These look great but seem to be in sketchup format. How can these be used in DS? 

I think there's a convert-to-obj utility somewhere in the online Sketchup archives. IIRC it has to be exported from inside the Sketchup program itself.

These look great but seem to be in sketchup format. How can these be used in DS? 

The Connect part of the page links to user's manuals for seven different programs: 3DS Max, Maya, Revit, Rhino, Houdini, Sketchup and UE4. No C4D (sad for me, but I could still use it with Houdini) or Blender, at least yet.

I added a material using browse to logo and I'm opening in Sketchup,

my first modeler was sketchup before I found Carrara

Artini, i see.

WendyLuvsCatz, we all have different paths!

nicstt, makes sense. On the other hand, many those options appeared relatively recently...

Galaxy, also good points.

@plasma_ring, thanks for detailed reply.

Sketchup

Btw some people manage to do awesome models just with it.

it blew my mind that this was possible and that I'd never heard of it

Yeah for me it's very weird to feel how it's for others with that "discovering", cause i was introduced to Poser long, long time ago by someone in my family (who used it for storyboard / pre-vis), along with an early 2000s book called "creating an animated movie with a computer" that discussed Poser, C4D, Premier and more. So i "grew up" with it before experiencing 3DS Studio, Blender, etc. Even though i was on and off, abandoning for many years and mostly became a bit more serious when switched to D|S.

One of the biggest things I think keeping DS from being more widespread--and something that frustrates me a lot--is that people who use it tend not to talk about using it unless they're part of the Daz community.  
 

Yeah 

MMO characters and Sims

 Two-three years ago i felt that i'm a bit too tired of DAZ. Learning iRay, new tips and tricks, generational changes... Also specific points about daz/poser-related marketplace...
So i temporarly left and dived in unofficial modding subcommunities of Sims. Must say, some sides of it impressed me very much. Especially the ones that are around subjective tastes.
I mean, style of "products", themes etc. You know, as we're discussing in another topic about "V3-V4 era vs. nowodays", there is a connected thought... Plenty of PA make products that will most likely find audience, and targeted. Which may reduce number of niche/exotic stuff. So, to compare, because Sims' modding community is basically rotating about making freebies (if we dont count donations/patreons), their creators just do whatever they want. Which is why you can see stuff, that you almost never see in context of Daz products (or havent until lately). Tendency for freckle & mole skin (which wasnt popular in dazsphere until recent years i suppose), ultra trendy asian fashion and cosmetics, emo goth subculture stuff, amazingly cute interiors etc. etc. Though, i thought that another reason was different demographics. Like, most Sims' custom content creators are youthful crowd (which is why their vision is different from previous genereations), and also more galz than boyz in community (which also may explain this or that in style or taste). I was posting some examples here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4625101/#Comment_4625101
HOWEVER, there were many downdides as well, like all those freebies/releases demanding much, much, much more other freebies to use (i mean, it's like having to get the whole pro bundle, if we speak in daz terms) and very often all those freebies were scattered around completely unintuitive tumblr blogs with crazy webdesign and often horrible navigation, and very often those blogs were dying within 1-2 year with all those freebies with them cause authors were asking not to reupload their creations, so you were having to ask douzens of people if, by any chance, they have those freebies and can share, etc. etc. Also, because 90% of "best" functional to use Sims in that way is done through usermade modifications, there were big problems with interface/uiux/installation like you cant preview skin unless choose it, and their "content library" will lag if too many installed, and to use custom sliders you need to know where you placed what, sometimes people had to place body sliders in head menu, and vice versa.. Very confusing, very unintuitive, very "DIY".
So when i went back to DAZ Studio, it was so incredibly comfortable and easy to use, can you even imagine still, when i wanna get some inspiration for "really modern fashion staff" or some "punk / not mainstream" creations, i take a look into what people create there. And some stuff is incredible, like interior/exterior design. Like this custom town.
 

There's at least one person who's gotten thousands of retweets on Twitter offering 3D pose reference, all of which is clay renders of G8 models--and in the middle of tons of people thanking them profusely for it, I never saw them mention

Oh, so maybe all those "anti-daz" biased people from Polycount forum etc. mostly encounter such "baddie" daz users, and draw their impression, heh (to addition with their "either you're modeller or go away").
But honestly, it's very illogical for me, why some people refuse to understand. I mean, stock photos exist so they can be sold to people who will use them, right? And all those models people are selling, some people will buy and use (including daz users). So for me it seems unnatural to be like those, who are snobbish at their potential customers...

and when I explain what it does it's just...totally baffling to them. Like, why would you want to just render things, a render isn't art on its own, it's just a nicely-presented image of your model. So when 3D artists are using premade assets and getting well known for their work, I kind of wonder if there's reluctance to talk about it because it might be perceived as cheating at 3D.

