What are some essential content to buy or for free?
captainalvord
Posts: 126
I played around with Daz3d for a few months back in 2012. Have some things I bought and freebies I downloaded from back then for V4 and Gen1. Been browsing the content now available for daz3d and been playing around with my old stuff to get familiar with the latest version of daz. Been enjoying myself and am looking to spend a little bit on this hobby.
So whats available now that you would consider to be a must have product? Can be paid content or free content. Right now the Gen3 male and female head and body morphs is on my list. Im guessing V7 would be another essential.
If you were to be starting out now what products on your content folder would you not want to without?
Post edited by captainalvord on
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I'm brand new too, but here's my ieeas for just starting out.
GET THE PC+ MEMBERSHIP
The ad reads like it is...saves you its cost several times over.
Free stuff...bonus discounts etc....
Pick a generation and stay close to it. Like say you go Genesis 3 Male/Female...make sure every product you buy or download is for them.
I would avoid anything that uses a person.s name and a number as that does limit the use-right-out-the-box-as-is. You'll then need to get little utilities to make this set of clothes fit this person, hair....poses...it starts a scrolling list of challenges.
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Learn the sales system as best you can and watch the fastgrab and free stuff categories in the shop.
Take advantage of March Madness!
More later or others can chime in....
And once I did go with a Gen 3, I'd get all the face and body morphs.
For hair, I'd look at the newer sets that have morphs and alternate styles included. They will have an extensive list of editable/adjustable features in the description.
http://www.daz3d.com/streaming-hair-for-genesis-3-female-s
This is a new hair release (that also comes in a bundle)
Look at the feature list. 10 hair colors means you can probably match it to any hair you've got and get over. This product has built in longevity and can be used across several characters.
I try and look for products that have an extensive shelf life and/or can be broken down and combined with other products to add usefulness.
I try and avoid things that can only be used once, unless it's iconic and can stay the same item across renders.
Old stuff is deep dish discount so there is a treasure trove of props, places and things to be grabbed. (get that PC+ thing going).
When it comes to older stuff, I get clothing and such for extras (not the main characters) - cheap wear-once items.
Some stuff for plain Genesis figures.
Facegen is a big deal right now. It lets you grab faces - and apply them + textures and basically make your own figures.
No...one....else.....
Okay. For POSES you want the ones that mix and match. The arms from here, the top portion of the body from this other pose...and then you can add the lower body from a different pose.
It lets you almost roll your own poses by combining bits of several poses.
http://www.daz3d.com/dynamo-poses-for-genesis-2-female-s
Products like this one, have that functionality.
NOT saying that you can't see a pose set and fall in love, but as far as bang for the buck..
For backgrounds, you'll look into the many different approaches. I tend to choose products by how they work.
I like easy environments best because it's...well....easy..it has everything you need to render an area.
BUT! If you need larger areas or want to cover a lot of gound, you can look at generators that create the area. It'll give you more freedom for landscape- shape and such...Terradome3....
RENDERING
There's a lot to this too, so I would get the iray product. http://www.daz3d.com/render-studio-iray
It comes with presets so you can get up and running fairly quickly. I tend to use draft to get an idea of what I have going on and scale up depending on my needs. You might have a better grasp of Daz than me, but I'm trying to learn everything at once to get going so a render-helper was much appreciated.
The Forum
Probably the most important aspect so far. Tons of threads and probably every question or issue has been at least mentioned somewhere.
Super helpful mods and veteran users. Even the vendors can be found contributing.
Extremely nice and patient members, answering and suggesting fixes. It's a nice oasis and fountain of...well...yeah...you get the point.
So I mean that to say ASK AWAY. You'd be suprised how many "dumb" questions aint so dumb. And if YOU encounter an issue, someone else has been dealing with it too.
Think about mixing and matching sets of clothing outfits. A lot of times you can buy basic stuff and accessorize it with a few things and now it's futuristic/goth/punk/urban etc.
Get up on sites and links mentioned in the freebies.
WISHLIST
I have a hard time with the search functions apparently. Lol. 'Wishlist' anything you find interesting or simply want.
See an item, click the heart icon on the main product landing page and you can sort through them and see if any of them are on sale. Sometimes I'll grab a random favorite if there's a little bit of room left in my 'salary cap'.
Don't forget to sort things by LOW to HIGH to see what's affordable for the time being.
I recommend the PC+ Membership too, but if you are not ready for that yet try some of the following
1. Sort the DAZ catalogue by price and look at the items costing nothing. There are about 2 or 3 pages of things that will give you a few things to play with
2. ShareCG is an excellent place to find freebies amongst many others. renderosity, art raiders, evil innocence, zeddicus3d etc
Hard to say what I "would not want to be without"; so much depends on exactly what you want to play around with. I like figure drawing and cartoons so for me anything that can be "posed" (I'm told this was the original idea behind "Poser") is good enough for me, and Genesis 2 is just peachy... add a horse (of course) and some other animals, and "backgrounds" or scenes to put them in, and some shaders, textures and lights.
Some sets like the canyon extension by Dreamlight or Merlin's church may include a sun, or a moon, and some night-time which if you think about it are a more basic type of lighting from the get-go, compared to very specific portrait or bounce lights say. So I personally found them handy.
Be aware that some sets are not marked clearly in terms of how "rigid" they are, and some interiors or props are a bit more "accessible" than others, and that it sometimes takes a while to figure out how to chop them up and kitbash them to your liking.
Some primitives are surprisingly functional, or function in ways that you might not expect, for instance in the "Everyday Morphing Primitives" there is a simple terrain model that can be altered in a variety of ways... add shaders or BUMP texturing to that and voila it's ground, it's water, it can be whatever you want.
