Things I Learned The Hard Way
columbine
Posts: 444
[I've changed the title of this post and the first paragraph because I think it was subject to misinterpretation. This wasn't meant to be a laundry list of complaints, it was meant to be a "here's some things I learned, share yours."]
Things which I have had to learn by stubbing my toe on them (sometimes repeatedly) over the last three-plus years, inspired by my comment in a different thread. Add your own to the list!
- Photometric lights (mostly spotlights and pointlights) work differently in just about every way from mesh lights (emitters), and since having even one photometric light in your scene will trigger special "photometric mode" behavior and calculations from the renderer, and sometimes photometric and mesh lights don't play well together, it may be better to go all or nothing. (I use photometric lights less and less because I'm tired of dealing with them.)
- You will probably not see that HD feature because the figure or item loaded with the subdivision set low enough that it doesn't come into play and you'll need to bump it up. Many HD surfaces load with the HD effectively turned off because you have to bump up subd yourself.
- The more shape/morph sliders you have for a particular generation/gender of figure the slower the load times for those figures will be because when you load one it must also load and parse ALL the shape sliders for that generation/gender. I have a LOT of G8F figures, and there are times when I use G3Fs for background characters etc simply because I have fewer morphs for them and they take about a fifth of the time to load.
- You can use a G8F morph on a G8.1F but not vice versa, so if you're mixing characters and you know you're going to want a mix of 8.0 and 8.1 stuff, use an 8.1 base. (Obviously applies to the men too but I don't use men much.)
- Studio does not do garbage collection; when you delete an item from a scene, it is not deleted from memory. It's taking up space and your scene is getting slower and slower to work with. Save your work periodically, use New (which does do garbage collection -- that's that ten-minute wait while it's "deleting items"), and reload the scene. This will usually give you an immediate performance boost, especially if it's a scene you've been working in for hours, adding and then removing sets, etc.
- Emitters are affected by mesh density. Basically (I may be oversimplifying) each cell of the mesh is one emitter. This is only ever really a problem if you make human surfaces emissive, where you have suddenly made a LOT of emitters. Unfortunately I do this all the time.
- Instances are the greatest thing ever but when you make instances of human figures--especially dressed, becoiffed human figures--expect additional overhead on cleanup. Say you make ten instances of a human. Then you don't need them in the scene any longer. You delete the instances first because you're not a monster (actually, it doesn't matter; if you delete the parent first the instances will just become invisible since they no longer have content to clone), and then you delete the real figure and it takes FOREVER. This is, unfortunately, normal behavior and I don't know why it does it, but it happens every time. If you make even a single instance of a base figure, that base figure will then take longer to delete, and the more instances you make of it, the more the deletion time increases. (This does not seem to be the case for instances of objects like furniture!)
- You can add smoothing modifiers to clothing that doesn't have it. DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG IT TOOK FOR ME TO LEARN THIS
- You can add dForce modifiers to things that don't have it--though it may not work out as well as you hope.
- Sometimes there is legitimate reason to show hidden properties and mess with them, especially if you do a lot of grotesque special effects like I do that depend on weird scaling and distortions. Ditto for removing limits.
- There are an awful lot of hidden things in Window|Panes on the menu. Not all of them are useless. Some of them may be things you want to dock (make a tab for) once you realize they're there.
- Studio has not yet switched over to making a geometry shell have Iray surfaces by default. If you buy kits that have geoshells in them and those geoshells load with Iray surfaces, it's because the PA has switched them to Iray surfaces for you. A fresh geoshell from the menu will always have "Default Shader" surfaces, which means what you're trying to do will probably not work. Keep the basic "Iray Uber Base" icon on speed dial, select all surfaces in the geoshell, and apply it to them before doing anything else. Alas, this also goes for Edit|Duplicate Node Hierarchy, which I use all the time. You make a copy of the figure but the new figure's geoshell(s) are NOT IRAY and have probably lost the effects you were using them for. AND this goes for accidentally deleting a figure and undoing that; when the figure is restored to the scene, the geoshell will have lost its Irayness.