Yes, that bothers me as well.. And also why i ask in my opening post, if you have impression that overall, in "3d art", making compositions/stories through rendering & setting up a scene (whether all premade or not) is becoming much more rare than it used to be. And how it looks like "visible and loud most" are interested in sculpting etc.

People say that using samples in music making is also a "cheating". However you can be a good composer while not having a skills of playing on violin or drums yourself...

("Look at this! Everyone was using Carrara as an art tool! They're actually discussing Daz as a thing artists should pick up!")

If you saw some interesting articles that were touching what you discuss, could you tell what issue numbers were those? Maybe some will wanna ebay for them and read, haha.  P.S. also, i cant understand why anyone would "question" Carrara... but some people do ><.

similar to game screenshots and cosplay and photography, or even doll collecting--things I think DS has a lot in common with--because it makes it less about doing 3D like the pros (even now my impostor syndrome addled brain balks at that--no I can't! That's magic!) and more about discovering a new tool to do the things they already love. 

Well said! Btw, by dolls you meant BJD (ball jointed dolls)? There are really some weird and inspirational creations in that field as well (though i guess its closer to what people sculpt with zbrush etc).

And yes, imho if you use DAZ, no one can demand you to make "art". There is somehow difference between "art" and whatever you do as creative hobby, sketches, fun, i dont know. Which is why i never understood when people hate dA for fanarts or smth.

By the way, some people just use DAZ Studio as useful little rendering tool! Like, they model in Wings3D, CAD or something (maybe Hexagone) and then use D|S to set up materials , light, viewpoint... Some may rig their own character meshes. Etc. etc.

The reason I started looking into 3D tools for my project in the first place was that one of my original worst nightmares happened: I turned 35 and suddenly my drawing hand is in really bad shape. I think about how all the people I know who want to get their ideas out but for many reasons can't do it through drawing; I know that if I hadn't found it, I probably wouldn't be making art at all. 

Oh :( I think kyoto kid has similar story (?)

There's not a lot of visibility on it. I only found Daz by accident; I'd been running through a lot of different 3D options hoping to find a way to streamline art creation for my project, and it was only by chance that I saw a product promo image in a Google image search and clicked through. 

Most people I've talked to who are potentially interested in doing 3D seem to fall into two categories: either they're super interested in modeling (in which case, Blender), or they've never considered the idea that they could do 3D rendering that looks like this. I was in the latter group when I started; it blew my mind that this was possible and that I'd never heard of it. If you'd asked me what my unrealistic fantasy program would be at the time I was messing around with Adobe Fuse and Sketchup, I would've described something like DS--it just never occurred to me that it existed because it was never presented as an option in all my searching, and when I did find it I couldn't understand why I'd never heard of this tool. 

I spend a lot of time in fandom spaces where 3D rendering actually is a skill some people pick up, but they usually do it through programs like MikuMikuDance and Source Filmmaker. It's even pretty common for people to make elaborate portrait art and visual storytelling projects using their MMO characters and Sims like you mentioned. But DS is almost completely unknown there despite being basically the high octane version of that, and when I talk to folks about it they're scared to try it because it seems like it must be hard. In a way it seems too good to be true, even when it comes to just using the base character models as pose reference. 

One of the biggest things I think keeping DS from being more widespread--and something that frustrates me a lot--is that people who use it tend not to talk about using it unless they're part of the Daz community.  

I've gotten familiar enough with Daz assets that I recognize them in the wild pretty frequently. They get incorporated into professional 3D art projects, used in ads, traced over for mainstream comics, painted over for concept art and motion graphics...and if the people doing those things mention that at all, it's usually offhand. I've seen vendors on graphics asset sites selling packs of pose reference renders for concept artists, and the poses will all be the ones that come free with DS and the models used are base G8. There's at least one person who's gotten thousands of retweets on Twitter offering 3D pose reference, all of which is clay renders of G8 models--and in the middle of tons of people thanking them profusely for it, I never saw them mention that you can just download the program for free and make any pose you want. When I play Spot The Asset, it's always a little wild to see Daz Studio go completely unmentioned while the assumption from onlookers is that the assets were modeled from scratch.