For texture and background ideas **I think** textures dot com is a DAZ partner site; at the very least I've seen ads for G3 series content on that site. You'll probably want an image editor of recent vintage to help modify textures and backgrounds - something that supports layers and allows warps and distortions. I always keep a more basic image editor handy as well - some people like Xnview for example.
Jeremy Birn (famous author) says the first thing you want to do is bevel all the sharp edges in your scene... again some models/sets make it easier to work this way than others.
Here is my most-recent render of my dog relaxing in his "castle" in Scotland after a hard day... you can see I've got all sorts of stuff going on here including a photograph of a real dog and a real couch, and one of a real "old fashioned" type of toy bunny rabbit, an easter decoration that I saw in a drug store.
The way I work, I like to take time off from a scene, and when I come back to it in a day or two say "new ideas" will come to mind - like there ought to be a second vending machine, filled with dog biscuits! These sorts of arising "needs" and trends are hard to predict.
Most of what I find essential for beginners just starting out:
Head and body morphs for whichever figure you think you'll use the most.
Some really good outfits with separate parts that look good for mixing and matching.
Some really good cloth shaders for easily retexturing outfits so you can use the same clothing over and over and they all look different.
Really good lights. Either HDR lights or a light set.
Those are just the basics to get started. Luckily, the last three can be free. There are lots of places with free clothing. If you're using Iray, HDR lighting is good and there are a few places with free ones. Check out the Freebies forum for links. ShareCG is a great place to find freebies, too.
Experiment a lot! Have fun with it. PC+ is a great option and it more than pays for itself especially if you get it on sale. Make sure you read how to deal with Paypal if you use that to buy the PC+ membership, though. They do strange things with subscriptions and it's best to cancel any kind of renewal on your Paypal account if you go that route.
Hand poses. You can speed up your work flow considerably with these.
I would not want to be without MaClean's Everyday Morphing Primitives, in fact, the entire
"Everyday" series for scene fillers...http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Maclean
Nurnie's Greebles 1 & 2. http://www.daz3d.com/nurnies-greebles-parts-and-pieces,
http://www.daz3d.com/nurnies-greebles-parts-and-pieces-vol-2
DZfire's Real Lights for DAZ Studio Iray http://www.daz3d.com/real-lights-for-daz-studio-iray
If you want to render "nude", you will need one of the "Pro" packs for your generation of choice, as the base males come without "equipment", and the females have more or less detailed texture only. Note that one Pro pack is enough to service your guys and gals of one generation (like, the Michael 7 gens will fit with any of the Genesis 3 Males)
Heh, this made me think of fig leaves - http://www.daz3d.com/rdna-leaf-jewels-crowns-and-necklaces. Ok so it's not exactly what we want in this case but if you really had to "gird G3M's loins"...! I also like how it's easy to make and position a thin black plane in front of your figure, like in, ah, "art" photography magazines of the early 1950's say.
Seriously on the topic of searching for leaves (or any cover-up or skin tone etc.) when it says "Merchant Leaves Resource" or "Leaves for Bryce" or "this is for Carrara", are those products still workable, in DAZ Studio? Ergo on the internet there's lots of .OBJ files that *can* be imported, particularly if you have or can make a UV map and you can paint a texture and so on. What exactly are these other types of products ("Merchant Resource...") for, I wonder. Because if they are ok for regular DS scenes then putting a scary-sounding name on them will not help sales, I should think.
Expanding on the "morphing terrain" a bit... I was playing around with putting the toon tank in a black and white vintage battle scene - like the Battle of the Bulge or something similar. I quickly pressed the terrain into service, to look like "beaten snow". Working on the snow some more, just a few clicks of the mouse turns the scene into... the surface of Mars!!!
Again this is done using ONLY the primitive shape -- it has controls for making it "bumpy" or undulating -- and a white shader for "snow" or a ground shader (J. Greenlees - Iray ground shaders) for dirt. Add some brown sky and a bit of gradient and lighten it up a bit to suggest the Martian dawn (or the setting sun) and voila!
I have a few ideas: First, get Daz Studio 4.9 (free). It comes with content too. For generics get Genesis Female (most of the clothes are made for females. Genesis 3 is the best to have since many new products are made for it. Get the genesis Morph packages for face and body, this will allow you to make many changes to your character. Note that each genesis package comes with lots of clothes, hair, morph, etc. Make sure you get at least one character with it's own skin/ texture to be able to put some realism in your image. You may also want at least one prop building or landscape so you can put something behind your character. A render without a background shows a checker board if there is nothing to render.in that spot.
When you have those basics, think about what kind of images you are going to make. This will allow you to really focus on what you want to get for your library. No sense getting modern clothes and accessories if you want to do sci-fi. Also, Daz products, for the most part, are really good quality. However the things can be very expensive. Even frugal people can wind up spending a lot of money!
There are websites with free content that can help you get enough things for your library to do images without being heavily invested in it. Two sites I like: Renderosity, items for sale and freebies. When you considering free stuff, keep a mind on what quality you want, but free is good when you start out. Many of their for sale items can be quite good. ShareGC is another good one for free content so you can learn before committing too much. The free sites have poses for characters too. Make sure to get poses for sale or from free sites. You won't be able to do it on your own and will get too frustrated.
I think there are lists in the forum that show you where freebie sites can be found. After that give it a try. Note that your first renders will be bad until you get a handle on it.. Just be patient. I hope you enjoy doing computer graphics, I know I do!