This Daz Studio webinar has a lot of useful tips!

[OhWee]

So as part of the Daz3D.com sales strategy this weekend, Jay Verslius(? on last name spelling) did a webinar to show off a few useful tips.

I shared this in the Freebies thread, but some of you might not watch that particular thread regularly...


Not sure how long Daz3D.com will leave this webinar up, hopefully for a long time, but it's definitely worth checking out if you are a fairly new Daz user, or a more seasoned Daz user like myself that usually has your eyes glaze over when you try to follow a tutorial. This one has a lot of gems, and I like Jay's presentation skills.

I myself learned a few new tricks today, and I've been using Daz Studio since 2017...

I linked a few pose related freebie scripts/utilities such in the freebie thread here, that relate to this webinar:

https://f95zone.to/threads/free-stuff-for-daz-3d.22194/post-5918304

Some useful tricks that Jay mentioned that I hadn't bothered with before now...

• Draw Settings tab, while viewport is in Iray: Dropping the Drawing > Manipulation Resolution to say 1/8 or lower (1/16, etc.) can significantly speed up your viewport in Iray mode if you are doing manipulations while using the Iray Viewport. This does not seem to affect the quality of the actual 'final' render as far as I can tell (just tried it).
• Puppeteer. Allows you to mix multiple expressions and/or poses together 'on the fly' without having to adjust the pose sliders directly, and allows you to 'shift' between the influence of various poses via a 'grid'. It's more involved than that, but don't let the name fool you. This can be a VERY powerful tool for still poses... Best to just watch the tutorial, it is discussed towards the tail end. Might be just the thing for when you are doing some back to back 'talking headshot' renders and such, where you need to change the lip pose and expressions slightly between renders, allowing you to do this a bit more dynamically and easily.
• Alt-Left Click while selecting a new figure in Content Library or Smart Content allows you to drag a figure into a scene from the Library tab WHERE you would generally like to have the figure placed (i.e. not at 0x/0z)
• The World's Greatest Pose converter from G3 to G8 (by AgentUnawares on DeviantArt), adds a slider to adjust a G8 figure with a G3 pose applied to account for the 'A' vs 'T' pose. Yes, there are pose converters for this, but this thing is easy peasy. There's also a script in the Freebie thread to do this the other way (for using G8 poses on G3), it's a little less slick, but works pretty well too. The second script is not mentioned in the webinar, but I just tried it and it's on my 'speed dial' now as I prefer G3 figures for various reasons...
• Some viewport manipulators that I haven't been using before now. The tool tips were already in my tool bar, I just didn't know what they really did before...
• There's a 'hidden menu tab' in the left margin of the Rendering window, that can allow you to change a few specific render settings 'on the fly', i.e. say you wanted to increase the number of iterations or something, then you can resume the render with the new settings...
• A few other tips, this webinar is definitely worth watching!

After watching and re-watching this webinar today, I feel like I've been using Daz Studio wrong for a few years now. I do quite well with it, don't get me wrong (just look at my fanart) although I get lazy with not bothering with depth of field more often, but yeah I'm glad that I spent the time to watch this webinar!

Hopefully this helps out a few other people that are using Daz currently as well!

If you have some other useful 'not immediately obvious' tips that you routinely use, whether or not they are in this video, feel free to share them below!

 

[OhWee]

BTW, I probably should explain what I mean by/how I set up my 'speed dial'.

In the Content Library Tab, under the subdivision Categories > Default, you can create a new sub-folder by right clicking 'Default' and choosing the 'Create a new Sub-Category' option. I named mine Speeddial.

Then you can drag useful buttons into your speed dial by finding them in Content Library (using the search field, or navigating to the folder you usually go to find those) and then leaving the right window alone (so that the thumbnail you just found stays put) while you navigate the left column to Categories > Default > Speeddial. Then you can simply grab the thumbnail for the thing you usually click on (say the Iray Uber Base shader) and drag it on top of the Speeddial folder, and it will copy a shortcut into that category subfolder.

In my case, I copied over Speed Dial, a Measuring Stick Prop, a script that does 'look at camera', mirror pose, and the Fit Control 'Activate Genesis 3 Female Morphs' and also the Fit Control 'Clean up unused morphs' as I use these particular scripts/widgets a lot. I just added the G8 to G3 pose adjustment script as well (just found that one today) as number of my 'sex' poses are for G8 and I usually use G3 figures.

Putting the Speeddial sub-folder in Categories > Default will (at least for me) also cause it to appear in Smart Content, if you have a figure selected or whatever that the thumbnail/script in question would apply to, under the Speeddial folder of course! It won't appear in Smart Content all the time, just if Daz thinks that the thumbnail in question applies to what you are doing at the moment.

Anyways, just something I did a while back that I use almost daily!

 

[jamdan]

Jay Versluis has a YT channel, he posts a lot of stuff about daz, blender and other programs. Very useful. He's a good teacher when it comes to this stuff.

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