of a room to fill it with a nice even tone, and then worrying about things like light bulbs and lamps for a room. I have seen many artists try either using only the light bulbs and windows of a scene, but they either need to make them really bright in order to light up the room, but the moment a bulb or window shows up in the scene or render, it is too bright and washes out. Or if they try to make the light bulbs look good, that leaves the rooms looking so poorly lit that it looks like a bad/bland attempt to make a horror-themed hospital room. The other things artist try to do to overcome these issues is using 'ghost lights' to fake the lighting to try to make character/room look illuminated, but the issue with this is they often just have a spot light or point light that is too focused or small or just used to illuminate the characters or just their face, and the artist still wonder why their lighting still looks fake. The last trick is to play with exposure and gamma settings. this doesn't work because iray is fundamentally flawed. iray is designed to be the standard for all ray tracing needs, be it in games or content creation, and as a result it uses an older sRGB type LUT table. The issue with this is that your virtual camera has 8 f-stop (a measurement of light sensitivity, kinda like, how dark and bright things can be in a scene before they are pure white or black) due to mathmatical limitations, this is worse then the cheapest disposable cameras at 10 or 11 f-stops, I think octane (which most daz users buy and use instead of the default iray in daz) has 16 f-stop, high-end Hollywood cameras have 14.5, the human eye which self adjusts on the fly is able to reach a max range of 15 to 20 stops, and I think really high-end rendering engines (and blender's

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LUT, which is free) have 25. these f-stops allow your virtual camera to see a wider range of light, so a dark room with a really bright light bulb can instead now be well-lit room with a light bulb where you can see the details of the bulb. So no amount of fiddling with the camera setting fixes the issue, so with daz you have to fake it. Often the remedy to this is to try increase light bounce to try to get the room to light up, 12-16 bounces is industry, and in Big hero 6 they went crazy with 24 bounces to give the movie supper soft and gently lit rooms that are still bright to match the toonish art style. but this is very computationally inefficient, and I max out at 4 bounces before I feel like I can't get anymore out of it (I also cheat and use the superior branch path tracing technique). So eventually you have to fake it with ghost lights. The magic is to make the lights that fake a well lit room is to make sources very large (like physically big balls of light, I usualyl do a range of 15 to 5 feet in radius) so that they emit soft shadows, and using a combination of high above head lights, belly level lights, being at the center of a room or where ever light from a large window lands as well as different color temperatures. (even pure white led or tubes follow the blackbody-color temp). but that depends on experience lighting scenes or your understanding of physics.

At this point I should call you obi-wan.

XD sorry if I am rambling too much, I guess I am just having fun remembering the problems I have faced and how I overcame them, sorry if I am stealing all the fun or learning experience out of this. I don't know if I would be anything like a jedi master, if you ask most serious daz users on these forums I am still a new guy who can't answer any technical questions about daz, I just use it to make base character shapes, I am more of a blender user. I'm more like obi-wannabe.

 

[Hamfist]

right now I'm messing around with very basic scenes with the free stuff that comes with daz (so limited) it's too bad I'm not making a fantasy game I could recycle the free stuff and make a fair amount of content on the pre fab back grounds and environments. I used the dragon and a generic female model to make a scene where the dragon appears to be sheltering the girl in one of the prefab caves. (lame as hell but I did it to get used to being able to pose so the two characters were interacting not just near each other. to gain speed in having them touch without going through each other or totally screweing up eachothers pose

at this point I don't really care about how original the back grounds and rooms or objects look, it's that I need certain objects/rooms to fit my story line, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, open street scene, alley way, subway, convenience store (though I supposed a coffee shop or diner would work but I prefer a convenience store. when it boils down to it that's a LOT of things i need so it doesn't look like a total ghost town. I need the rooms and basic parts of the environments to be in 3d, if they are basic backdrops it wont work for the scenes for the action in the story, as seen in the spoiler below.

