Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 7
Novica
Posts: 23,887
Welcome to Thread 7! You'll notice the slight name change, as I already opened up the thread to all forum members who want to help showcase the products during Thread 6. It's very rewarding to see how often the threads are surfed, even after they close. If you're new to buying from Daz or just want to see different images and opinions from those who have bought the products, take some time (lol, well, a LOT of time, they're monster threads) and surf back through!
Here are the thread locations:
Thread 1 is HERE Thread 2 is HERE Thread 3 is HERE
Thread 4 is HERE Thread 5 is HERE Thread 6 is HERE.
Some fun facts. The five closed threads (NOT counting thread 6) get approximately 4,000 additional views every 28 days. Currently on Sept 7, 2016, there are 414,765 posts/views.
As of January 26, 2017: Thread 1 81,248 (+730) Thread 2 65,772 (+467) Thread 3 76,579 (+930) Thread 4 56,392 (+505) Thread 5 51,165 (+494) Thread 6 68,244 (+2986) Thread 7 45,657 (+24,180) Total: Threads 1-6 (+6,112) Total Threads 1-7 (+30,292 posts/views) Total: 445,057 views/posts.
Thread 1=80,518 Thread 2=65,305 Thread 3=75,649 Thread 4=55,887 Thread 5=50,671
Thread 6=65,258 Current thread=21,477
The thread showcases products both old and new. We're all surprised by the great oldies that evoke feelings of "Where'd that come from? I don't remember seeing that in the store..." or "Oh yeah, I have that!" If you need motivation to dig into your Runtime, this is the thread to motivate you. If you don't want to spend money...well... stop now. Here's where you'll find family friendly (and sexy but only in good taste. Surf the previous threads to get an idea.)
The most used other thread I started is Free Backgrounds. Head over and grab a few, contribute a few, and enjoy!
**********References / Of Interest In This Thread:**********
Books, Digital: RScotJohns (Author) helped us with ebook (did a chat one evening)
Characters: I also showcased Odelle, a wonderful older character from another site (that Daz rejected!) and thanks to jakiblue telling the vendor about this thread, they posted a sneak preview of the next character for us.
Expressions: Here's some with sliders that are really fluid and usable. And Poses (be sure to scroll for both of these, numerous posts) NEW January 2017
Hair: One of the funniest things showcased- vendor's names in hair!
HDRIs: Fishtales showing you some HRDI's
Free Infinity Cove 3 sets
Mountain Valley: Take a tour of this product as we drive around town!
********** Programs **********
Infinito: Infinito Experiments: If you have questions about Infinito, ask them here
iClone: iClone6 (I'll have to get back to it) Here's a nice video by Bigh and Bigh's thread on Iclone and Reallusions Thread The Path To iClone
Motion Capture in general: Motion Capture products/ discussion linked from the Octane FaceShift question
ShapeMagic 2 ShapeMagic 2 By our very own RGcincy
Silo: Silo Modeling
Zbrush For Beginners: Zbrush for Beginners
Livebrush Pro (FREE) Livebrush Pro- link, it's now free
********** TIPS **********
Tip: Bloom Filter- Settings
Tip: Characters- Where To Load From Loading Characters- does it matter if you load it from icons, the Genesis figure + Character List, or the Figure (Aiko 7, Girl 7, etc) + the Character List? YES IT DOES.
Tip: Custom Categories for Sets Here's some suggestions and additions
Tip: Delete Items in Scene: Grouped items giving you fits? How to delete those polygons!
Tip: Dreamland Models in DS Learn how to work with Dreamland Models (Poser) in DS
Tip: Doors and windows that open, flat roof to add, pane of glass, good kit bashing items
Tip: Dome Orientation Results My experiments/settings for rotating the dome by changing the XYZ Dome Orientation. All settings given/ shown.
Tip: Fern Lake Instances and Water Instances in Fern Lake and Through The Woods And clearer water tip for it. My example.
Tip: Focal Length
Tip: Gemology Shaders for Iray: Settings for best results, by vendor New January 2017
Tip: Greek Houses: Fixing the water, landscape, and stone edge materials. All settings provided!
