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About the having to use units in millions for lighting thing, I don't understand why we can't have the intensity scale secondary thing back. That way you can still have the insane numbers if you like them, but human beings can simply say magnify this light x 10 or whatever.
The lack of a real Studio manual is one of the big reasons I only ever use it for the most basic of purposes and do most things in other programs.
I've been using PS for years too and I only recently realised just how much 3D it does these days o.o
It's all about the units used...there are several things that need to be kept in mind. Translating between m2 and cm2 is a factor of 10,000. So something that looks absolutely ridiculous in one unit is actually sane, normal, correct in another.
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Right but most of the basic Iray lights don't give you the option to change to cm2 that I've seen? I've seen the option to switch on something (I forget where exactly) but on basic things like spotlights etc. I only see the standard lumens.
Yes, but it just brushes through things at a very surface level, no screen shots and it leaves a LOT out. Under saving and exporting, it only mentions saving weight mapped figures to Poser 9, not all the many things under the save menu! Each sections describes in two or three sentences what should be a whole chapter of about 20 or more pages with screenshots! Ideally I would like to see screenshots of every possible action/menu, how checking/unchecking each thing affects other things, how each slider affects things with screenshots of renders showing results, what everything in the menus do and how to use them. A really great manual could be made and I'd be willing to pay quite a bit for it since I've already invested in a lot of DS only content and it seems like it has some really cool new abilities to do so many things and I wish I knew exactly what they were and how to use them!
Unfortunately...that's true. It's a mix of units...which is definitely not helping matters. If everything were uniform AND units clearly stated/able to be changed a lot of the 'this is ridiculous' when talking about lighting would vanish.
Right I'm fine with all the real world measurements and things (and if you don't know them they're good to learn about even on a basic level) but there's no point having a slider for a setting when you can only use insane settings that aren't particularly easy to slide to, which was the only real point of my original scaling option suggestion. Adding the cm2 setting to all the basic lights would achieve the same thing (though I guess it might still be harder for some to understand.)
Alicia, from your description you want a bible then. The closest thing we have to a manual is the link you looked at. You want a much more in depth approach that I don't even think I've seen for Autodesk products including the Autodesk bibles written by tech writers (very thick volumes if you've never seen them). It's commendable, but I doubt we will ever see anything like that from DAZ. They would have to hire a tech writer or two and DAZ has had bad experiences with them over the years from what they have posted in the forums before. They pretty much swore them off a while back. There was one person they had not too long ago who was doing a good job and looked like she might finally be the one after all their bad experiences with others (unfinished/non-delivered work a few times), but she could not relocate to Utah to work at DAZ HQ. They then went to the developers and others to add to that online resource in their rare spare time and that's where we are now.
You are better off experimenting, and asking your questions here. Usually a few folks will respond quickly or within a day or so if anyone knows the answer.
Fair enough...
And for those that don't know...you can type the values in directly (usually clicking/double clicking directly on the value you want to change will allow you to type it in).
Folks... There are whole University DEGREE PROGRAMS on this stuff. I know this because my daughter is finishing up her Bachelor's Degree in Computer Graphics. This stuff isn't simple. It will take work, research, work, experimentation, work, asking experts, and did I mention work? There isn't a "make art" button for this reason. DS does a very good job of hiding some of the more complicated things, but there are things that just take learning. Sometimes, learning is hard, but rarely unrewarding.
Kendall
Still, I'm assuming your daughter had textbooks, in addition to professors who systematically took her from a newbie to 100 over several semesters. The people asking for documentation aren't asking for a genie in a bottle. They want documentation so they CAN put in the work and not waste their time. I went to film school back in the 80's right before digital was becoming a thing. Back then if you really wanted to learn filmmaking you "had" to go to film school because there weren't a lot of books on the subject, experimenting would have wasted a lot of time and money without someone to show you the ropes. Now, with all the books and tutorials availible I could have taught myself the stuff I went to college for.
