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Comments

• barbult Posts: 26,215

  January 2017

  Download and play with the free content before investing in too much purchased content. Make sure it is a hobby and program you will enjoy. Join the Platinum club so you can get 30% discount on all products that list Daz3D as the vendor (Daz Originals).
• BeeMKay Posts: 7,019

  January 2017

  Welcome!

  As barbuit said, work with the free content first, before you decide to invest a lot of money.

  • Even if you don't like video tutorials, I would still recommend to at least watch the free video tutorials offered here on the DAZ site. It will give you a good idea of how things fit together: http://www.daz3d.com/help/help-daz-3d-video-tutorials
  • DAZ Studio has built-in tutorials that guide you step by step through creating a simple scene. They also come with extra free content.
  • Talking about free content, though as lot of it is not for G3: http://www.daz3d.com/free-3d-models#
  • There's often a lot of confusion about thevarios generations, and what goes with who, so I recommend this thread, though it also doesn't include G3: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/24257/daz-3d-human-figures-a-history#latest
  • A note of warning... while clothes & hair can be made compatible to G3, skins are difficult, and both poses and morphs need a special converter. On the other hand, the "older" generations often come much cheaper, as they show up in sales. If you really intent to go into rendering, you are looking at $100-200 just for things like head&body morphs (if you want to dial your own characters) and some decent skins or base characters. If you need (external) genitalia, you'll have to buy at least one Pro character pack for the Generation of your choice.
  • Lights: Iray comes with simple solutions for many things, but I strongly recommend to learn how to light a scene properly. Switch to "scene only" in the render tab, and load a few lights, and see what they do, play around with the settings, etc. Also, Meshlights (can be created by loading the Iray emissive shader to a plane primitive). Check out this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/110771/natural-iray-lighning-for-rooms#latest
  • Render engines: DAZ Studio has Iray as default render engine, but it also has other render engines to offer, namely 3Delight and OpenGL. The render engines use materials differently, and you will get different results. Some materials don't work at all in a different render engine.
  • Hardware: Unless you already have a high end gaming PC with an nVidea card of more than 4GB VRAM, and you're rendering Iray, you'll soon find out that rendering will take a lot of time (literally hours, or even days), or that you experience crashes because your scene doesn't fit into the system's RAM. This can easily lead to hardware costs of $1000+ if you want fast results.

  All that said, 3D is a rewarding hobby, but you have a lot of things to learn. It's easy to get frustrated, because there are usually no "quick" solutions, especially when it comes to posing, lights and shader. There will be compromises, and you probably will need to dwelve into "Postwork" for some things.
• dracorn Posts: 2,353

  January 2017

  Feel free to hang out in the new user's contests - you can learn a lot by watching. Then jump on in yourself. The advice is great, the people are very friendly and welcoming. It's a fantastic learning atmosphere.