Getting back into DAZ - comprehensive tutorial suggestions for beginners

rnollman

I am getting back into DAZ Studio and want to get some suggestions for free and not-free tutorials to get me started. Most of the free videos I have been watching are not very good. There was a course offered for $100 that looked promising, but I cannot find it again. I have had experience with DAZ in the past, but limited success achieving the goals I intended. I see the images in the ads for DAZ products and find it difficult to recreate the look and feel of the images in the ad.

I watched one video in which a very experienced DAZ user said that you have to do post- production work on your images to make them look like the ones you see in the ads. He said unequivocably that you cannot simply render images in DAZ and achieve professional-looking results. He warned that you have to be careful what vendors you buy products for because there are some that spend a lot of doing post-production work on the ads, but their actual products were really bad.

One thing I am looking for is video tutorials, articles, even books that provide lots of examples that I can work through to produce quality results.

TheKD

For tutorials....
https://www.daz3d.com/dreamlight
and
https://www.daz3d.com/darkedgedesign
Those are the two vendors I would reccommend for paid tutorials.

ebergerly

IMO, high quality production is less about the software tool and more about the artistic skills. And it depends a lot on what your goals are. Are you looking for realism, or a certain style, and on and on. There are very few tutorials out there as I recall on the basics of the DAZ Studio software, and I think that's partly because it's, for the most part, a drag-n-drop and hit Render. DAZ Studio does have an incredible amount of functionality, but I think a lot of it isn't used by many/most users. 

Personally, I'd focus more on the artistic aspects (lighting, composition, etc.), and then once you know what look you're going for then it's a lot easier to figure out how to do it in the software. Learning what buttons to push doesn't help you figure out WHY you'd want to push them. 

As far as what you heard about post production, I think it's a very valid point, and the route that virtually all professionals take once they realize what look they want, and what emotion and story they want to tell, and need a lot of control over how to accomplish that. So I guess I'd recommend you search for some art and color theory and composition and other tutorials so you know exactly what you want to acheive, then figure out how to do that in DAZ Studio.