What Are Your Most Useful Resources?
nelsonsmith
Posts: 1,337
in The Commons
Once you've got the figures and the sets, what do you find to be the most useful items to add to your arsenal? Poses (full body, hands, expressions, etc). Shaders, Light set-ups ? What do you find that you need and use consistently and why?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Probably poses because the character rig in Daz Studio is just really bad compared to what I'm used to in Maya and that can make posing the figure pretty difficult.
hard to say, I save alot of my own poses for future use and these are usually based on another canned pose as a starter. I would have to say a modeling app (3DSMax for me) since I tend to tweak morphs, have to make props on the fly, weld objects for dynamic clothing, etc for nearly every scene. I do have a couple of utlitities i use often, a pose converter and the simterio randomizer, both invaluable to my workflow
Anything that can help me create new and original characters from what I've already got. Good shaders that accurately echo real-world materials are always welcome too. If somebody came up with a script that could help logically sort my content and have it stay that way then I'd be on it in a heartbeat and since we're in the realms of fantasy now, I'd quite like a tool that would let me save an unfinished render and let me pick it up and resume it again whenever I like.
This is not the time to tell me that Santa doesn't exist :)
Simtenero's randomizer
Pose conveters and pose builder
Light Utility - Iray LIght Manager Pro - If you don't buy anything else buy this
Light Sets - Khory's Scintillating Lights, Colms Iray Light Set Ups and GI Dome for Iray are just a few - I collect light sets I find them invaluable to speeding up my work flow - yes, I should learn to set them all up myself and could probably do it myself at this point but hey, I'm a hobby artist with minimal time so I go with what works for me and is the quickest.
UHT2 Ultimate Color (Hair Utility)
Special effects like Jepe's stuff and the Godrays and the morphing flames and and and lol.So many very cool things to choose from. And don't count out some of the older stuff a lot of it still works very very well.
Skin Builder
The list is much longer there are a lot of really good tools that will make your life much easier once you have the basics. Check out the commercial products thread, you can find a lot of really great utility items there that are very helpful when builiding a scene.
Threads like this are interesting to me seeing what others consider "must haves", because I look at some of them and wonder why I have no need for them. I know in the past it was mainly because I didn't render "in" DS, but always outside to Luxrender, so many utilities that were DS specific like LIE were useless to me, but I have gotten more and more into using IRAY and as such pay more attention to DS specific utlities.
UHT2 is a product that I really can't see a major use for. It takes me a minute to change any hair color in photoshop when needed. Same for skinbuilder or any product like this, I actually enjoy altering textures for my scenes when needed, makes me feel more creative.
I did buy an IRAY light set, but mainly to try and understand IRAY more and now I can just tweak this one for my needs in most cases, same for a shader set and now I can customize existing ones and save for future use.
Anyhoo, look forward to seeing what others consider "must have" as I might find something that would be benficial to my workflow or I haven't seen or thought of yet.
Okay, that was on my wish list, now it's in my download queve waiting for me to get home from work.
My list is long
Iclone pro &3D exchange
Mcasuals "teleblend" Script to send my scene auto converted to cycles for render PBR stills
Mcasuals copy pose animation retargeting script
Mcasuals "move" script for instant relocation of object to location of other/nodes ( Example select random prop knife
located 200 meters west and relocate it to characters left hand with one click).
aniMate+(Full version)
and the MDD exporter in aniMate+
that sends the PLA Data to my genesis meshes over in Cinema4D making them animated for rendering in C4D.
Cinema4D R 11.5 studio itself.
Natural Motion Endorphin
for Dynamic Ragdoll physics.
Out of touch Iray hair shaders on renderosity. My absolute favorite hair product.
Shaders and making what I need model-wise. I usually give the stuff away afterward hoping someone else might find a use for it. I like being able to make what I need and load it in on click. I've amassed so many of my own shaders and things...and still working on more. I like poses too. I almost never use them exactly as is, but I use canned poses all the time as a starter for what I need. Oh, and ditto on OOT's hair shaders. Just fantastic.
Laurie
...I still have to say the most useful for me has been the AoA Advanced Lights and Atmospheric cameras even though the 4.7 update hamstrung some of what they can do.