Spoiler: this includes a description of a scene from my story line

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At this point since it's my first go round and I have no intention of being the next best thing in homemade VN games, i'm not even overly concerned that anything is hyper realistic, i'm hoping to use basic renders and such for the bulk of the story and have any better renders be used as prizes for progressing with an unlockable gallery.

but I definitely need the ability to create various environments for the story to happen in

 

[Hamfist]

most of the scenes the corner angle will work (wall/wall/floor or wall/wall/ceiling)and for several the flat pane will work wall/ceiling or wall/floor, very few may require fuller environments but I may be able to work around that depending on what I am able to come up with for backdrops and assets for scene building. at this early in the game of game building and learning rendering it's hard to tell where I'll be in a couple months as far as ability and resources.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

many many fun ways to die that involve a combination of bad luck and bad decisions and sometimes what would normally be a good decision in life still makes for a messy death because I'm an asshole and the game and life is not that simple. hopefully it makes for a game that's funny as hell.

XD well that certainly is new and unique on these forums. You should be able to find beta testers here as well, you'll have to make another post.

 

[Hamfist]

at this point I have the main plot line written (but not coded) I still need to fill in a bunch of situational stuff, decisions and flesh out so much dialog it's ridiculous. Fortunately I have way too many Ideas about how the MC can kick the bucket for just one installment, so there may eventually be a part two/day 2, and i'm hoping my brand of humor is, if not unique, at least refreshing (can verbally abusing the player be called refreshing?).

also fortunately today Is my version of friday, I have tomorrow off (barring unforeseen circumstances) I should have a lot of time to write/code and work on getting my skills up to par so I can produce a render almost worth looking at. I might even sleep in until 4:30am. it'll be a crazyday i'll feel so lazy sleeping in that late.

I wish I kept track of my word count not including coding so I could calculate estimated play duration

 

[lancelotdulak]

For assets: There are a bajillion free assets out there in other formats. The best all around format to pay attention to is .obj. Not because it's the best format but because it's the format most programs handle the best. FBX etc are probably best but the programmers of the various 3d programs are all over the place in their competance in handling fbx. Texturing on humans as in Daz characters is vitally important... it's very not when youre texuring a white wall, or a wooden table or a cup. And building a lot of things in Blender is trivial, even if like me you rarely use it so never remember the keyboard shortcuts it insists be the only way to use it. I was looking for bamboo, bamboo huts etc and couldnt find anything decent. I installed the latest blender and created all of the above with multiple versions in a few hours... All of your assets dont have to come from daz. If 3d graphics programs only relied on content created for their software we'd be at the point we were around 1988

 

[Hamfist]

so there are a few resources on rederocity that are listed as free, obviously theres a select few that are listed as for gen8f or otherwise daz compatible i'm just trying to figure out if downloading using those creates any problems with daz, like being pirated or something, they are listed as commercial and non-commercial use licenses, I just don't want to create any conflicts with the daz store or program from the renderocity rescources. can anyone clear that up for me (obviously not talking about quality etc. just if it's going to be a conflict with keeping everything above board)

 

[Hamfist]

For assets: There are a bajillion free assets out there in other formats. The best all around format to pay attention to is .obj. Not because it's the best format but because it's the format most programs handle the best. FBX etc are probably best but the programmers of the various 3d programs are all over the place in their competance in handling fbx. Texturing on humans as in Daz characters is vitally important... it's very not when youre texuring a white wall, or a wooden table or a cup. And building a lot of things in Blender is trivial, even if like me you rarely use it so never remember the keyboard shortcuts it insists be the only way to use it. I was looking for bamboo, bamboo huts etc and couldnt find anything decent. I installed the latest blender and created all of the above with multiple versions in a few hours... All of your assets dont have to come from daz. If 3d graphics programs only relied on content created for their software we'd be at the point we were around 1988

I did download blender and have zero clue how to use it. i will be digging into that because similar to what you said many people have talked about either building assets in blender or reworking models in there so I figure at the price of the program it's totally worth it even if I never use it..

