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daveso
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if you truly believe that I have some great ocean front property in Oklahoma I will sell you REALLY cheap
I honestly don't feel most products will help with creating great art, especially since many of the utilities in the store are just shortcuts to the tools and features already built into DS. products may give you more creative ideas, but how you use them outside of copying a promo image is up to your skills and imagination.
Another thing to think about, since many of the banner images use very heavy postwork, that really doesn't use moch of a DAZ product or DS skillset, but more an image editing skillset
IMHO having too many products, especially products I'm not particularly interested in using, can kill creativity. Sorting through a bunch of stuff I don't want to use to find the one(s) I do want to use can take all of the fun out of it for me.
Agreed!! I don't do post work well, but the few instances where I've seen the full process from start to finish, I'm pretty amazed at what can be achieved. Take a rather unremarkable image from DS, combine elements and FX in the image editing software and come out with a really great image. Wish I had that type of talent, but for now I'm stuck with getting the most I can out of the renderer.
Light sets can help you achieve great light, and even if you know how to set up your lights by hand, light sets are usually faster. Additionally, it DOES help to have a variety of items to suit a mood or theme. If you're rendering a party scene, and one person is in formal wear, one is in jeans, one is wearing medieval clothing, and one looks like he came from the 70s, it'll just look wrong.
But if you buy a lot of items at once, that can be overwhelming, imo. You might forget what you own or feel like you don't know where to start with them. Buying one or two things at a time usually kick starts my creativity because I want to use it right away. NGL, I still load up my cart with PCFAD stuff on a regular basis.
For me, having a huge library lets me be more creative. A lot of my process involves just picking semi-random things from my library and seeing where my muse takes me.
Actually if you mail me lots of cash your art will improve tenfold... Because I definitely will tell you that your art has improved at least ten or more times... in fact nine out of five people who I totally didn't make up, that mailed me a bucket or two of cash, felt they were significantly better at art and had become incrementally better looking, as well as having developed a fresh pine scent.
I'm not sure buying more stuff will make you better at something... if you are bored with rendering portraits, maybe visit sites like ArtStation and browse the vast collections of works there... you are bound to find inspiration... and buying more stuff won't make DS suck less, it will probably make it more frustrating because you'll still have lots of content and no inspiration... I'm not sure why DS crashes a lot for you, but more content won't fix that.
So while you are thinking about that, feel free to send me a bucket or two of cash, preferably in unmarked twenties, and I will definitely tell you your art is improving and you won't even have to make any art!
I'm just joking about the sending me cash thing... I'm incredibly irresponsible and I'll probably forget to tell you whatever it is I just promised I'd do which apparently I've already forgotten what that was... so my offer is probably not as attractive as I first presented it as which I'm assuming was pretty well sold as I'm prone to making shady offers to strangers and then forgetting all about it... So maybe just keep the cash and seek out inspirational works and look into whatever is causing DS to crash so often...
My guess is Cybergnomes... they are like gremlins, but they infect computers and reduce creativity and increase software crashes... if you mail me a bucket or two of cash... preferably unmarked twenty dollar bills, I share with you my patented computer salve formula which is made out of all natural ingredients that you can apply to your computer as a cybergnome repellent... it will yield results almost immediately... those results may vary, but there will be results... stuff will definitely happen... and most likely DS will never crash on that computer again.
Anyway, good luck and I hope I've given you something to think about... if not, I hope you slept peacefully through this and are just now awakening feeling refreshed and with a brand new perspective on things.
Content alone won't make your art better. It only gives you more options for the type of images you can create. There are many tools that can be used and skills that can be learned that will help a lot. However, talent plays a big part of the process as well. I lack a lot of that artistic talent for making great art, but I still have fun tinkering with the software and content to see what I can create. That works for me.
Having a lot of products can help to inspire new art (and things like PS brushes are a huge help for post work), but it's not the only way to improve. You also have to learn to utlilize the tools available to you, pratice (something I need to do more), and learn from other artists. Using Daz to make art is no different than any other art medium in regards to improving one's craft. There's a ton of great advice on these forums and on Youtube. I have hundreds of tutorials, discussions, and videos bookmarked on topics that have helped me improve a lot. I've been making art with Daz since 2018 and have used every render as practice to keep improving. I learn something new every time.
What we respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against their own limitations.
I have always viewed DS as a canvas, a set of brushes, or a mannequin. They are just tools to help you find and express your creativity. Will buying colored pencils, oil paints, and larger canvases help an artist better their art? Yes and no. It will help them expand the types of art they can create, but if they don’t have the knowledge to use those tools, then the artist is just adding more clutter to their studio.
There is a Japanese art style called, hitofude ryuu. An artist can create beautiful images of lifelike dragons with just ONE continuous brush stroke. It’s so impressive what can be done with a minimal amount of effort, but maximum amount of knowledge.
You said you enjoy doing portraits. What themes do you enjoy doing? What stories do you want to tell in that one image? Is it a medieval fantasy? A science fiction adventure? An ordinary Sunday with someone reading a book?
Feedback is also a great way to “improve” your artwork. Share your images, ask for constructive feedback. There are tons of wonderful tutorials out there to improve your lighting, camera angles, etc. And don’t just limit it to DS or CGI in general. DS uses real world elements like cameras and lighting. Look up YouTube videos on how to properly light scenes (the three-point lighting setup) and watch deconstructive videos on camera angles and how those impact the human psyche. My ex- loves photography, and we’ve had a lot of discussions about lighting, ISO, etc.
At the end of the day, what is it about your artwork that you want to improve upon?
Even with a good-sized library, I still use Primitives to get things done. It's not really about what I have at all.
