I've had the software for years and I never...
will2power
Posts: 270
I'm sitting here going through Dreamlight's tutorials on lighting. I feel like such an idiot... I've owned the software for three years now and I realize after watching about 45 minutes of the tutorial that I have been using the default lighting in just about ever single render I've done except for Sandy Bay...
Has anyone ever discovered something after a while that really pushed their understanding of how to use Daz up a notch?
Throw me a lifeline... Or else I'm gonna spend the rest of the weekend feeling like an idiot...
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Took me almost two years to figure out how to use shaders. I thought you just selected the item/figure and double clicked. When that didnt work I just stopped trying to use shaders. It never occurred to me that I had to go to the surfaces tab and pick the parts to apply shaders to, and then it was only 3 weeks ago i figured out you could apply a shader to a part without replacing the original texture by holding down CTRL when double clicking the shader.
Yes, I am the type that never RTFM but I also prefer to learn by experimenting rather than reading, it's how my brain is built.
nah don't feel like an idiot. Lighting is usually the last thing people tackle. Now that you've gotten into it, you'll see a dramatic difference in your renders. I highly recommend http://www.daz3d.com/lantios-lights if you don't have it.
Which tutorial are you using? I admit, I hate lighting. I understand it kinda, but I could always use more.
-When I first started I didn't know I could add a camera for several months. So I used the default perspective camera. I would spend hours jiggering it back into place because it would revert out when I saved it. Don't ask. LOL.
-I didn't know how to find expressions also by clicking on the head to bring up the expression dials!
-I recently learned I could adjust the height of my lighting to light interiors. I just kept thinking oh, this light doesn't work indoors... Er... No...
-I had reinstalled daz more than a few times because The content manager stopped working and I thought it was broken.
There are my embarrassing things I've learned over the years. I'm sure there are more, but I've wiped them from my memory.
I am working through Dreamlight's Light Master course. The first few videos were pretty dry because he was doing a lot of drawing on the screen and trying to talk at the same time, but once you get past that and he gets into showing you the things in lightwave and Daz 3d, it starts to make a lot more sense.
I basically wanted to do a fireside render, and I realized I had no idea how to light one or light anything for that matter. So I bit the bullet and stopped eating at Mcdonald's for a couple of weeks and bought the course. Now that I can see how to apply it, it's making a lot more sense to me.
Greetings,
I was furious with DAZ for months because Undo just DID NOT WORK; half the time I would do a camera move, and decide it sucked, hit undo, and the last thing I did to the model would change. But sometimes it worked. It gnawed at me, and made me very annoyed... Then I discovered the difference between Perspective View and a Camera view... *-*¡
I was trying to use one of the popular lighting sets, Photo Studio 2 I think, and I was really angry because the lighting looked like shit, and I posted (and I kid you not) angrily demanding if anyone knew how to make the quality any better. And a nice forum member pointed out the Quality Presets that showed up in Smart Content if I selected the light. That taught me a lot about humility, samples and shading rate. And reminded me to explore the interface, and not post angry.
More recently, I realize that some of my favorite artists had a stable of characters, and outside of loading a scene, deleting everything in it but the character, then saving it back out again, I had no idea how to do that. Like...a year after starting to work with it, and I still was pretty much creating everything anew each scene. And 'lo did I discover 'Save as...' with 'Scene Subset', 'Character Preset', etc...
I could go on about shaders, polygon grouping tool, light-generating surfaces, moving bones of clothing around, etc., but every time I find that I'm in need of something, it turns out there's already a feature for it in the application somewhere. It's kind of nice. :)
Don't feel like an idiot; you learned what you needed to at the time, and when you reached a point where you needed something better...there it was!
-- Morgan
...lighting was never much of an issue for me as I used to work in theatrical lighting.
Then along came UberEnvironment and that basically took everything I knew about stage lighting and flushed it down the loo.
After that it was UberSurface and HSS.
...and now SSS.