Of course, no one is under any obligation to reveal their process; it just flabbergasts me since I'm 100% the person who never shuts up about DS and I'm constantly trying to do tutorial threads and encouraging the communities I'm in to pick it up and ask me any questions they want. It's a mindblowing program to me! It lets me put my weird ideas right onto the screen! I can't believe it's not known everywhere in extremely online creative circles. There are definitely barriers to entry; building an asset library is very costly and many of my friends are using old laptops or desktops that won't run it well if at all. But the biggest hurdle seems to be just informing people what's possible. 

Modeling and rendering are actually two different skill sets, but when I think about what I assumed rendering was before discovering DS, I realize I sort of classified it as the thing you get to do to show off your model once you've sculpted it. I was familiar with 3D animation, and I always liked high-res official renders of video game characters, but those still felt like an end product you reach after creating the model. Zero professional 3D modelers I've talked to at work have ever heard of Daz, and when I explain what it does it's just...totally baffling to them. Like, why would you want to just render things, a render isn't art on its own, it's just a nicely-presented image of your model. So when 3D artists are using premade assets and getting well known for their work, I kind of wonder if there's reluctance to talk about it because it might be perceived as cheating at 3D. Once you reveal you didn't make the model, it's kind of like, "Then why did you make a picture of it?" even if the picture is the only way anyone experiences your art.

I picked up a bunch of old Digital Art Live magazines from my work and my friends got to watch me yell for five hours ("Look at this! Everyone was using Carrara as an art tool! They're actually discussing Daz as a thing artists should pick up!"), but it was very surreal to see what professional attitudes were toward programs like this when they were brand new compared to now. I would love to find a way to talk about this on a large scale and frame it as being similar to game screenshots and cosplay and photography, or even doll collecting--things I think DS has a lot in common with--because it makes it less about doing 3D like the pros (even now my impostor syndrome addled brain balks at that--no I can't! That's magic!) and more about discovering a new tool to do the things they already love. 

The reason I started looking into 3D tools for my project in the first place was that one of my original worst nightmares happened: I turned 35 and suddenly my drawing hand is in really bad shape. I think about how all the people I know who want to get their ideas out but for many reasons can't do it through drawing; I know that if I hadn't found it, I probably wouldn't be making art at all. 

Greetings,

If memory serves me correctly, I believe this will be my first post!

I wouldn't say I'm brand-spanking new to DAZ and 3D in general - I started exploring 3D with DAZ/Sketchup/Blender back in circa May 2015 . . . but within a few weeks eventually I back-burnered Blender/Sketchup because DAZ is a heck of a lot easier to use and get decent results with - but I have the opportunity to render in DAZ/Iray only during my spare time . . . so while I began this wonderful hobby of 3D art several years ago, I very much consider myself to still be a beginner.

Very recently I also began getting black renders in Iray and for me the fix was to go into the "Render Settings" tab and change the "Render Mode" parameter to "Interactive".

Otherwise, in the "Render Settings" tab under the "Environment" parameter my "Environment Mode" is set "Dome and Scene", the "Dome Mode" setting is "Infinite Sphere", and "Draw Dome" is set to "On". For me this works even with no spotlights, distant lights, etc. in the scene, and also if my camera "Headlamp Mode" is set to "Off".

I'm using DAZ edition 4.12.1.118 Pro under Windows 10 Home 64-bit running on a GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card with (from memory - I don't know how to tell exactly and confirm on my computer) 4GB of GPU memory.

Caveat: the black rendering for me has been inconsistent and sometimes whenever I create a new scene from scratch then inexplicably I get black renders again even if I didn't change anything under my "Render Settings" tab. For me the fix for this is to go back to "Render Settings" and toggle the "Render Mode" back to "Photoreal" (keeping all the other settings above the same).

I hope ths response is helpful because as a beginner I certainly know the frustration of getting nowhere after rendering a scene. Thank goodness for these forums and all the artists out there who are guiding others. In all of the other technical posts I've read if an issue was one I had encountered and solved before some poster before me had already responded and proffered the same solution I would have suggested, so I didn't see any need to beat a dead horse. However, responding to this query seemed like it would be helpful. I hope it puts you on track to solving the issue, and I apologize if it came to late but I am mostly just a lurker look over the forums only occasionally. Notwithstanding I admit that potentially helping out someone else feels very gratifying and motivates me to go to the newbie forum and formally introduce myself. Who knows, perhaps I might even upload some renders.