For figures it's Skin Builder Pro (waiting for the G3 version) the Skin Overlay LIE utility, Gen-X, and various Morph Metchant Resrouce kits.
For scenes it's DraagonStorm's Let it Snow and Gathering Moss shaders, AoA's Grass shader and Dimension Theory's Shades of Life - Urban Shaders.
Both Aging and Growing Up morphs which extend the versatility of the figures on sale, most of which fall into a narrow category of mid-20's glamorous. Well done to Zev0 and colleagues.
Indeed add those to my list as well
GenX, and its add ons.
Not so much as a paid resource, but... the forums! There's so much information here. If you keep your eyes open, you can learn so much!
(As for normal resources, AoA lights are the ones I almost always use, so that has to be the most useful for me.)
My favorite thing is "Look at Camera" script by rsg on ShareCG. I use it like 10 times a day while working on setting up scenes.
Blender - for: Creating items from scratch; modifying items, creating morphs; tweaking items once the scene is set; creating new material zones.
Shaders (IRAY) - various, but including: Fisty & Dark; MEC4D; Parrotdolphin; Sloshwerks.
Lights: OOT Lights Drama 10 mostly and tweak it to my needs (and getting better with it); Dimension Theory HDR (usually the same one, and may or may not set very low for ambient); various free HDR; Epic Godrays, but depends on requirements.
Pose sets - love em for getting in the ball-park (really hate Daz Studio's Pose set up system).
Growing up and Ageing morphs; it's surprising how often a figure will get up to 10% growing up morph; it seems to scale (make figures more real-world petit, and just not as tall) very well; it doesn't always work at getting the shape I want though.
Dynamics (VWD or Daz's) - without this believability is killed stone dead. I see lots of great scenes that could use just a little bit of it.
SimTenero Randomiser.
Mcasuals copy viewport to selected camera; others of their scripts on occasions.
Do what Holliwood does, and use adults into their thirties as teenagers. :)
Character & Figure Morphs, Shader sets and OptiTex Dynamic cloth
The large lump of gristle between my ears.
Most usefull tools...
My old copy of DS 2.3 with the Figure Set-up Tools is my biggest and most usefull since I can use it to make fully Poser-compatible content. I also have a ton of 3rd party plug-ins for it that weren't made available for use in more recent versions that are also incredibly usefull for figure set up and content creation. Obj-PP2 exporter (for creating Poser friendly props), Poser Format exporter (for exporting Poser friendly Pose sets), Morph-to-Cr2 exporter (great plug-in for creating figure morphs with DS deformers and the Hex-DS Bridge and inserting them into the figure cr2). and a host of others. Most of these plug-ins provide bennefits not available in current DS versions and without them I wouldn't be able to create content... The older version of DS is also more directly compatible with Poser for surfaces and materials set-up than current versions are.
Hexagon and the DS-Hex bridge are the next most usefull since I can create morphs using the DS deformers which can then be inserted into my creations via the plug-ins mentioned above... Hexagon is also my modelling app of choice for figure sculpting and I use it to create every model I make.
3rd most usefull is the morphs transfer tool in the current versions of DS because it allows me to transfer my custom morphs from my own creations into clothing or extras that I make for my figures and, also allows me to export the modified cr2 to include the morphs I've transfered...
4th is UV Mapper Pro for mapping and texture templates... very very nessessary for content creation since Hexagon's internal mapping tools are a pain on the best of days.
Filter Forge is next on my list of usefull tools for ease of creating texture samples that can be used when painting textures on new figures (or for creating new textures for figure I already had).. Also PhotoImpressions 4 which is my paint program of choice...
Lastly, Poser 7 and Poser 10 are in my tool box for figure testing and additional tweaks during content creation.
Fit control is extremely useful to me, as it adds a lot of handles to things and I do a lot of layered clothing.. Though I am often frustrated that it doesn't have more controls for sleaves and gloves.
Once again: Maclean's Everyday Morphing Primitives, for creating odd things for my scenes.
DZfire's Emissive lighting shaders for iray, for custom lighting effects.
Nothing really fancy or exotic, just a couple of products that are useful everyday.