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I always forget some folks do not realize DAZ has been adding to the online documentation. You might find answers here: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/start
Has anyone looked at the book FIGURES, CHARACTERS, AND AVATARS: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO USING DAZ STUDIO TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL ART. by Les Pardew? It's one of perhaps the only two in depth books on Daz3d, but they both appear pretty basic and don't seem to get real specific about lighing, or render setting and what they do. It's offered on Amazon, but there are absolutely no reviews and the book's second ed. was released in 2012.
Perhaps the DreamLight tutorials are the way to go, as they seem to have tuts specifically geared toward Iray.
Also someone mentioned some tuts done by Ironman13 in conjunction with another PA; where can those tuts be found?
Especially if it was raining on that day; then you're really screwed!
I actually have a copy of that book (first edition, the one that came with a DVD, which included a copy of DAZ Studio 2.3, and a butt-load of content -- V4, M4, Aiko 4, Hiro 4, clothing, props, hair -- veritable treasure-trove of assets! The DVD was dropped in the second edition).
I found it to be, well..., considerably less than what I was looking for, and needed at the time, to wit: an entry- to mid-level technical reference on the actual workings of DAZ Studio. This was more of an 'artist's guide' than the document produced by DAZ, that they actually called an 'artist's guide'.
As for 'technical references', i.e., something that actually explains what the controls do and what the parameter values actually mean, well, such documents are still pretty thin on the ground.
Thanks for this, I found it fascinating. Especially this part: " A lot of it is just your brain making stuff up and stitching together a composite image from the information your eye is giving it." I'm also fascinated with quantum physics and parts of your explanation kind of fit right into that. Reality (not the software, the real thing LOL) is just a bunch of vibrating subatomic particles, waves, frequencies, or "quantum soup" that our brain assimilates so it appears to us to be solid matter and our eyes and brain "fill in" a lot of it to make sense of the world. When you see an Iray render in its process, it's almost the same thing, a lot of tiny pixels slowly converging to create an image that appears finished, but the render never really finishes, we just end it when it appears "done" in our eyes (or when it times out if you have it set that way.) And the irony is, I actually understand many aspects of quantum physics better than I understand Daz Studio LOL! I actually do have some geek in me...
In the meantime I purchased two of Colm's lighting products mostly because I loved his free tutorials. He explained things even about Daz's UI I didn't know, like the live AUX window. I haven't had the chance to try his products yet, but am looking forward to it. In general I like to experiment with things to see what they do, but I just find DS too unintuitive. The only reason I really started with DS recently was because although I found Poser was perfect for my fantasy/sci-fi pin-ups that I later made more stylized and arty in Photoshop, Iray renders have amazing photorealism for scenes, environments and sets and even G3 if done correctly, which I have yet to see reproduced in Poser and that was something lacking from my toolbox if needed. Plus I was getting in a rut with Poser/V4 and wanted to try out G3 and the other Genesis generations.
As everyone seems to agree, I would love a manual and as a visual person, I would love visual pop ups for everything in the UI. Although Colm's live NVidea AUX camera concept could definitely make things a lot easier for me. Also I found on the Internet a way to make a slider for your own created characters, but now I lost it, I have to google to try to find it again. I think things like that should be part of the manual, basically, everything, all the bells and whistles, should be explained in detail in clear English with screenshots. It's not that I want it dumbed down, I just want it clearly explained in non-scientific English with images. If Daz is the only one with this proprietary knowledge, it seems they are the only ones qualified to do this. Forget the complaints I'm seeing in the forums about the lack of male teens, we need a MANUAL! That WOULD sell! Even if it's just a PDF that could be updated with each version. If Daz created a comprehensive manual I bet it would be their best selling product ever! If they are worried about piracy and theft, they could sell it through Amazon on Kindle and it would be protected like all Amazon Kindle books. Any Daz mods reading this? :) :) :)
...for me it was all the technical stuff regarding skin in Iray that put me off. I finally gave up on the Fiddling With Iray Skin Settings thread as it was getting so technical, I felt a lot of what was being discussed was "whooshing" high over my head. I pretty much stick to the skin and eye parameters Mec4D posted months ago and even saved them as a textfile (though they are now pretty useless beause of the Iray update in 4.9 which is part of why I still am working in 4.8).