Crikey, when did this has become so bloody complicated?
Almost has me wanting to go to the art store, buy some canvas, oil paints and brushes were it not for the severe arthritis I suffer from.
The problem with DAZ is there is no FM. *fuming smiley*
But they do have pretty good starter videos that cover a lot of what new people have problems with. Yes, I know it's not the same as a manual, especially for people who don't learn well from videos... but from what I've seen it appears they get totally overlooked sometimes.
The problem with DAZ Studio lighting, is that you have to learn DAZ Studio lighting. I know photographic lighting, but that only takes you so far because DAZ has its own rules (see biased and unbiased rendering.) What finally was the key to me, was using Luxus and learning Bryce. They both work more like a camera, which I understand. I never could figure out why you needed a gazzillion lights in Daz when God gave us one sun and it works fine. Then I learned what DAZ Studio didn't do with that sunlight, and that you had to factor in the sky. Finally it dawned on me what Uberenvironment's purpose was.
You will have to find your own path. For me it was finally learning why I needed to do xyz instead of just do this.
(Edited to break up a massive run on sentence that made this post read like it was written by a five year old.)
I think there are too many options and the features could use some documentation.
I have trouble with light sets, playing well with things like skydomes, because of aritfacts, or sometimes leaving blotchy shadows on things, or lights disappearing entirely sometimes.
I have been told to tweak setting to remove problems with sets working in certain scenarios, but I'm not entirely sure why that works, or what I'm really doing. And my machine can be slow, so tweaking a setting, re-rendering takes tons of time. I would love to know a bit more, but I also would love it if the lights were a bit more intuitive.
I may eventually buy a tutorial, but not until it is on sale.
Until then, I stick to premade light sets, with a few adjustments.
I'm in the same boat. Just did not have the time to sit and figure things out. And always something new and cool comes out before I figured out the packages I already bought....think we have a word for my condition :)
However, I highly recommend Portrait Lighting Tutorial for DAZ Studio 4 by Laticis. Simple, easy to follow and gave me great insight into addons for D|S. Plus Daz's Fiery tutorial was a great benefit too. Hope we have more tutorials like that.
Would love to see if Daz would put out a tutorial on the new splash screen w/Victoria and the Fiend. That would be awesome.
- Frank
*points to his join date*
I just had it click this week...THIS WEEK...that I could swap in Gen4 UV sets for Genesis figures and reuse my extensive library of Gen4 character textures.
I immediately messaged a friend of mine who's a content creator for DAZ, and ranted at her about what an idiot I was.
She, being the nurturing type, laughed heartily at me :D
I'd like to use light domes a bit more, because the outcome is realistic. However, I suck at it. The light looks weird and i get strange shadows. One day though...one day i'll get it.
That's the spirit! : )
Well the discovery to me, has made a major difference towards how I approach things, that's for sure. My purpose in learning 3d has always been to use it as a means of telling a story --whether it be from a single image or a whole series of images. Discovering light and how to use it in establishing depth and tone has made a major difference. I'm not even a newb when it comes to it, but just seeing the potential has made me excited about learning even more. That's what I was after when I started this post. We all have our own goals and methods as different as night and day. But as we all grow in our knowledge and development, there are always those "light goes on" moments that make a real difference in your level of achievement. This moment was just a beginning of a new leg of the journey.
When I started using DS, for a good couple weeks I had no idea there was a way to fit clothing to a figure.
And I was posing the figures by hand.
Every single wearable item got the same treatment.
:lol:
Ouch. So do you consider yourself a masochist? Because that can't have been fun!
I used Poser and then DS for almost 8 years before I decided to learn something about lighting. Not that I used the default lights. I just reused favorite light sets that came with different products and tweeked them. I still do use some of those favorites, even though I completed and enjoyed and learned a lot from the Light Master course.
...as lighting goes, apparently Daz is comfortable having others (like DreamLIght) provide the assistance (for an additional fee of course) which they should package as part of their primary application.