- Control-D is "drop to floor."
- Zero is relative. If you zero a figure (I mean XYZ zero, not zeroing the pose, though I often use an icon that does both) that's just out in the scene, it will indeed be the true 0/0/0 in the middle of your world ... but if your figure is in a group, "zero" is the zero location of THE GROUP. If you group two figures who are standing near each other, the group will be created with a bounding cube that encompasses both figures and "zero" will be the zero of that bounding cube. This is INCREDIBLY USEFUL because usually you've grouped the figures because you're about to apply a two-person pose, and you can fully zero both figures so the pose will apply properly, without moving them to world 0/0/0 which may be halfway across the scene somewhere. This is also helpful for poses in a vehicle (or on a horse) which only apply right if both the vehicle and the person are fully zeroed.
- You can lock X Y and Z on a figure before applying a pose to deal with those pesky poses that insist on moving a character to a certain location in the world. If you're using a pose kit that has both "Go-To Poses" and "Use Anywhere" poses (or equivalent, some PAs call them different things), the "use anywhere" poses are the ones which just pose the figure in place, without moving the figure somewhere. (If you never use poses that were made for a particular set without using that set, you probably never have had this problem.)
- The overall scale of a figure has a "factory set" default and it may not be 100%. If you change the scale of the character and then use certain zero-pose tools, it'll reset to default scale for that figure and you'll be sad. I have one set of characters I always load at 110% and I finally gave up and locked the scale slider in the saved bases I use so that zero-pose wouldn't mess with it.
- Speaking of factory settings, G9F figures tend to load with Eye Look Out Left and Eye Look Out Right set to 10% (which will show as an altered parameter in "Currently Used") and their right eye set Side-Side 3.0 and their left set Side-Side -3.0 (which will not). I do not know the reason for this; I just know it's annoying to have to manually turn off every time I load a fresh G9.
- Eyeballs in general seem more prone than other body parts to be a little sticky when poses are loaded and changed and unloaded and reloaded and so on, and it's a good idea to periodically check both the pose sliders (Look Side-Side, etc) and the sliders for the eyeballs themselves to make sure they're not utterly haywire.
- And speaking of going haywire, if after repeated poses your character's legs start to look REALLY WEIRD, go find the two Flex Quad sliders and reset them.
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Comments
It's true there is no single, centralised, reference manual - but there is a lot of information put out by the devs 9change logs, forum threads on nwe features, the wiki for example. I would love Daz to assign resources for a full manual - but don't forget that doing so would slow development work on the application as the devs had to explain things to the tech writer, then check what the tech writer wrote (probably across several iterations).
Not sure about that. Could you explain what you mean?
That is settings, not DS. And setting the HD to full on in the Viewport is probably not geenrally desirable.
It's not sliders as such, it's the links between them - and isn't really something that would make the manual anyway, I would think.
Again, content not DS - and, I would have thought, fairly unsurprising.
Don't forget that DS must keep deleted items in memory for a while, to support Undo.
Probably in the Iray docs, which is where it should be.
What are you expecting the manual to say? That sounds more like a report of how it behaves.
I'm pretty sure a lot of these are documented.
That sounds like a feature request or even - if reproducible - a bug report.
Isn't that in the 9admitedly old) user guide?
Yes? What would you expect, or course the postioning relative to the parent is relative - otherwise moving the parent would be tricky. It could be in a very pedantic manual, but I think the result would be unreadable.
That is content and a rule of good practice - to keep plaement and posing separate (so that you can offset two figues shaking hands, and move them around the scene without breaking the offset).
al of these are content behaviours, not DS.