I bet not. Too many people here would complain that it should have been included with the (free) product.
Also, nobody picks up Poser and immediately creates great renders. Being an experienced Poser user doesn't particularly convey advantage to Studio / Iray.
Interesting thread. My experience with Iray has been exactly the opposite of many here. I find lighting and shaders in Iray the be logical, intuitive, and very simple (especially when compared to Poser lighting which I have always struggled with). When I've run across a term I don't understand, a quick google search has always worked to get the required info.
I guess it's just a classic example of "one size doesn't fit everyone". 3delight is an outstanding render engine, but to me it is quite a bit more complicated than Iray.
This is true in pretty much all vocations.
Well, it's hard to learn something if there's no documentation... In order to create a slider for my own character, I had to google and found someone who posted for free on the internet how to do it. Colm has a lot of great stuff in his videos that should have been documented. You can play around with lighting and Iray shaders for hours and still not get the results you want. There are a ton of things under save and other menus and although it can be a weird game to just keep trying things to see what happens, it would be so much better to spend that time actually creating art and at least experimenting with settings that make sense rather than random ones. I think a manual would sell and people would be thrilled to pay for it as long as it had everything, all the bells and whistles and hidden aspects of DS.
Well you can keep saying what we have been saying since DS went free(documentation sucks), or you can just adapt to the situation at this point. I'm not saying the complaints are without merrit, but we have been saying it a very long time and we've heard all their responses and seen the path they are going to take. Documentation is not free for them to produce, and selling content is what drives anything they do. Incluiding improvements to DS itself.
While it doesn't hurt to remind them many of us are not fond of thier lack of documentation, it's not worth spending a ton of time fussing about either as it has proven to not really change anything. So leverage what you can find, including the forums (people here are often very willing to help) and push forward.
I get having ideals but sometimes reality sets in and you realise what you are working with.
As long as you are willing do to what you have, which is research and not wait around for someone else you should be fine.
to an extent, this is all true even when you have full control over the tool. You still spend time tweaking and refining. Part of creating art is this experimentation regardless of medium or the tools you use. There will always be time devoted to this area. So keep that in mind.
...shaders for props and scenery are not so much an issue. Lighting, well I still have some issues getting the results I expect when using photometric spotlights and point lights. I find I have to crank them up to extremely "ludicrous" values compared to what I needed in 3DL so I usually just resort to mesh lights using the emissive shader. The downside is emissive lights take longer to render (at least in CPU mode) seemingly exponentially so if you have a number of them in the scene.
I was once pressured by a publisher to include the exact lighting and camera setup with my scenes that I used to create the promo renders. At that point I threw up my hands and asked, "Why don't I just sell them the render, then?"
A huge part, as mentioned in this thread, is playing around with things like light direction, intensity, and camera exposuse/film speed in order to create an interesting, dynamic image, from an artistic standpoint.
I see a a couple folks here wondering about things like light strength or intensity. I would recommend either doing an online search, or going to your local hardware/department store and perusing their electrical and lighting aisles. Take a notebook and a pencil along with you. Light bulbs have all the same information on their package as you need to create real-world analogues in Studio. You'll find ratings for things like lumens or candlepower, for instance, right on the packaging. Look at all kinds of different bulbs, from standard residential lighting to industrial stuff, to get an idea of what kind of range there is in terms of what exists in the real world. You can also look at things like stage lighting to gain an appreciation and a quantification of how bright those lights are.
Remember, also, that "watts" isn't a measurment of a light bulb's brightness. It is a measurement of how much energy it uses. For 100 years, the Edison incandescent bulb was the standard, so you could judge fairly well how bright a light would be by the amount of power it consumed, but these days that's not the case. A 12 watt CFL bulb will put out as much light energy as a 60 watt incandescent, for instance.
When trying to re-create real life artificial light, there are 2 things you need to know: the brightness and the color temperature. Brightness, as I mentioned, is expressed in terms like lumens or candlepower. Color temperature is expressed as, for example, 5400k. Where this comes from, is back in ye olde days, a fellow by the name of Kelvin decided he would heat up an iron ingot and record what color it glowed at each temperature. Modern light bulbs will say things on the package like "Soft warm, 60 watt equivalent" but on the back of the box, will give you the Kelvin color temperature and the lumens. This information plugs directly into the photometric lights in Daz Studio to perfectly recreate that light.
