DAZ Blender workflow

analog24

hi all, 

new to Daz - been about a week now and loving it. Easier than I thought it would be, albeit I'm still getting used to it, as I come from Blender.....

So apologies if this has been asked a 1000 times. 

1) the quality in iray is so much better than Cycles ( using diffeomorphic - and gone through the render settings already) - the skin quality and textures are amazing in iray, and I havent even setup proper lighting or tweaked the iray render settings yet

2) are there hotkeys for the viewport navigation?

3) as for Blender, I can build a scene - I have 'lots' of purchased (fbx) assets. I presume textures will need to be re-aplied, in a obj format for each object I import? 

4) I would like to start animating sometime - so find a good workflow, based on the above. 

- analog24

  

 

 

 

ShelLuser

analog24 said:

So apologies if this has been asked a 1000 times. 

No need... this is what I love about these forums: there's a very friendly community behind it. And well, if people get bored they can always ignore your question ;)

 

2) are there hotkeys for the viewport navigation?

What exactly are you looking for?  But yes, check out F3 (also accessible through: "Window -> Workspace -> Customize..."). You can customize just about everything within Daz Studio...  menus, toolbars, activities and also hotkeys (or 'actions') but it does depend on what you're looking for.

For example... if you expand "View selection" you'll get several hotkeys which you can use to change your current view (back, front, left, right, etc.).

 

3) as for Blender, I can build a scene - I have 'lots' of purchased (fbx) assets. I presume textures will need to be re-aplied, in a obj format for each object I import? 

Bear in mind that I have maybe 3 - 5% experience with Blender (I plain out dislike it) but... DS has an FBX importer/exporter plugin. So I assume that you should be able to import all that stuff right into DS without too many problems. But... I never bothered with this myself, I only know that option exists.

 

4) I would like to start animating sometime - so find a good workflow, based on the above. 

I can only say that I really enjoy the aniMate 2 plugin. I'm not an experienced animator and so far my stuff is kinda crude (often only meant to apply a small bit of variety to my pose) but... IMO it's pretty cool to work with. DS has a lite version which you can try so... that's probably where I'd start.

Hope this could give you some ideas.

Spacious

I've noticed that FBX import in DAZ can be a little wonky sometimes, obj just seems to work more consistently.  Lots of Items will bring all of their mats with them and you'll just need to adjust the levels of everything and whatnot for the iray render engine.  Some items will not bring any surfaces and then it's manual from there.  One great thing in DAZ you can pretty much drag and drop evrything, including object imports, surface mats, pretty much you name it.  That was one of the hardest things for me to get used to when I first was learning blender.  I just kept dragging and dropping stuff into it and nothing would happen.