When I was programming (back when computers took up most of a college's Science and Math building cellar and were no where near as powerful as what I am using right now) documenting one's software was a requirement. When I worked in multimedia development nearly a quarter century ago, documentation was a requirement. Now it's left to vids on YouTube or as perk of a paid membership in some third party club.
I'm old school, one of those who does a lot better with a printed document (PDF, whatever) than a vid. I find it a lot more efficient to click a bookmark in a PDF rather than have to back up of fast forward a vid to a certain point to grasp what was done. Back when I still painted reading books on techniques was far more valuable than watching one to those "how to paint" shows on the educational channel.
Cross referencing is also easier in a printed/eletronic document because only one is needed rather than having to close vid "A" which talks about IBL and open vid "D" to learn more about how surfacing (mentioned in the previous tutorial) works with the lighting.
Also, from home (where I do my CG work) my connectivity is bad and I'm unable to stream vids sometimes having to wait upwards of twenty to thirty minutes for a five to eight minute clip to load (if it doesn't lock the buffering when paused like I've seen some do). I'm certainly not going to sit though 5 seconds of video followed by 2 minutes of waiting for the buffering, another ten seconds, more buffering, etc.... Downloading a vid (if that is permitted) is also an exercise in futility because of the sheer memory size usually results in corruption or a complete crash of the DL due to intermittent resets and timeouts.
With all the new features being added left and right, Daz needs to document it and do so in a printed format. Even for someone like myself who has been using the software for just over five years a lot of these new concepts like IBL, SSS, SubD & such are perplexing. I am really tired of doing everything through trial and error, having to stop what I am doing and get on the forums to ask questions or hunt the Net for anything that could be of help. It really puts a serious dent in the workflow and can derail one's creative momentum. I just wonder how much time has been lost due to playing "guessing games" with the software because we are given little clue by the company we bought it from as to what this stuff really can do.
It's like buying a piece of machinery or a sophisticated electronics component and getting no operator's manual with it.
I am always discovering something new with the software I use.
I stayed out of the Shader Room (in Carrara) and the modelling room until very recently.
It seems like I'm always learning something new. Probably because the documentation is non existant.
...half the time I feel like I'm at the controls of a 747 with the crew incapacitated, two engines out, fuel low, while in a fierce supercell thunderstorm and the nearest airport that isn't socked in is still over an hour away.
...I never got over Macho Grande
--Buck Murdock
I remember those days as well but it's hard enough trying to get today's programmers to even document their code much less produce a readable manual.
It's like buying a piece of machinery or a sophisticated electronics component and getting no operator's manual with it.
One of my last projects when I worked tech support for a major computer manufacturer was to sit for 4 hours a day and work with a technical writer to create the large foldout sheet of directions that shipped with our computers aimed at the home market. That foldout sheet was the biggest part of the "operator's manual" that shipped with those products. For our rack based server components there wasn't even that much. It was the old 80/20 rule. For 80% of our customers any manual that came in the box got tossed as soon as they opened it. That meant for 80% of the product shipped we were paying extra to print and ship something that would never be used.
Any business is about making money and show a company an easy way to cut a huge cost that will only upset a small fraction of their customers and they'll jump on it.
Sadly, I only see this getting worse and I blame Wikipedia. These days it's much easier for a company to throw up a wiki and seed it with a bit of information then say "the community will build the documentation that's important". It never works though because the people that just spent days learning IBL or SSS don't want to spend more days learning wiki markup so they just throw their info up in a forum post that gets buried in a week. If you're lucky they'll throw a video up on Youtube that you might have a shot of finding a year from now.
Oh, and I consider a computer a sophisticated electronics component and I can't remember the last time I bought one that had more than one of those single page "how to plug it in" type manuals. Not that I'd read the thing anyway (smile)
...but a number of times when I went the the Daz Wiki, there was nothing there.