I taught myself lightwave and 3ds Max only because there were books on those programs aimed at whatever level I was at at that time.** If those books hadn't existed I daresay I wouldn't be doing anything with those programs worthwhile after years of fiddling around. The lack of proper documentation for Daz is keeping many people at an amateur level in their creative endeavors when they could be progressing well beyond that. Having people use your software at a professional level is perhaps the best free marketing a company like Daz could hope for, and they are completely neglecting it.
** and based on what I've seen people say about the amount of items they own, I'm sure many people have spent more on Daz peripheries, than I spent on Lightwave, Max, and the multitude of textbooks I bought to learn them, and those are considered "professional" software packages, so I don't think you can assume that people wouldn't pay for such a resource. If you've already spent hundreds on a hobby, wouldn't you shell out $40 to $60 for a resource that helped you get the most out of it?
I'd love to know why some scenes end up huge. I have this one scene that's 62 MB. I have... no clue why.
There's two figures, one prop, and a room. And... boom.
Meanwhile, I have other scenes that look as complicated or more complicated, and come in at 300 kb.
I think a lot of that additional data size comes from 'auto-generated' geometry and such. When you import, fit-to, etc., a lot of the conversion data gets saved in the auto-generated data directory.....and in order to re-load the scene, you have to reload ALL that auto-generated stuff. Morphs included. So when you auto-fit some Gen2 stuff to Gen3, a bunch of morphs have to be generated. Iray uber settings converted from 3DL? Probably saved as well. Probably bunches of stuff. It really depends on how much 'intermediate' data is being used by the scene.
You present a very linear way of thinking about the program and its tools, that is quite common I find. I consider this way of thinking to be Goal Oriented, which for many art disciplines is a no-no. Expectaions of immediate results from direct inputs without any trial and error is in my opinion not helpful when it comes to learning technical things.
My opinion is that CG art is not for all types of artists. Because with CG the "art" is coupled with the underlying "technology." If all one cares about are the finished artistic results, then CG simply isnt for them. To truly be at home with CG, one needs to be driven by the desire for technical knowledge as much as anything else. And technical knowledge doesnt come from producing "finished" artowtrk, it comes from doing technical studies for no other reason than to see what is possible. Not becuase you have a specific end goal in mind and are struggling to make the application produce the results you want.
Painting with brushes is simpler from a technical standpoint because brushes are a simpler technology than pixels.
Where we both agree is that in life there are difficult things sometimes, and that there is no benefit in making those difficult things even more difficult than they need to be. Documentation is essential, no way around that. But like life itself, the documentation is sketchy at best. So we often flap around blindly, and luck plays a significant role in who succeeds and who fails. No one wants to rely on luck when they have commissions due for submission. Professionals need certainty. Agreed. But not all of our time should be spent on commissions.
Curiosity about the technology of the application should be as strong an impetus to press Render as the need to create the art itself.
CG is all about manipulating pixels, and each individual pixel has only 3 degrees of freedom to distinguish it. So no matter what the process is, it can only affect the pixels in one of the three ways. Pixels can be lightened/darkened, saturated/desaturated, and red shifted/blue shifted. Everything boils down to these three ideals.
If a pixel is too dark, there can be a million diferent ways to lighten it up.
The intended purpose of a tool is only its starting point. How you might use a tool once you understand how it functions is quite another. I cannot tell you how many times I've produced "impossible" renders in Bryce simply because I created all my own stuff. Custom rigged soft shadow sunlight, custom rigged light domes, all of it far from the standard way of using these tools. I never used presets, presets were mere learning tools. As I've always said, that if users dont step out on their own and find new and unique uses for the tools at hand then the only resutls the artist will accomplish are those minimal results the original programmers intended. I see no reason to allow the programmers to limit me. Having someone say that this one way is the only way to do something seems limiting and predicatble.
Schools teach kids answers, but they also try to teach problem solving skills for problems they have yet to encounter. Knowing how to solve problems is as impoirtant as knowing the answers to the factual inquiries.
