Do you think there will ever be a decent manual?
JonnyRay
Posts: 1,744
As I've returned to Daz in the past year or so, I'm struck by the number of questions we see from new users that could have easily been answered by a decent manual. Even further, although I've used Daz Studio since it's beginning, I still see things that say Richard will point out or that I see in a tutorial video that I had no idea Studio was capable of. Sometimes it feels like what really holds Daz Studio back is the lack of good documentation on the features that are available.
Even a public wiki, with some good editors to ensure the information being shared is accurate, would go a long way toward exposing the full power of the application.
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No.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/start
Well, that's a start.
Rob has also been providing references pages for new features in each build of DS in the wiki, as well as threads in the forum.
Which manual do you want - the one that describes in-depth each option and what it does, or the manual that describes in great detail how to do a specific process, function, or effect? Rob is currently generating the first as time permits (far too much of it, IMHO, on what should be his free time). The second probably will never happen - it would need a skilled technical writer capable of juggling multiple processes at once with direct access to the development team of 6 to 8 hours per week. I don't see that happening, and without that you get incomplete process documentation OR obsolete process documentation - or both.
The Daz development team is already spread a bit thin, between Studio, Hexagon, and (presumably) Carrara; stealing time from them isn't going to happen.
So the bulk of the 'how to' documentation continues to be generated by forum posters and spread throughout many threads.
To be fair, the "War On Literacy" is prosecuted by Marketing Managers of every product. DAZ cannot be singled out in their total failure to provide professional product documentation. Tom Peters would have said, "We're No Worse Than Anybody Else." Add to that the fact that, for a number of reasons, professional tech writers are very nearly extinct. It is ironic, actually. Certainly the "Push Every Button And See What Happens" approach increases profits by reducing the payroll. At the same time, it limits profits by limiting what the average user is able to do. It is what it is.
The problem is/was that even when comprehensive documentation exists it isn't always used - there was a column in Scientific American a few months back related to this topic, according to which back when Office came with huge manuals a substantial proportion of feature requests were for things that the applications already did and that were in the manuals. If the manuals are not substantially reducing support overheads (and realistically, those of us who read manuals are also those who can more-or-less figure things out without) then the argument for assigning resources to them is greatly weakened.
I personally think that there are way too many variables
in most modern 3DCC applications for one big definative manual to realisticly cover them all.
Ongoing Wikkis are better suited
A manual for your vehicle is relatively easy to produce because
most motorist are only ever going to simply drive the vehicle with its standardized factory components therefore it is easy to
anicipate everything the motorist would need to know about that particular vehicle
And as soon as the motorist starts installing non factory, third party components the maufactures make it abundantly clear that they are not liable.
Sure we could have a manual comprehensively covering the basic use of a "Vanilla" install of Daz studio with the latest Default genesis bases....lovely
Right then..who here is actually running such a basic set up??
New third party products are being introduced Daily and
much of the extended functionality such as scripts and plugins have been developed by parties other than Daz.
Some well documented and some.... frankly not so well documented.
Some of these third parties have vanished entirely......some have Died.
And then there is the fact that Daz is a 3D content company that supports industry standard in/out formats that involve the use of external programs.
Are the Daz tech writers expected to have expertise in every 3D program on the bloody planet, so that the official "DAZ manual" will have warnings for obscure factoids such as ??:
"sculptris creates "symmetry" by splitting the model in half and combing the two peices which will bugger up your vertex count for morph loader pro in Daz studio."
This "manual" situation is no different with the so called "pro apps like Houdini ,Maya or C4D. and they are demanding thousands of Dollars or monthly pay plans to use thier software.
IMHO , Daz Studio users need to be willing to "discover" the deeper parts of this (or any) 3D software from the vast,dynamic, existing user knowledge experience based on their immediate needs
because,IMHO expecting some single,static source to have all of the answers is a fools gambit.
Succinct task-oriented instructions, written in the active voice, rather than huge ones, are what I mean when I say professional. And yes, in today's business culture, a thing that cannot be quantified has no value. It's hard to prove that more assets would be sold as a result of publishing a manual.
Use of a manual has always been optional. Those preferring the "I wonder what this does" approach or the "I can memorize everything" philosophy have never been constrained by manuals. "It does not answer every possible question" is a weak argument for not having a book at all.
Many users still wouldn't read it. And if they would, couldn't understand it. I saw RTFM so many years for products that had big manuals back in the day.
From the list of 99 reasons why it is fine to have no manual.
Personally I share nonesuch00's view, above. I believe that generally, for a number of reasons, the written word is in decline, and the consequences go beyond DAZ Studio None of us can change this, even those who would if they could.
I don't think heavily graphical UIs lend themselves well to written manuals. I bought a introductory character modelling book for Blender that was writting very nicely but I found myself using the included link to download the associated videos to work through the book rather than the book text.
DAZ 3D could make videos of the screen when experience DAZ modelers are doing there thing and then have timestamp indices that skip to the apropriate section of the video(s). I think many features of DAZ Studio aren't used but they'd still need topic indexed videos for those features. Just look at all the possible feature tabs in the DS menu, it's a long list and there are all those other features too.
The videos from DAZ 3D on YouTube a pretty good tutorials for a decent amount of topics.