Tip: Growing Up: Making Chest look good
Tip: Harpsburg Night Lights Best way to apply them
Tip: Iray Organized References This thread links to the threads, but also categorized some of the topics within the thread so you can look things up quicker.
Tip: Iray Section Plane TabascoJack shows you how to use the Iray Section Plane
Tip: Madelyn Ears- How to remove those elf ears.
Tip: Manual Downloads in Product Library How to find them ultra-quick
Tip:/Info: Difference in Materials and Shaders (from Commons)
Tip: Mermaid Top Family friendly suggestion.
Tip: Millenium Cat- Free Persian Head
Tip: Photoshop Postwork Postwork Photoshop Tips (Laticis) and my example
Tip: Photoshop Plugins From Thread 6: Examples
Tip: Pose Converter (Genesis 2 to Genesis 3) Where to find files (Scroll for discussion)
Tip: Combining Poses by locking body parts
Tip: Postwork The Postwork thread has a lot of good information!
Tip: Rigging How to import OBJ and rig in Daz Studio
Tip: Rigging Basic Rigging Preparation then Adding Bones for Rigging
Tip: So Wet Bundle Examples
Tip: Skies of iRadiance Which are for high / low altitudes? Answer
Tip: Spectural Rendering tests for the studio NEW January 2017
Tip: Ultragenesis: Faces of G has a variety of older faces.
Tip: White Point Changing it- Examples
Tip: Walls- Sets Which Are Easier To Use- or Not. Sets that don't have separate walls and handy notes on a few sets
********** TUTORIALS**********
Tutorial: Breast Gone- In Hexagon (Smoothing Zev0s Grow Up product even more)
Tutorial: Clothing, Making in Blender SickleYield's tutorial on Deviant Art.
Tutorial: Create Categories Using Gen2F, I showed how to Create Categories and Export to save your custom categories. (Here's WHY you may want to do that with your characters.)
Tutorial: Custom Actions In Toolbar How to Create Custom Actions In Toolbar
Tutorial: D Former D Former Tutorial D Former tutorial and links
Tutorial: Depth of Field Flipmode provides a good depth of field tutorial for you.
Tutorial: Fisty's Shaders & Getting Rid of Gooey Lips This one shows you Fisty's shaders. One of my favorites is how to get rid of the overly gooey lips.
Tutorial: Garibaldi Hair Doing a cat with Garibaldi Hair- Tutorial
Tutorial: Generation 4 Materials on Genesis 2 This one put Generation 4 materials on Genesis 2 using Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female.
Tutorial: Geometry Shells How to do Geometry Shells (video tutorial the3dwizard) and doing makeup for different characters
Tutorial: Hair Shaders (Slosh, his product) If you use Slosh's hair shaders, you can always come back here to find his post explaining how to use them.
Tutorial: Iclone Iclone videos
Tutorial: Images- How To Put Them In Forum Posts Here's Putting Images in Posts
Tutorial: Instances: Using Ultrascatter (by RGcincy) New Jan 2017
Iray Canvases- How To Do Lighting New Jan 2017
Tutorial: Iray Light Manager Pro Step by step screenshots
Tutorial: Iray For Beginners- Do A Scene Step By Step The Wanna Render? Iray tutorial walks you through Iray lighting for total newbies- including Crush Blacks, Burn Highlights, how the sliders work together and why in Tone Mapping, and Environment Intensity.
Tutorial: Iray Lighting- A Night Lantern Doing a night time lantern with Emissive Lighting.
Tutorial: Iray- Portrait Light Setup With Point Lights Portrait Lights: 3 Point Lights and a Spotlight- Settings Provided
Tutorial: Iray Skydome Super Pak The Explanation on how to use it.
Tutorial: Maps for Iray and 3DL / Albedo Explanation Texture Maps: (Saba Taru) ALBEDO explanation, and where to put the maps for Iray and 3DL
Tutorial: Metadata- How To Make It Video Here (Slosh) and Here (3D Almanc) New January 2017
Tutorial: Shaders- Mec4D's PBR Shaders Mec4D's PBR shaders: How to use
Tutorial: Teeth, Getting Realistic Shapes Getting realistic teeth shapes was here and slight tweaks here.