Richard, I think you misunderstood my tone and I apologize. It wasn't meant to be a litany of complaints and it wasn't even necessarily meant to be a criticism, though I DO think that that the piecemeal "oh, there are docs for that here, there are docs for that there" we have to sift through isn't great. This was more intended to be a "things I have learned about Studio the hard way" post and an invitation for others to share similar experiences. I wrote it lightheartedly, in other words. My natural sarcasm levels may have obscured that :P
Some of them absolutely do make perfect sense when you stop to think about them, like zero being relative--the point was more that I DID have to stop to think about them, or find out about them through trial and error. I think everybody has things like that in just about any piece of software.
My comment about photometric lights not playing well with emitters is ... I'm not sure I can give you hard evidence of it. I've had a lot of cases where a render came out grainy even though there should have been plenty of light, and over and over again I found it was this situation: The set is mostly lit with emissive lights, but there's not enough light on the main figure in the scene, so I add a spotlight on that figure. What happens next is that the scene is grainy and the render is slow and difficult. You can pump up the luminance of that spot, but it won't help with the graininess; you'll just eventually get it so bright the figure is washed out and is STILL grainy. Adding a second spot, say, a kicker light, will not necessarily help. The problem seems to be entirely with the interaction of the photometric lights with the emitters in the room ... and the fastest, most foolproof solution I've found in those situations is to not use any photometric lights at all. I delete the spot, take a primitive like a plane or sphere, make it emissive, and position it off-camera so it's illuminating the subject. Suddenly, magically, no more graininess, even if the new emitter is more or less the same luminance as the spotlight it replaced.
I would honestly be surprised if "newly created geoshells do not have Iray surfaces" hadn't been reported as a feature-change request already. A lot. Like several other items here, that was in the list for the benefit of some possible reader who comes along and says, "oh is THAT why they do that weird thing, thanks, now I know how to deal with it!"
On the flip side, if someone who is brand new to DS has a problem, asking a complete newbie to somehow find out how to wade through all that in order to find the answer to their question... if, indeed, they can even figure out exactly what the question that they need to be asking is... is, in my experience, one of the single biggest reasons that a lot of people who're trying DS out ultimately get frustrated with the whole thing and walk away. That's not idle extrapolation, that's a lesson I've learned from personal direct feedback multiple times after I've recommended DS to somebody and then followed up with them later only to find that they gave up on it due to the lack of simple and accurate basic documentation. At the very least, the document that's being advertised as being a User Manual should at least be updated enough to include how to use the default Iray renderer instead of still giving instructions for 3DL, cover the basics of d-force hair and clothing & working with geometry shell textures since that's what the majority of newer product is, show a working interface that at least resembles what the opening screen displays, and focus on base figures that are only one or two generations behind the current generation of product instead of still refering to Genesis 2 and V4. As to slowing development on new versions of the software... if more people are trying DS and sticking with it and buying more product, then how is that not as valid an investment towards the future longevity of DS than spending time and resources developing things like redundant new content management systems that end up being less efficient than what already exists, or chasing off spending those same resources trying to compete in completely different markets against companies and products with far vaster resources and multiple years already invested in those areas?
This was precisely my gripe initially, with daz and especially with blender. Once you know what you want to do, it's easy to find out how; but knowing what that is or being aware of the existence of features is another thing. This is where many absolute beginner tutorials fail also, they show you how to do things using certain features of techniques without explaining what those are in the first place; which would make it a lot easier to understand whay it was done that way and how it works.
Some other things to add to the list that would have been useful to know earlier:
If you want to use both scene lights and sun sky, you have to remove the hdri map, if one is active.
Scaling to -100% will allow you to mirror props on the chose axis. It may not work in some cases, but it usually does.
If you have a scene that seems to be way too heavy for what's in it, always check for displacement maps and the subD there; I've come across objects that had displacement sub with ridiculous values over 10, and a single small prop could be the cause of the scene crashing.