Sliders arent everything.
Example, Sally, an artist using Daz3d IRAY struggles with getting the right shine of skin on the character. Some might give the Sally a million tweaks to the specular and roughness sliders of the skin, but Sally still finds the shine is too flat. Then one day Sally comes to realize randomly that the character has been lit with a wide area light, as wide as the character herself and positioned not far away. Sally accidentally discovers that by making the light source much smaller but brighter, that the specular reflections become more pronounced, and now violla, the skin looks as "expected." So in actuality the "problem" of not enough skin shine had multiple solutions beyond the obvious specular and roughness sliders, and some of them are not directlly obvious such as the width of a light source.
Thats why assuming channels and tools can only do the one thing they were designed to do is not always liberating as it would seem.
It's like an episode of Star Trek, when they say "Captain, we don't have enough power to jump to Warp right now." Kirk replies:" Then re-route power from life support and get us out of here!!!
Knowing where to get more power when you suddenly don't have it where you expect it is as important as knowing how to pilot the ship itself. We've gotta know how to improvise, because again, there is never a ready made solution for all potential problems.
To continue that analog, Scotty already knew the basic functions of the engines and how they worked. He didn't come aboard having to figure it out from scratch. Experimentation with a tool only begins after you know the basics of how that tool is supposed to work. It doesn't matter what the tool is being used for, whether it's a circular saw, or a chisel used by a sculptor.
I found one book on Amazon that looks fantastic but it is pre Iray. I have found some great tutorials online and I unfortunately forget to bookmark them sometimes. People are doing it on their own in bits and pieces, sometimes for free sometimes charged, but it seems odd that Daz doesn't do their own. It just seems like a great new source of income for them and as I said, if they put it on Amazon, their suggestion engine could introduce new customers to the store. I emailed the person who did the book on Amazon to she is doing an updated IRay version. But whoever is doing these books and tutorials are not the creators of the software and probably don't know every bell and whistle themselves. I suppose I will have to create my own manual for personal use by copying and pasting every tutorial I find online into one document I can search. A lot of extra work I would rather not do.
Rather than a technical writer, maybe they could hire an experienced user or even one of the authors here to update to post IRay http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_5?url=search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=daz3d&sprefix=Daz3d,aps,328
The forums are great for answering specific questions, but 1) I have a lot of questions which could become annoying and 2) there may be hidden things in Daz (which I'm pretty sure there are) that I would love to use IF I knew they existed, but can't ask about if I don't know they are there. Like how could I ask "What is a subatomic particle?" If I don't know that subatomic particles exist...
Dang...it's been that long?
I guess she won't qualify for the New User's contests any longer
Yeah, the work part is definitely there.
Oh, wait! One of the books on Amazon is for Iray!!! But it's for 4.8, not 4.9. Will that make a difference? See, if I buy that, that money could have gone to Daz... But that just focuses on IRay, I see, not everything else... Urrghhh... And can't see inside to see how they explain it and it seems to just focus on digital women, maybe not full scenes...
I don't need to know enough CGI to work at Pixar, I just want to learn Daz Studio, which as far as I know, is not being used by major studios. Yet. Give me a manual so I can study it! Maybe I'd like the geeky stuff after all if I could actually study it in a well written manual with screenshots! :)
Poser has documentation everywhere, even on Roku, but I'm actually starting to like DS, if I could just actually use it and know what I'm doing, rather than random trial and error... There were certain things I was able to figure out because of a similarity or counterpart in Poser, but I have no idea how someone completely new to 3D would have found those things...
You won't be annoying at all, Alicia, especially if you maintain your current level of civility. You'll find assistance.