Tutorial: Texturing Texturing With DestinysGarden is a good thread- let a pro show you how!
Tutorial: UltraScatter Advanced Instancing UltraScatter Advanced Instancing: RGcincy's handy notes, how-to.
Tutorial: Windows, Making Them From Planes And Cubes Realistically Making Windows using planes and cubes, with glass panes and images!
Fun / Interesting Threads
Photoshop Playtime! Where we showed you some really neat plug-ins to get cartoon, oil, watercolor effects.
Scripts: A one click solution to put things on your ground plane, under things, etc
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Comments
Characters- Here's renders from this thread. ALWAYS IN PROGRESS Thtrough page 78
Thanks to many contributors, we have a good variety of character renders.
Here are the posts showing the renders, a (2) means to check for two posts in a row. Enough of the product title is given for you to recognize it, I put which figure it is for in ( ) Also, look for the "as child" and take a peek at how the Growing Up product changes some of these to adorable kids!
I have the save and share and the skin builder pro. Still working out how to save and share but if anyone gets it let me know. You get six premade skins with it. Edited to add thanks for the heads up on the stacking discount I ran over and grabbed some really really good deals on the Gen 2 stuff. Kind of excited about the wet skin and the vascularity stuff. And I got a lot of the people of the world morphs which I can't wait to try out in the randomizer.
Sonja, love to see what you come up with in the People of the World + randomizer. You know, I haven't had time to even try the randomizer by itself yet! I did get the Skin Builder Pro and the Save and Share but it might be a couple days before I can tackle it. And yep, got the Wet Skin stuff too. Spent too much money but it was 90% off so my priorities shifted to getting those deals. Going to feature the characters and stuff to show my appreciation for the sale. Glad you read about the glitches in time.
Oh wow, Ansiko copied that Newsstand perfectly. If you haven't looked at the thumbnails, read that last one that shows the original and the story. Very cool!
Rating: Recommend! One of the most realistic beach waters, many opportunities for camera angles, good vegetation. Trees are separate props so you can add more. Be sure and EMBED feet and bodies in the sand- not on top of it!
TIP: Your characters will load in the middle of the island. Use these coordinates (X/Y/Z translation and Y rotation in parameters to scoot your bathing beauties and hunky dudes on down to the beach where there's excellent vegetation for your scenes!
-2986 / 13.70 / -1049 for translation and Y rotation -131 to face out to the ocean. Tweak from there.
DA Palm Island
I used the same two characters from my temple (Ragnar and Fukiko) and am having to play with the skin, for some reason they are going very tan. If I get a chance I'll tweak them and post a closeup. Will add more island shots later tonight or tomorrow in this post. The island is quite fun, I am biased because Pensacola has of course gorgeous white sand on our beaches, so I prefer white sand. I also like that the island has open areas so you're not going through jungle brush, you can add that in with the individual props. A lovely set- well done!
Coming up: Important to note: if you haven't visited a beach lately, it might not stick in your mind that sand is SOFT and feet do not walk on top of it unless there's been rain to pack it down or it's not deep sand. With the impressions in this sand, it's wind blown and deep enough that you need (IMO) to bury the toes/bottom of feet in it. So consider putting the foot INTO the sand. In the render below, look at Ragnar's back foot and his knee. Note her booty is IN the sand, not on top of it. Another thing- that is WATER his foot is in- the waves are receding or advancing and leaving a thin coating in the sand. If you look behind them, you'll see patches of wet and dry sand. The overhead shot shows it quite well.
Both characters were rendering quite red, so I adjusted the skin for the closeup. It's sunset and they're tanned so this was a good start. TIP: change your Emission color from dark black to lighten the tone and the Translucency color from the pink/med mauve/whatever red to a light pink or light blue or white. That was using Sun-Sky. I didn't mess with Glossy/Specular as I wanted to start with the "base" skin. I'll be playing with some of the sheen/water products.
LOVE these! I picked up Palm Island and will have to try and make time to use it.