 

[Hamfist]

so weird I was struggling to figure out how to change Manipulate not change facial expressions a bunch of random clicks got me where I needed to be....... now to remember how I got there....

 

[Hamfist]

am I the only one that save then starts clicking randomly to see what it does in daz, or am i the only hamfisting my way through it?

 

[Hamfist]

ok this render with just two models I'm building is supposed to be a mother and daughter the mom on left is 37 (definitely need to change her hair color though it look too old for her supposed age) and the daughter on right is supposed to be 19. the mom looks about right the daughter looks too old. anyone have tips for making her face a little more youthful that early 20's glow.

and in your opinion do they look related (not counting the hair obviously the hair is the same resource which will be changed as I get more hair options in the near future)?

now onto technical questions,

the errors in the hair is that from my shitty video card trying to render in IRAY ? (I do have a better vid card coming) or is that simply from using the generic light settings that are automatically in each scene? or do you think I might be doing something else wrong? (radeon rx560 is whats in right now that will be changed post haste)

how does one change the render process to gpu over cpu I have been looking since I first heard about it days ago and cant find it because I'm stupid.

also just fyi this render took 31 minutes for JUST the two models, obviously my vid card needs more oomf

 

[HadazzH]

I did download blender and have zero clue how to use it. i will be digging into that because similar to what you said many people have talked about either building assets in blender or reworking models in there so I figure at the price of the program it's totally worth it even if I never use it..

As you are new(?) to 3d, you should Google some Youtube videos and watch beginners tutorials. As the interface of Blender changed substantially after version 2.8 put that number on the search field. When you open Daz or Blender and follow video tutorial at the same time, you learn much faster. On youtube you can filter the results so that you can see the latest videos. (English is my 3 language so...). Good luck and be patient

 

[Hamfist]

As you are new(?) to 3d, you should Google some Youtube videos and watch beginners tutorials. As the interface of Blender changed substantially after version 2.8 put that number on the search field. When you open Daz or Blender and follow video tutorial at the same time, you learn much faster. On youtube you can filter the results so that you can see the latest videos. (English is my 3 language so...). Good luck and be patient

well I think you write english better as a third language than I do as a first so never worry about that. I only speak 2 languages bad american english and drunkenese (which isn't a real language) so you have me beat.

thank you for the tips.

 

[Hamfist]

I'll have to set up my second monitor so I can watch on one screen and work on another, I simply cannot tolerate windows that aren't full screen it drives me crazy, like having a controller wire in front of a screen while playing video games I might as well be blind to the whole screen when that happens. I know, it's a really fucked up mental block.

 

[Hamfist]

ok stupid question number... well I dont remember what number i'm on I ask a lot of stupid questions. so I Favorited a certain skin color off a model how do I apply it. if I hit favorites there is no apply option (same gen character)

 

[Hamfist]

man I really suck at this, the damned vase is levitating

 

[Leobbb]

If it was a floor you could use Ctrl+D to drop some object on it. It's a bit more difficult to place one object on top of another but there are free scripts that can do that, google mcjDropToTop for example.

 

[KiaAzad]

usually I select the skin as the whole character first, reset the shapes/morphs to zero to have the base model with the skin, then start tweaking the morphs to get the shape I want.
alternatively you can find the skins in `materials` to apply but you'll have to brows tons of other textures, guess which is which and hope it applies correctly.

 

[Hamfist]

more posing practice, cartwheel. this frikken hair, I just can't do crap with it to make it splay like she's actually moving through a cartwheel, what am i missing? (this is a prefab "actor" all I did was fairy-tail the face a tiny bit because I have never seen that slider before first time using gen2 anything) but this is about the pose (not the face expression she looks bored as hell lol)

now please critique does the body shape look to you like she's actively in the middle of a cartwheel? if not what would you suggest I move to make it look like a more natural motion.