Kevin Sanderson, do you work at Daz? I used to know Dan Farr, great guy! I would have personally asked him about hiring someone to create a great manual for DS, but I was Poser only back then and I don't think DS was as complicated back then! It just seems advantageous to the company to have a manual for its software, don't you think? Sorry for harping on this, but I know I can't be the only one who wants this, but maybe the most vocal LOL... And I do really WANT to learn it! :)
There are some bloggers doing some great tutorials that could be hired way cheaper than a technical writer and can write clearly with screenshots for the layman... Or even different bloggers, high level users or PAs could write various chapters of the manual so one person alone is not depended on... Each could write a chapter on their specialty. There are so many ways it could be done!
Nope, Alicia, I do not work at DAZ. You are one of many, though, over the years desiring and begging for a manual. But it seems to me it was under Dan Farr where the idea of a big manual fell apart. I know of one quality writer who declined to do it. And then are the ones they mentioned (not by name) who messed up and did not deliver. The software has been a moving target of sorts. Some things don't change but other things have. That's why the wiki idea works better. You really will start figuring it out. I've poked around different software for years and have found most of my answers using Google when I have a question if I haven't already seen it here. My approach has usually been to first buy quality content and use presets, tweaking from there. I've only known one great manual and that was for an audio workstation back in the 90s, written by a tech writer who used to contribute articles to a couple magazines.
You've hit the nail right on the thumb.
This is the main reason why conversions from Poser-format items should always be done properly, as Figure and Prop Assets; it takes most advantage of the way D|S breaks down and stores the files that make up its content. Done right, as much as possible of the files are stored once, in the relevant subfolders of the /data/ folder, and as little as possible is shoehorned into each and every scene file using that content. The ideal is for the scene file to contain nothing except parameter settings and pointers to mesh and texture files.
I've got the book you were referring to, but I haven't started it yet because I was still working my way through the Piola Ciccone book. I was going to gift it to you since I purchased it on Kindle, but then saw that it was only 4 bucks. LoL. Thumbing through it though, it's basically in the style of the video tutuorials, only in print. You load up a figure, and he explains how to achieve different looks using I-ray and the setting you need. It seems to be basic enough that it will give you a solid starting point "from which to start experimenting on your own". At the very least you'll have a good idea what certain sliders do.
Seems it's better than nothing, and $4 won't break the bank.
But is it complete - does it get around all the features so you learn all the aspects? I've known about this tutorial for years but I've always heard people complain that it was never up to date. Has that changed?
I agree, an online wiki is definitely the best solution here, as for any complex program which is in constant and fast development.
Another but probably more complex solution is like they're doing in Visual Studio - select a control, toolbox or feature, or a command, method or whatever in the code, hit F1 and your browser opens with an online webpage that explains everything about what you have selected.
Lots of books. Lots of classes. And that's my point. There is so much in DS now that requires knowledge of the CG field that "documenting it all" it in a single manual is just not practical. Rendering engines such as Iray or 3Delight are huge complex beasts on their own that could only be lightly touched by a "DAZ Studio" manual. Then you get into things like weight mapping, rigging, quaternions vs euler, etc. It is more than can practially be covered in a "manual". There is an online "how to use" manual that cover the basics, and has been for quite some time.
Kendall
There are many more complicated programs - some of them free at that - which manage to have an up to date manual written in everyday language. Studio is not too complicated a program to have more than a getting started guide, and since their main stated issue was ease of use you'd think they'd try to address that instead of building a stupidly overcomplicated extra system to install your content wherever it wants. But since they are making money without bothering to properly document their software for users they probably won't do so. That's their choice, but don't try and give them excuses like "it's too hard."
I don't see it as 'it's too hard' so much as 'it is too costly' and by THAT I refer to previous comment.
We aren't willing to PAY for the effort required.
I am. Time is too valuable to spend it trying to figure out stuff that people have already figured out. Knowledge is just as real a commodity as a software asset, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd daresay there are more people using Daz, than say a program like Maya, yet you can find numerous manuals on Maya. Who are those written for? Certainly not the animators at Pixar or Disney, but for hobbyist, students and people just like users of Daz.
Like it or not, Daz3d has become a professional software tool, and it's time to treat it as such.