School is in Session
whispers65
Posts: 952
I want to make some stuff because, 1) I have no money. 2) What I have in my head, doesn't match up with what I can find. 3) Some things are hard to find...i.e..sports uniforms. 4) I like to be creative and it helps with stress. Those are some of the reasons.
What I can do - I can take things from different products and put them together. I guess this is called kit-bashing. I never knew it was a thing; I just liked it. Examples are a couple of attachments of a locker room. In this case, I didn't create anything. I took a copy of the model, lined them up and knocked out a wall or two. I did learn about shaders and used them for the floor and the mirrors. I also created a plane to replace the floor. Nothing too glamorous.
What I would like to do - for my school project, I'd like to create an entire school building. I have a gym. I have a cafeteria. I have classrooms and so forth, so I can kit bash them altogether. But what I don't have is the basic structure. There is https://www.daz3d.com/high-school-hallway-2 I really like the looks of it, but it is limited to that space. So I'm looking to build my own hallway system. I mapped out a basic floor plan in Excel. It'll probably be too big all in one scene, but I can divide it up into sections. Whatever. I can bypass all of this and just do renders inside the classroom, but it would be nice to have a hallway outside the classroom that is decorated and so forth. I have a hard enough time creating a scene outside of the window to look realistic. I do have Collective3d's "build a room" modules. It has some basic walls, windows, and things like that. I know it is more for houses and stuff maybe, but still. Textures seem to trip me up the most. I did an experiment. I had a wall from one source that was pre-textured. I created a basic wall shape using primitives. I thought that it may be as easy as going into surfaces and copying and pasting the values and then changing the base to the texture. Didn't quite work out that way. I can take pre-existing textures that are already set up and take them into paint.net and make some minor changes, like I did for a baskeball uniform, but that is about it.
I wish I could find a simple project that would lay everything out like "make a pair of socks". Here's how to model them. This is how to check to make sure the mesh is okay. How dense should the mesh be. Here's how to make a UV. This is how you texture it. This is how to add morphs. This is how to get it into studio. This is how to make sure it works with your figure. This is how to save it as a real prop that you can use. Whatever the steps are to take something from nothing to completed finished project that can be shared or whatever.
Bottom line, I'd like to take a bigger step into modeling and texturing. I've done some modeling tutorials and so forth. I've watched lots of videos, and I'm sure all of this process is up in my mind somewhere, but it is so disjointed and disorganized to be useful.
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First thing is to find a modeling app that works for you. there are many out there, some free, some paid. They all do the basics pretty much the same. it's all about the user interface and what works best for you.
There are free 'how to' videos and tutorials on the web. Also, there are paid tutorials for sale in the Daz store that do what you say you want. Some are very organized. There is no single best approach because there is no single software workflow. For example, there are multiple modeling programs out there and they can all achieve pretty much the same thing. To create models, you can use Blender or Daz's Hexagon for free, or you can use a variety of modeling and sculpting programs like ZBrush, 3DCoat, etc. Similarly, there are free UVMapping programs and there are paid for dedicated UVMapping programs. There are quite a few structured 'how to' tutorials available for sale through Daz, Artstation, and other places.
Examples of vendors who have offered very structured 'how to model/uvmap/texture a model and get it into Daz' include but are not limited to
Digital Art Live - https://www.daz3d.com/digital-art-live
SickleYield - https://www.daz3d.com/sickleyield
Flipped Normals - https://www.daz3d.com/flippednormals
Dreamlight - https://www.daz3d.com/dreamlight
Dark Edge Design - https://www.daz3d.com/darkedgedesign
Repeat. There are free tutorials available on the web if you search. Repeat, the above list of vendor tutorial producers at Daz is not complete. Also, software is constantly changing; therefore, an older tutorial can sometimes become obsolete.
Wishing you the best in your journey. I am sure you will enjoy creating items from your own imagination or inspired by something you see in a movie or described in a book.
Blender is free. There are free tutorials for Blender.
Many people start with the Blender donut tutorial.