I wanted to show my goblin (I'm ridiculously happy with him lol) but he was done with the randomizer. I will be using the skin builder on him as soon as I get a chance. I am having to go through my entire content library, apparently, DS has decided that I didn't really install all of my content via DIM and would like me to re install it using connect. I am NOT happy. This is stuff I purchased before 4.9 even came out. Its totally disappeared from my content library and DIM seems to think its still installed. The only way for me to install it again is to use connect because dim swears its installed. Terribly time consuming but I am becoming VERY familiar with my content library.
Sonja, is there a particular reason you're using 4.9? Do you have 4.8 installed, and if so, is the content showing there? Someone over in Commons was having the same issue, was that you?
I'm biased, I'm a 4.8'er and staying that way. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's easy to tweak skins to get rid of the ruddy if you want to, and there's so many products to assist with that, I don't feel the need to change to 4.9. Particularly after it obliterated my custom Categories after two weeks. Each beta run gets better (they say) but it shouldn't have been released until these new beta improvements were there to begin with. What was the rush?
The goblin did turn out very well!
Actually, 4.8 is broken if you use Iray. 4.9 fixes an Iray bug that caused some materials to crash Daz Studio. It also has Iray improvements to make skin look better.
I have 4.9 on my PC and 4.8 on my laptop lol. And yes that was me over in the commons. I think we finally got it sorted. I am a big gamer so I am pretty used to working around bugs. I kept 4.8 on my laptop just in case and also have a back up of what was on my PC before I switched. Just in case. I am not unhappy with 4.9 but it will take me the rest of the weekend I think to sort everything out and get the meta date re imported so its workign correctly
While I'm playing with DOF I'm going to show you the same image with the tweaks. If you have difficulty with DOF or want a quick setup, you can try this no matter what your scene is because...
TIP: Get out of the habit of always moving characters, and into the habit of also moving sets. If you have a character is located at a certain coordinate and your camera DOF settings are setup around him/her, simply MOVE THE SET and you're ready to go.
I gave you the character coordinates but I moved her a tad, so if your character is located at these coordinates, these two sets of DOF settings will give you these results. Try it!
Character Location: (xyz translation) -2975 / -95.71 / -1206 (xyz rotation, if you want your character facing the same way to get these results) 0 / -131.28 / 0
First Render:
Frame Width (36), Focal Length (65.00), Focal Distance (356.15), F Stop (22)
Second Render: More of the foreground will be out of focus (compare her feet to prior render) and background more blurred.
Frame Width (36), Focal Length (66.30), Focal Distance (348.29), F Stop (16.79)
To me, broken implies it doesn't work, but yet many people have been very pleased with it for the past year. Personally, I've never had a crash using Iray, and that's on my old laptop and not this new computer. Perhaps I've just been lucky! I know people tweak the skin a lot, as I've read some of the skin thread but it got to be so many pages I quit. I don't recall reading about certain materials crashing, do you remember which ones? (You don't need to look it up if you don't have it handy. You're more on the ball with changes in the technology than I am.)
I know one nice thing they fixed in 4.9 was to make the skin more blue and less ruddy muddy. Do you know off hand what else they improved? Because otherwise, that's not that hard to fix. Is there a specific post on the skin tweaks? Some of this "improvement" stuff may not even be that noticeable. The red skin, that's definitely an issue. My basic feeling is that 4.9's "improvements" for Iray isn't worth the bugs with destroying custom categories after WEEKS of working right. I'd never trust it. I know it ruined yours three times. Did the recent betas fix that for you?
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/69709/daz-studio-4-9-daz-original-figure-skin-material-optimization
I'm running a comparison render now, and it looks like the 4.9 skin has a more creamy complexion, better translucency (?) The hair strands are duller so far as highlights. It's still coming in. I do see a difference though although I'm thinking it's handling the wet body product differently.
I haven't had any more database corruptions since I reset the database and started over with 4.9. It was the converted database that just wouldn't work for me.
I don't know exactly which material was causing the crashing. I know it crashed if you used the GPU to render. When West Park Treatment Room Iray came out, it crashed for me.