You can also press CMD (on Mac) or CTRL (on Windows) while clicking on the pose you want to load: a window will open and you can uncheck Translations axis:
Something I didn't know at the beginning: poses sets like the ones you have in mind, if bought on Daz (less likely when it's a freebie or bought somewhere else), will have the translations and rotations done on the hip bone, not the root of the figure so I didn't know what to do (outside of moving them manually) when looking at the figure's parameters, I didn't see change in the X,Y and Z value while, clearly, the figure moved far away from world center
And now, I grumble each time I find a pose with rotations done on the figure and not on the hip (because it means translation corrections too: the hip pivot point is not the same as the figure one) but at least, I now have an alternative to placing the figure in a group to make translating and rotating easier.
Things I find are useful to remember:
Just a few thoughts, mostly about content as DS is a content rich environment.
Regards,
Richard
Thank you for this, seriously. I just learned several things I hadn't even known to ask about.
My additions are much more Level 1, but:
- Just because a scene says there's lighting included doesn't mean it's enough for your render. You didn't do it wrong, you just need to learn more about lighting
- Shaders. Embrace the shaders.
- Come up with some sort of organization system right away, before your library gets unweildy, or you will spend an age trying to get it all sorted out. If you do not have an organization system, you will completely forget half of what you have. Don't trust Smart Content to be the amazing thing it looks like in the videos.
- You don't have to stick to just one generation of assets. I am embarrassed how long it took me to figure this one out.
- Don't expect anything to work flawlessly the way you want out of the box. If it does, count it a win. Mostly you're going to have to fuss with it.
- If it's fighting you too hard, ask a question on the forums because often it's something easy to fix that you didn't even know could go wrong.
- Learn to look at the overall geometry of a thing, and also learn how to assign geometry into new groups. See shaders, above, and cue up Aladdin and Jasmine singing "A Whole New World."
- Just because you can't find it through the search bar on the Daz store doesn't mean it doesn't exist in the Daz store.
-There's an alphabetized product listing in DS. So if you can't find it where you think it ought to be, look there.
....and as an aside, I agree that it's pretty off-putting to expect new users to know how and where to go hunting for answers to questions they often don't even know how to ask. If you don't know the terminology of what you want to do, how can you google it? Honestly the only reason I'm still here (almost) a year later is sheer stubbornness because I want it THAT BADLY and the kindness of folk on the forums. If it slows down things to get some decent, up-to-date documentation out there, I say so be it.
I had completely forgotten but actually this has been addressed, in 4.22.1.118 http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log#4_22_1_118
My Google fu has failed me, but there was a long thread which has probably now dropped way back that had a lot of things people had discovered late in the day (but not, judging by my search attempts, named something like "Things I wish i had known sooner").
probably this one: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/185056/features-that-you-could-slap-yourself-for-not-figuring-out-sooner#latest
Ooh! this looks like it will be good reading.
One of the things I like about perusing lists like this is that we don't agree on what's obvious and what isn't, and again, no criticism; brains just don't all work the same way, and thank heaven for that!
(I notice one of the first items in that thread is "You can 'look through' spotlights" and my immediate reaction is "How do you aim them properly without looking through them?")
Thank you!
By using the cone that Studio draws, which I have no idea if it has a specific name, that has a focal point that tells you where it's pointing. (I've tried looking through spotlights, but that view is so weird that I don't know how anyone actually uses it. There's probably some way to make it do a normal sort of view instead of the extremely elongated thing that I see, but I don't know what that way would be.)
You can create your own surfaces in Daz Studio: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/42088/tutorial-adding-surfaces-in-ds-with-the-geometry-editor-tool/p1
I don't know if I would say I learned about that the hard way, but it severely restricted the products I found useful until I realised it was a thing. I've used it on so many legacy architectural assets that are actually fantastic except they were built during a time of less technological advancement and prowess in computing hardware. Being able to create your own surfaces means you don't even have to worry about whether meshes were textured using one big surface or with surfaces that don't logically adhere to features of a mesh.