People who have backgrounds in photography and film, or have worked with other 3d programs know this, but a lot of Daz users really are hobbyists, and may not have a clue about any of it, which is why documentation is important. To give an example it's rather like a kid getting into model rocketry (they still have that, don't they), and then being told in order to send up your first rocket you need to study these electrical books over here on how to wire up your ignition controls, and then you need to search out these books on aerodynamics so you can place you tail fins accurately and . . . you get the picture. A simple book on model rocketry puts everything you need to know in one place, and once you know the basics you can experiment to your hearts contents.
Another example is like being given a video game with no instruction manual (or an inadequate one). Sure you may figure out some basic controls, but there's going to be a lot of stuff you'll never discover because it never would have occured to you it was there, or even where to look for it, and the person who is familiar with the game will always be able to kick your ass.
Simply saying turn a dial and see what it does, "experiment" may be fun for some people, but that's not how tools generally work. It's also why in the art world many people make a fairly good living writing books and teaching techniques, tips and tricks, as well as the basics to people who don't have a clue how to start.
I know I've said this before, but sometimes the best teaching tools are good, sound products. Especially when it comes to lighting. Google is great, for specific references and charts, but as far as getting an overall grasp of IRay, I've learned more from watching settings change when I changed product options than anything else. There's so much to learn -- one could never learn it all. So I try to get a general idea of how something works, then learn only as much detail as I need to. Too much detail, and I get lost. Especially if it's disorganized detail. My brain can't make sense of a lot of facts, without some kind of glue to hold them together.
Daz do do that they supply ready to render scenes, with I believe step by step set up instructions.
If you hover over the icons you get a description of what they do in the bottom left corner of the screen.
Lighting in my experience comes from practice and trial and error, it always takes me several attempts before I settle on the lighting for scene. To me Lumens control the strength of a light and the temperature can alter the colour/warmth of the light I tend to go frrom there.
One of theproblems with documentation is that by the time its published it could already be out of date.
When teaching 3d modeling and rendering, I always tried to abstract every lesson down to as few basic fundamental tasks as possible, for this very reason. If you slam someone with a bunch of dense technical jargon, you're going to blow a circuit breaker. It still happens to me when reading or watching advanced tutorials, and I've been at this for over 10 years. I also try to tie things into regular, everyday things that a layman could understand, even if the analogy is not technically 100% correct. Better to give someone a basic grasp of something, in a way they can relate to, and then slowly start filling in the technical information at the appropriate speed.
For those who are frustrated with learning Iray, if its something you want to learn, you must stick with it. I find sports analogies tended to work well. Ask yourself if a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback woke up one morning when he was 23 years old or so, with the sudden ability to throw a football 90mph, 20 yards downfield into a 3 foot diameter basket, while running full speed to his right as the basket was moving to his left. The answer, of course, is no. He started throwing 1000 footballs a day, every day, from the age of 5.
It can take years of using a physically based renderer like Iray before you start getting good looking renders. You can help yourself by reading some basic lighting and photography stuff, but there is no substitute for practice and artistic instinct. Watch a lot of movies, especially those nominated for cinematography at the Oscars. Forget the plot of the movie and the dialog. Watch the way shots are composed and lit. Where are things placed within the frame? Where do the shadows fall? Where are there strong highlights on the composition elements? Is there a lot of contrast in the lighting and shadow? Does the shot look very shallow or very deep (foreground, midground, background)? Pause the movie when you see something visually interesting, and study the frame. What about it do you like? Where is your eye drawn? What is visually appealing about it?
The more of these things you do, the more you dissect and attempt to understand, then the more you will be aware of when staging your 3d scenes. Once you know what you want to do, it becomes much easier to learn how to do it. Try to mimic some of your favorite shots from movies. Study photography in magazines like National Geographic and ask the same questions. Try to ape your favorite shots in 3d. Necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention (and also Fank Zappa's band). When you know what you want to do, you'll figure what you need to do, and from that you'll learn how to do it.
Just don't be depressed when you can't get it to come out just right, or if you can't get anything to work at all just by farting around aimlessly with the software. Know exactly what shot you want to get, and you'll be able to learn how to get it!
My guess would be, not many. I certainly wouldn't.