And then people might want to follow the fantastic, amazing, terrific The WP Guru for integrating Blender with Daz to make morphs, etc.
Thanks. I have both Hexagon and Blender. Blender is a little hard to get use to its interface, but I'm sure if I work with it enough, I'll get it eventually.
Thanks. I'll check them out. I've use some of sickleyield's tutorials before, but mainly for character creation. I had no idea about Digital-Art-Live. They have a lot of comic book type stuff. I'm actually using Comic Life 3 as a part of this project. So my eyes perked up when I saw them.
I made a donut before, but I need to make a couple of dozen to get the process. :)
I've followed various tutorials including the Donut (I think we used to spell that doughnut when I was a child in England) and I usually come to the point where they try to explain UV mapping and my eyes glaze over. Then there's rigging and weight mapping and finding textures and trying to figure out the node system with all those boxes and spaghetti strings (Andrew of the Donut has a business selling textures and materials, of course). All I'm saying is that it isn't a venture for the uncommitted. So far I've abandoned all of my efforts so I'm not one of the committed - I wish you more success.
That's basically the same as me. So I can relate to everything you said. And I have a problem with follow through. I'll do something for a while and then give up. However, the desire never goes away so instead of getting overwhelmed I'm looking for better ways to make it stick so I get it. The node system thumped my brain. Maybe, I just need to make several dozen donuts and open a donut shop or something lol. I've seen "doughnut" spelled this way.
I think the problem for me is the mixture of the artistic creativity and the technical skills required. I am very attracted to the idea of sculpting a character or building a set of props but the technical process of figuring out how to align UV maps or rig bones is quite daunting and off-putting. Then there's that node system which, when you ask in the Blender forum, you will always get the reply that it is quite logical when you get used to it. Maybe so but in order to get used to it you have to learn about how dozens of those boxes interact and what happens inside the box. Some of them have mathematical formulas and I just turn and run at that point - mathematics was always something I tried to avoid from childhood - I wish it were not so because I admire mathematicians.
So for people like me, DAZ Studio offers an outlet to be creative (perhaps even artistic) without the need to be a Mr. Robot level technical wizard. I just wish that DAZ Studio had better tools for soft-body physics or animation or cloth simulation - all reasons that many DAZ Studio users look to other applications to realise their creative process.
That is it in a nutshell. Knowing what everything does and why. I can get used to anything, but not knowing means all I am doing is going through the motions. I do like that Studio is fairly easy to get into and I can be creative in ways I never thought possible, but it is complex enough that I have a lot more to learn. The only downside is that I'm older now and don't learn as quickly and to tell you the truth I feel like time is slipping away too and sometimes I wonder if I will ever accomplish even small things. I like the creative process though.
Not to answer your question, but at least to give you a reference for school building and space distribution. TrueForm released a full school at rendo called Prestige School.
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/prestige-school/155169/
Cheers
Thanks! It is way over the top nice for what I was thinking, but I read up on it and it does pretty much have everything I was looking for. I'll have to put it on my wanted list.
There's this one for a school exterior:
https://www.daz3d.com/school-s-out-19787
Sorry, I got the impression that you were school age yourself. I'm over 70 now and learning does not come as easily as it did when I was young. I just tend to forget things so quickly. I watched that donut tutorial about 6 moths ago and again a couple of weeks ago and I had forgotten everything. As you say, you need to keep doing it for it to sink in.
Nah, I'm like 57 so leaerning is quite a bit different from my younger years, I'm sorry to say. School was a pretty positive experience for me for the most part. Home life was another story altogether. Next month is camp nanowrimo and I usually try to write for it. I plan on writing a story where the kid doesn't come from a great home, like I did, but in the end it all works out well for him. I guess trying to undo the past and make a better future in fiction anyway lol. So when I write, I try and do renders to help me visualize the story better. So in this case, it'll be different. I used to play a lot of sports, although I sucked at them all. They still let me play though.
I get the impression that I'm one of the younger members of this forum, and I'm nearly 40.