Anyway, enough of my mindless bantering. Good luck with solving the issue if you haven't solved it already.

Thank you for the info here. This is something that I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to work around. Still have not figured out a way to export a Sketchup model and import it into Daz so that the textures (not just shaders) in will apply correctly. I have SU Pro and have been through every option and export file format.

Have you found a way to make this work?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

join and grab it from here

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/21024f61-8715-4452-b939-79fe281f82b3/Castelia-City

save as sketchup 2020

grab and register this
https://pcon-planner.com/en/download/

and export an obj

seems fine but with my CPU being 100% used by Carrara I am not going to try and render it right now 

some people just cant be helped.  i edited my original post to make it a bit clearer.

Just remember, English may not be their first language and Google translate doesn't always give the clearest indication of what is being said.

as an aside

bit off topic but the sort of hurdles one faces not using DAZ content

obj files from Unreal Engine give me my own personal hell in Carrara because it has a file name length limit, I have to be very creative with find and replace using notepad and on the mtl and obj files, even though they actually work out the box in DAZ studio too, it also needs the quotations.

I have the fun job now facing me of converting about 100 FBX files too which are encrypted and use an image format only DAZ studio can actually read out of all my softwares namely dds, using third party models certainly can be a minefield of frustration. (I need to export as obj with converted jpg images for all my other softwares)

OMG don't get me started on Trimble 3D Warehouse sketchup files  I have found a handy ArchVis converter though for those.

I'm looking for a model of the SA-2 Samson helicopters from Avatar.  The only free ones I've found so far are for GTA-5

There is one in SketchUp format; so it will take a little work to convert it: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/fccf5f7bb4ee5d80a41eea4ec6ecb063/RDA-Samson-SA-2

i would really love to see the copper sexy console room or the chrystal mystery console room made

I found this: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/c8866b9dabb5cf8aca08066b31d87923/TARDIS-control-room-updated-March-2017
 

The image shown isn't very good but it's a sketchup image so one should not expect it to be.
Download the Collada version to convert into something useful in Poser or DAZ with these sketchup models. Also, it will almost certainly need to be scaled and materials set.

California class USS Cerritos

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/dcd79639-86e3-4b3f-a9dc-f5bd2caee267/USS-Cerritos

someone already tried doing the mesh

I am really excited about this model. It is one car that I can just barely remember. I spazzed when I saw it. It is a Sketchup conversion I did. This was the original color for this car, the patriotic red, white and blue. Made by AMC, it was called The rebel, and this limited version was called "The Machine". Here it is in all it's glory. 

I am really excited about this model. It is one car that I can just barely remember. I spazzed when I saw it. It is a Sketchup conversion I did. This was the original color for this car, the patriotic red, white and blue. Made by AMC, it was called The rebel, and this limited version was called "The Machine". Here it is in all it's glory. 

True, Skecthup can be strange.  There are some plugins that can look for and try to correct flipped faces, but I agree that mapping is .... odd...

Love the Chevy!

I do this...I export the Sketchup model as a .3ds model (sometimes in parts for opening doors, hoods, tires etc.). The I open each 3ds file up in Poseray. It usually is kinds rough and edges are not rounded well. I then hit the "groups" tab at the top. Then I select  "weld vertices" and then after it stops, I select "recalculate normals". It will tick for a few seconds and then POOF...the model is perfectly smoothed. Huge difference. Then export as .obj and import into Daz and apply textures and material colors. Most will usuall already have them applied when taken into Poseray. This is my method and it works great for me...as you can see with these renders. Here is one more...hahaha....It is a  red 1966 Sunbeam Tiger. The same car agent 86, Maxwell Smart, had on the TV show "Get Smart" back in 1966. I tried to put it near a street curb like he did in the intro to the show.

This GTO has been around for a while, but it has been taken back into Sketchup and tweeked and finished out real nice.

Nice Ones!

Sketchup models can be a great source.. just got to watchout for flipped normals on some faces..

If you have ever seen a UV template for one of their models, it looks very weird. It isn't setup with quads like many are. It is a wide scattered sets of triads. They can't be mapped in any other program. I made a Gibson Les Paul guitar and in order to get different top colors and textures, I had to make the top in Daz where I could map it for textures. It turned out really nice and I got lots of tops for it. Point is, it is not UV mapped like any other. Here are a few more I did. This is a real nice 1957 Chevy Two door, two poler.

Nice Ones!

Sketchup models can be a great source.. just got to watchout for flipped normals on some faces..