I would be willing to pay $29.99, that seems like a reasonable price. Maybe even more. And if they sold it on Amazon, it would prevent theft and new potential customers might discover Daz accidentally through Amazon's search system...
My issues aren't just with lights, it's all the hidden things in the menus. I know I'm only using using like 10% of what Daz is capable of and I can't use things if I don't know they exist.
Unfortunately, not knowing what you don't know is a very frustrating aspect of the whole business. I always told students to focus on using what they do know, and learn to do those things well, and that over time they'd come across things they want to do but don't know how, at which point you learn and add those techniques to your repertoire.
...like a Daz for Dummies book. Yeah, I could get into that. Much better than dealing with having to spend a lot of time watching a slew of videos.
Well, I'm sorry, but that just seems silly to me. If I have software, I want to know EVERYTHING it's capable of. I don't want to have to guess or imagine what it MIGHT do. There are techniques that exist that I've discovered through Colm that can drastically simplify things. Why should I have to do things the hard way or struggle through when there are simple solutions that exist right in the software but I don't know exist because they are not documented? Software is not meant to be a guessing game but a tool to create/do what you need in the simplest way possible. You should save time with software, not waste it, trying to figure it out or doing things a complicated long way just because you didn't know a simpler way existed.... And if I knew everything it was capable of, it would expand what I could do creatively instead of being stuck in a small box, knowing only its simplest uses or being frustrated because I know it's capable of doing things but I can't find documentation on how to do it... Some of us are beyond "students," and make a living or at least try to with our art, and want to use the software as a means to create our art (that maybe we were doing perfectly well with Poser and Photoshop) and just wanted to expand our toolbox but finding it difficult because of the lack of proper documentation. And the documentation should be artist friendly, not for scientists or students planning a career at Pixar.
...I was pretty darn good at working with Daz before 4.x SInce then, the additions of so many new features have made it somewhat daunting, even for a veteran like myself who has used it since ver 1.5. One of the new features I latched onto quick (and use regularly) is the Geometry Editor, a real useful tool when "meshbashing". On the other hand, still unable to find a control to decrease LOD, the only way I know is taking all the individual textures into a 2D programme changing their resolution and resaving them under a different name, which in a big scene becomes very tedious.
What I do know well with regards to this discussion? 3DL lighting and 3DL SSS, which unfortunately, doesn't translate very well to Iray.
So this is funny, someone is selling a tutorial on Renderosity about how to save a prop in Daz Studio for redistribution and sales. Daz's direct competition is making money off tutorials for its own software because they won't do it. Please Daz do a comprehensive detailed manual of EVERY aspect of Daz Studio with screenshots in non-overly scientific English and sell it on Amazon Kindle! I know it will sell and probably bring in new customers! :)
"The tutorial is of Intermediate level and is aimed at anyone wanting to set up props in Daz Studio for Redistribution, either as a Freebie or a paid product.
The tutorial will guide you in correctly setting up the props, saving them in the correct method for distribution, adding metadata and correct packaging.
This tutorial will give you insider tips that will see your products pass through review or Q&A much easier.
Starting at the point where Geometry and Texture maps are complete and ready for import into Daz Studio. I will be using a Viking Style Axe as an example which is included in the tutorial resource folder in this package.
Also included as part of this package is an empty content runtime folder to help you in packaging your products and freebies
The subjects covered in this tutorial are:
Folder Structure - Overview of optimal folder structure in Daz Studio products
1.0 Material zone setup - covers correctly naming your surfaces in your Geometry and how to fix incorrectly named surfaces. (Skip this if all your surfaces are correctly named)
2.0 Geometry Resizing and Positioning - covers scaling and positioning your geometry and reseting the values to 0 (Skip this if your geometry is positioned and sized correctly)
3.0 Material Preset Setup - covers creating and saving a material preset for use with your prop
4.0 Saving your Prop - covers correctly saving your prop for distribution. Including parented hand props.
5.0 Adding metadata - covers adding metadata smart content to your prop
6.0 Packaging for distribution - covers packaging of your final product.
Colelctive3d's explanation or lighting/exposure is another reason I prefer reality/luxrender for rendering, you can adjust the camera exposure (iso/f-stop/shutter speed) and all your individual light intensities during the render. And film settings.
Alicia, have you looked at the links here yet? http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/start