The library is a shortcut for getting towards a creative environment, but the brain is the best tool there. The figures, the actors are the thing... the rest can be impressionistic shapes and colors if you're creative enough with the tools that you have.
The underside of a car might be a high tech wall. A fleshy tentacle might become a weird staircase. Play with scale, play with the textures and patterns.
The best thing for me was just doing the contests here. Not that I do fancy great stuff, but I had to learn to get where I was at, and I learn by doing it. A contest helps push your brain into different ways where you might not have considered before.
I don't really enter them to win. I enter them to learn. It's the learning that helps me grow as an "artist" (whatever that means). I haven't stopped learning, and I keep trying different things.
And in that case, it's not about WHAT I have. It's what I do with what I have. It's about the how & the why I use what I use to pull a scene together.
Spending money doesn't necessarily help you figure out the how and why of putting things together in an aesthetically pleasing combination.
No, but it will certainly increase the size of your product inventory. If you haven't been able to effectively work with what you already have, buying moar won't make a difference; especially if its crashing on you so much. You'll have to figure out why its crashing(low spec system, drivers, settings, etc.) and have it corrected. Otherwise its just going to be an exercise in frustration & disappointment.
just buy stuff and stop rendering
thats what a lot of people do here
Buying products won't help you understand composition and proper color selection, artistic concepts that are applied across the board throughout most media commonly used in art.
But then again, my fountain of creativity, when it's solely centered around DS, just tends to be using products not as intended.
At some point, most products won't help you create better art, just help you add more variation to your art.
The exception to this point, are products which introduce new capabilities to your workflow which you weren't able to do before. For example, if you just couldn't figure out how to do volumetric lighting, and some product makes that process easier to work with for you, then yes, it can help you create better art.
Otherwise, I'd have to agree with Molly: art is more a matter of composition, lighting and camera use.
Did you not get the memo about only needing Victoria and a sword? LOL
Edit: Well, I guess if you are seriously blocked you could splurge and grab yourself a nice temple or two along with some jungle scenery. (JK, I couldn't resist.)
I've bought a lot more content than I've used. I've bought a lot of male content that I haven't used at all, as much as I want to support male products in the shop. That makes me sad, and I think I should delve into male portraits. I've rendered a lot of half-done pictures that aren't good enough to put in my gallery but that I enjoy looking at from time to time. I keep meaning to render more than I do. But DAZ makes me really happy, whether it's buying products or "doodling" in the program for my own enjoyment. I guess the joy I get from the whole hobby is worth it to me. I've slowed down on buying content, mostly because I realized I was buying more than I was using and due to real life financial constraints. Has buying more content helped me be a better artist? Probably not, but it has sure been fun trying.
Some of my art has improved just by going and looking at it a 2nd time years later. LOL, but some has not too.
Nice answers, but I think daveso is pulling your chains here, people.
learning all the little mysteries DAZ studio has up it's sleepve will
or just start calling it the art of collecting probs
i consider myself a composition artist, since my art is composing scenes of the content assets i have.
studying composition techniques, camera shots, portrait techniques seems useful. theres plenty of ut tutorials.
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I think having a decent-sized library does improve your art. It gives your muse more freedom to drift and more high quality items to play with.
Plus, you could set up all your lights and poses yourself. But having shortcuts saves you time and energy, which in turn you can spend perfecting other aspects of your work.
It's just... spending money alone will not automatically improve your art. You also need experience, skill, patience, time, and... uhm, talent.
(Talent 8.1 now available for $2.99 if you buy any Debut New Release!)
What makes great art? Great underdrawings
What makes great writing? Organized notes and outlines
For Daz I think it might be lights but it's better to have too much content than too little. If you have too little you will think "I don't have the right shoes/skirt style/fantasy or sci fi clothes" then shaders can make different pieces from different sets match better. I included a wrap skirt I really like with a leather shader and matches a steampunk outfit from another set
Then I dialed the dual lobe until I had a gloss that felt good
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Well, if you take the subway, the 57th street, 7th Ave subway station is directly adjacent to Carnegie Hall... The N,Q,R and W trains stop there... or you could ride a giant subway rat directly to the front door if you know how rat wrangle... generally the subway is quicker.
Having Stonemason, Polish, Aeon Soul, Linday, Luthbel, & outoftouch items (pardon me, whomever I left out) will definitely improve the quality of your images immediately---if you're using Iray.
is it the same way to Amarillo
you might be on to something there, when I started out with DAZ I had literally next to no knowlege about making digital art. So I focused on this one app, back then with a library existing only of things coming with the app and some freebies. joining into the new users challenge gave me a good start into knowing my way around the app. but to this day I still discover things I didn't know (or forgot how to do at some point)
got to add that by now my library has grown ... a little bit .. like substancially
No, buying more products will not improve your art, with the possible exception of tutorials. If you want to improve your art, it will take work. I suggest you start with tutorials. There are some good ones for sale in the store, as well as free ones that cover the basics of DAZ Studio. YouTube is anoother good source of tutorials. Read the forums here, especially the DAZ Studio Discussion forum. Examine other people's renders you really like and see if you can figure out how they made them. Ask questions, like you have here. Finally, practice. Every render try to improve something.
As you improve your art, buying more products, or downloading freebies, will give you more to work with. But it won't improve your art. If you use an environment by Stonemason, unless you know how to adjust the lighting, surfaces, camera, and other aspects of the scene, you will never be able to make your own awesome art. It will just be another render with default settings. Sometimes it just takes a couple of simple adjustments to make a unique image, other times you may spend hours getting everything just right. The more you learn and the more of you that goes into your art, the more it will improve.
Good luck and have fun on your journey!