They have their pros and cons. In many cases they are all we have. At any rate, there are limits to what can be learned or communicated via YT videos.
So for the record would you be willing to accept an official manual that only covered the core features of Daz studio proper?
I would be in favor of that for total beginners or poser refugees.
As long as it was made clear that ANYTHING not part of a default Daz studio installation would not be covered in the "Daz Manual"and any forum post, bleeting about the manual not explaining some third party feature or utility, would be deleted.
Indeed the written word is a form of communication that is Slow,not time sensitive, not easily updated, not well suited for effectively explaining highly visual activities and, subject to language and cultural barriers and bias's.
In the modern world of instant global visual communication it is not hard to see why this form of communication is less utilized and thankfully so as we no longer have elite gate keepers of knowledge hoarding valuable often life saving,
"Analog Data" in their private libraries, while the great unwashed masses languished in ignorance.
Indeed I would not try to learn software engineering from watching a persons screen recording of him typing code.
However in the specific case of Manipulating an icon based 3DCC software interface such as Daz studio,
I have a hard time imagining that pages of text and static images would have any advantage over a well made video.
We as humans learn the basics of life by visual observation
of our environment.
we learned how to use eating utensils ,for example, by watching "Live footage" of our parents using them
not by reading a book about the subject.
"Everything changed when the internet came," an instructive young man said to me a few months back. The thing is, it didn't. Anyone who doesn't recognize and acknowledge the power of the written word only proves my point.
Tons of effort has gone into DAZ documentation over the past ten years. Try to find it. I'm always surprised when I come up with one I haven't seen before. It was written then neglected by someone who didn't understand that documenting a dynamic subject is a sustaining task. And then there are those "file not found"s. More neglect. And why is there no TOC? If we can't access the docs, why even write them? DAZ's past efforts at documentation were all wasted thanks to poor implementation and no follow-through.
If you had any idea what RoboHelp (or a couple of others) can do, and has been able to do for more than 10 years, you might be astounded that it is used so little. All the various media types mentioned above can be easily incorporated. Even YouTube, You can have a TOC. You can have a clickable index. How about a hyperlinked glossary? You can do anything with it you can do with a website. Prefer online access only? No problem. Want a PDF copy, so you can mark it up? Press a button. It's no biggie, it's part of the software. And RH lends itself to multiple remote authors working on the same doc at the same time. It is the ideal tool for a job like this
We don't need to choose between multiple media and format types. We can (theoretically) have them all, using each when it is most appropriate. Instead we have virtually nothing, and we meet here to defend keeping it that way.
Just my thoughts...
Sounds like a great idea, but the powerful flexibility built into D|S kind of works against it. I've been using D|S since the late betas, a short while before the release of v1. I got used to thinking of how to use the program's features from that vintage of the UI. Every time some fancy new UI style was added, I tried it out, and realised many times the new bell or whistle actually slowed me down — I could work more quickly and confidently by recreating the old style in the new program version. At this stage, I'm using the no-training-wheels UI style, set up as close as I can get to the way it was in D|S2 or D|S3. I just can't think the way the full bells-whistles-and-gongs setup works.
How many D|S users never change away from the "training wheels" style, or never realise there's anything else? How many have customised their setup until the D|S programmers might blink a bit?
Which style would be more likely to help a random user looking for a relevant tutorial? FWIW, a lot of the problems I've encountered over the years trying to help someone is when we're both using different UI styles, and neither of us realises this for a while.
On the gripping hand, one IMHO good feature of doing things here on the forums is an opportunity to meet and make new friends, talking about stuff we all enjoy, and learning new stuff from each other.
(I'd still like better documentation, though; the online stuff comes close, but the incompleteness is annoying and too often it hits the nail square on the thumb.)
Mostly, what I would love to see is an explanation of the things that are in Daz Studio. As a couple of examples of what I'm talking about ...
As I mentioned in my OP, watching the Daz Tutorial videos taught me things that have probably been in Studio for a long time, but because I never clicked on the right menu, or understood the dialog box that was displayed, I didn't know they would be useful.
The problem, as I see it, with "Push buttons and find out" method is that you can learn the wrong things. Using an example from above, if I select a different subdivision algorithm, I might not see any difference in the results for the specific object that I have selected. So, I might (wrongly) decide that the algorithm isn't really important and never go back there again, even if it would help me with another object geometry. There's a reason Daz chose to implement more than one algorithm, but without knowing the benefits and drawbacks of each, I don't have enough information to know when to change that value.
Or, as another example, a new user might change the translucency strength on the Uber Iray shader and think "Oh, I'm making the object more transparent. So if I want it to be transparent, this is the setting I change." and have no idea that the Opacity value is really transparency and translucency is something else.
I've seen users who swear that "Iray is broken" when the only real problem is that they have it set to Interactive instead of Photoreal rendering without knowing what the difference is and so transparency and shadows aren't working the way one would expect them to.
There are only a very small number of YouTube content creators that I know well enough to trust. How do I know if some new person is explaining the software correctly or if they're just sharing their flawed ideas about how they think something works based on their own experiments? This is why I prefer getting information about software from the company that makes it. Not other users who may (or may not) know more than me.
Daz has a very poor documentation. The learning is very slow. I spend more time looking for documentation than production.
Daz could expand quickly if you solve this problem