They need to hire one (or several) of the more well versed in the community here on a contract to sit down with their developers and produce a downloadable PDF user manual. Heck SM still includes a Dead Tree manual with their boxed versions and that actually helped me better understand how Poser worked as I could take it with me anywhere. Learned more about the Materials Room riding the bus to and from work than I have about the Shader Mixer as the manual actually discussed the concept behind it, not just walked you through the motions.
Szark's tutorial threads on lighting are a a good example of doing this right for like a good manual they discuss the concepts involved. The only trouble is I have to be online and then wait forever for page refreshes because of all the images. It's too bad these couldn't be distilled into a PDF.
For me, the DreamLIght club would be a waste as I cannot participate in the "online one to ones", stream the vids, or participate in the webinars.
Yea lighting can do in a beginner... not sure if it was Poser or Carrara... but I remember buying a nice interior bathroom which I would setup and then when I rendered it came out total pitch dark result..... not sure it it was shadows or my camera was in the middle of a wall or what.
I agree but again you're talking about spending money for something that most customers won't see or use. Hard to justify that from a business perspective. Especially as long as DS remains free.
Why aren't Szark's tutorial threads in the wiki? Why hasn't someone taken them and turned them into a PDF? My guess is that Szark would rather spend his time doing something else - can't blame him this is a hobby for most of us - but has anyone asked if he'd be ok with them turning his work into a PDF or even putting it on the wiki or a wiki somewhere?
I know I'd love to be able to go to a wiki and find tutorials that weren't using DS 2/3 or just plain missing the image files that make them useful. Heck I'd like to find a sticky post on the forum with just links to the various up to date tutorials.
Here's another rookie move.
I bought an outfit for v4 that I really liked, but the top was way too clingy. I spent time and everything I could to smooth out the character's chest, only to discover the top had built in unremovable nipples morphs built into the outfit with no morph to smooth them out. d'oh.
I'm still sort of ticked about that, because it makes the outfit unusable to me without photoshop as it looked too smexy for the professional character I was rendering.
In general I think lighting should be easier. If I do my magic dance and use my bag of tricks to make the lights work, I'm always happy. But if this doesn't work, I'm sad and can't figure out why. Lighting takes a long time to render, so when I find one I like I use it over and over.
I tend to find premium lightsets a mixed bad. I love the ones that come with the characters the most.
Ouch. So do you consider yourself a masochist? Because that can't have been fun!
I used Poser and then DS for almost 8 years before I decided to learn something about lighting. Not that I used the default lights. I just reused favorite light sets that came with different products and tweeked them. I still do use some of those favorites, even though I completed and enjoyed and learned a lot from the Light Master course.
Perhaps not masochistic so much as persistent. I did understand the lighting and materials pretty much from the start, and that was the fun part for me. Boy was I glad once I noticed the "Fit to..." option though.
...two light sets I like to use repeatedly for character pics and portraits are the ones that came with Jasmin and another two that were released with a freebie character for Vicky 4.1 (yep 4.1) many years ago.
For outdoor scenes I have pretty much stuck with Cloud9 though I still miss using LightDomePro2 which was very simple to use and included some incredibly lovely detailed skydomes. I wonder what it would take to get Waldemar to stop spamming us for a couple days about how we can improve our rendering or make sexy pics with Vicky and just update the bloody plugin. I'd gladly buy an "LDP3" or "LDP2 Bridge" because I loved the quality it gave to a lot of my scenes that just isn't possible with UE.
I'm not the only one around here who misses it.
I really love the lights that came with Cat Character for Genesis in the v.4 version of the file. It is a staple I use for night scenes.
Are you talking about the lights with Jasmin for Genesis and Cloud 9 for Daz Studio?
I may have to add them to my wishlist. I honestly would never have looked at Jasmin since I don't do toon stuff but for a decent set of lights I'd be tempted to grab it if it goes on a big sale.
...with Genesis, you can mix toon and realistic figures together for very unique characters
...here's a test I did with Sadie, Steph4 (through GenX) and a little Genesis Kid.