You can read about all the DS 4.9 changes in the change log.
Ah, I haven't tried that one. I skimmed the change log when it first came out, I'll go back and take a look. Thanks! (And thanks fixmypcmike.)
The renders I did, had the Wet Body droplet (Water Beads, Strong) applied, and I'm still figuring out how to get them to show up well. But in 4.8, they showed up some, and in 4.9, not too much, the skin went smoother. So what seems like "noise" in the 4.8 is actually the renderer catching the droplets in the geometry shell that have been applied, whereas 4.9 didn't do as well. The product was made before 4.9 I assume. Regarding the hues, I don't see a difference. Valerie is a Genesis 2 out of the box, no Uber applied. Edit: I double checked everything, the camera settings are the same, and the proportions look different in the face and arm to me.
Yeah, on the change log, any useful information about skins is buried amid a ton of technical junk for Connect and Interactive Lessons. The only line I saw was:
Fixed an issue in Iray Uber shader with the application of Diffuse Strength to images
But in the other thread, it rang a bell- the SKINS are different, not the Iray setup. But taking what they said to change the blue in 4.9 to more yellow (below) am I correct that the opposite would be true for 4.8, just change that Translucency Weight (active) to blue? Makes sense. What bothers me more is that using the same camera settings, I am getting different looks in 4.8 and 4.9. (Same .duf.)
Fixes made to the implementation of Sub Surface Scattering (SSS) in the NVIDIA Iray renderer affect materials which have "Translucency Weight" active—not set to 0. This manifests in skin tones appearing more blue than they do in 4.8. A quick adjustment that can be made during the BETA phase is to adjust the "SSS Reflectance Tint" from a light blue to a light yellow—R: 1.00, G: 0.88, B: 0.67. Adjust this value to your liking.
I am using 4.9 release (not beta) on my new system (and 4.8 on my laptop still) yesterday I had my first crash while using V3D's new G3 Iray converter and PD's Iray shaders but I was messing around for quite awhile before it crashed so I am not sure what exactly caused it. So far I like most things about 4.9 with the exception of the whole smart content...I am going back to DIM for installing and content library until the whole metadata thing gets straightened out! If this feature was as they say supposed to make it easier for new users to install and find their products and I was a new user I would have quit and moved on to something else already! If the new products can't be released with proper metadata how will they ever get all the older products up to date?
Back to your renders...love the beach scene Novica. I am one of those guilty of moving the person in my scene instead of the set and then wondering why I have such a hard time loading other products around the character, until I watched Sickleyields new tutorial and she showed that option, I don't know why it never occured to me before..lol Definitely a great tip for new users (and old
)
I also have the Skin builder Pro and Save and Share, tried them on my laptop when I first got them but jit was too slow, I will have to get them installed and try them out .
LOL, SereneNight and I discussed that back on a really early thread (I think it was Two back in August 2013.) I don't know if you remember when I tested all those lights at World Center? There were about twenty + posts, and we said it made sense to leave the characters where your known lighting is and move the set instead. There's a lot of stuff buried in the threads, I don't remember a lot of it either! And am also guilty of moving folks instead of sets.
Making good on my promise to showcase items bought in the 90% off sale that Daz_Steve so generously put back on the site. Starting with Nabila. (got her for under $3)
Rating: Recommend Nabila morphs, Be Pacific swimsuit (TEN materials!), and Elite Ponytail Hair- however it needs bangs morphs IMO. Very limited with what you can do with the bangs which are swept up onto the forehead/crown.
Try Nabila for a unique face- she has an interesting nose. I tweaked the slope of it and the nose tip slightly (and the lips.) There are FOUR HEADS to choose from. The first render is Gingersnap's skin with Nabila tweaked morphs, the second one uses her skin with a slightly different mouth. you can play with the skin materials to lighten or darken, this is out of the box.
The Nabila morph will provide an interesting nose on other characters. I picked her up during the 90% off and got her for under $3. You'll find her under FWPixAnson in Content Library under the G2F characters.
The Elite Ponytail Hair did not have bangs controls, only Hair Forehead Height. Any of the wind morphs that blew the bangs, blew the entire hair. It appears there are 10 morphs for the ponytail, but I just couldn't find any for bangs. I broke it down in scene and also did Parameter>Actor>Pose. If anyone finds bangs, I will change the review.
The Be Pacific Swimsuit is a lot of fun with many material options. TEN! Highly recommend for a family friendly one piece swimsuit! It loaded correctly, no tweaks needed. You can even raise the neckline if you want to, which is nice. (I didn't.)
HUGE render (1200 pixels tall) CLICK TO ENLARGE, click again.
Nabila morphs were put on Gingersnap's materials. The lips are extremely shiny. Here's the fix if you want a bit more matte.
For the gooey lips, to reduce the shine on these, the two numbers represent the original setting and the new one. You can also change colors; I stuck to the original and only focused on the shine.
Bump Noise Strength 0 / 4.8 (more bumps, less shine) Specular Glossiness 93 / 78.3 Specular Noise Density 70 / 73.70 (do that one in small increments)
Specular 2 Glossiness 65 / 61.8 Velvet Roughness 20 / 21.5
The background is one of the five free ones SereneNight posted for us.
LIGHTING: Using Malibu Overlook from HDR Labs.
I have some questions. Looking at these settings: Dome Only, Infinite Sphere, Draw Dome Off, Environment Intensity 1.53, Environment Map 1.10, Dome Y Orientation 110
1. If I have Dome Only, that means Scene isn't active and Scene is spotlights, distant lights, etc, correct?
2. So if I have Dome Only, and Draw Dome Off, it's still lighting the scene but the image on the dome doesn't show up?
3. What is the difference in Environment Intensity (I assume how strong the light is?) vs Environment Map increases? (Does that make the image itself brighter?
4. If I have Dome Off, does Dome Orientation Y still make a difference so far as the program reading the map and doing the light?
Well on the crashes because of Iray materials that have been fixed in 4.9, the metallicity slider would cause crashes if used on items with a texture map in the base color. Usually had to be more than a certain number of materials, but I ran into it quite a bit.
So 4.9 is a welcome relief for you!
Watch this thread for the sales glitches fixes. Daz Steve is trying to make amends.
I've been meaning to post this for a few days but it's been a busier than normal week. I wanted to show off a new set of Iray shaders I bought: Ceramics for Iray. I've always admired how glazed ceramics look and the promos for the product caught my eye. The render below uses a number of the shaders on some Shape Magic vases I've designed. There's a mix of high shine, crackle, and satin glazes, Raku, metallic luster and unglazed. The set also comes with additional shaders to add surface detail - I still have to give those a try. A beautiful set of shaders I highly recommend.
Click on the image to see it full size.
Rich you seriously need to sell those vases. They're as good as any in the store. Those shaders are nice!
I'm busy testing skins with a certain lightset. I want to see who goes well together with only minimum tweaking required, who looks good together with a bit of variance but not washed out, etc. TIP: If you want to do this, pick one you really like, then only move the shutter value and jot down what the exposure value and shutter speed were when you get the skin to the brightness of the first one, or slightly darker if it's not caucasian. I'm doing my V4s that I put on G2F, and still have hundreds of skins to do so far as V4 and Genesis. Don't need anymore new characters!
Those look great!
I've thought of it but have always held back from the lack of textures/shaders to include. Seems most props (even Everyday Morphing Primitives) include them, although with the EMP only has a few basic shaders and you have to add them manually.
For those who liked Mec4d PBS Shaders vol.1 for Iray, a new volume is coming soon. Here's some St. Patric's Day free shader's (available for download today only) and a contest to win the new set.
Thanks for letting us know Rich!
SIGH, Pensacola has ping pong sized hail coming in and 60mph winds. What a season so far! I called the ranch to be sure she had the tractors and trucks all under shelter. The horses are all stalled at night so no worries there. Can hardly wait until Spring REALLY gets going. Whacky weather, it's been 78 with lows of 65, but Sunday night low is 39! You folks up the East Coast going to get some snow too. Wow!
Be aware, this is encrypted only. (EJ Graciana)