Features that you could slap yourself for not figuring out sooner.

Stinger

L'Adair said:

I can't believe I didn't share this one first...!

In the Progressive Render settings for Iray is an On/Off button for Quality. If you turn it off, Iray stops trying to reach convergence, leaving Max Samples and Max Time as the only limits to your render. And if you set Max Time to 0, (zero,) you've essentially disabled that limit as well. Then you can use Max Samples to control how long your image renders. And if the default limit of 15000 samples isn't enough, you can go into the parameter's settings and turn limits off.

I now have a file that is loaded at startup and New which is set up that way as the default. I like to let my renders run at night, while I'm sleeping, and when I get up, I decide whether or not to continue rendering. Assuming it hasn't finished already.

Thank you for this!  This will really shave off a lot of time on my Iray renders!

BurstAngel

Are there any tutorials on how to use the geometry editor tool? I've never used it.

 

MelanieL

BurstAngel said:

Are there any tutorials on how to use the geometry editor tool? I've never used it.

 

Novica has one about using the Geometry Editor to create new material zones here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/166896/the-material-zone-geometry-tool-tutorial-shaders/p1

Redz also did something about how to use it in a G3F to G8F morph transfer thread - I'll try and track that one down.

BurstAngel

THANK YOU!

mtl1

L'Adair said:

D-Form!

I tinkered with using D-Formers a couple years ago, but didn't really understand what I was doing, even with the really good YT video I watched on using them. (I needed them for my first ever published render... and what a poor job I did, too! lol) It was last December when I needed to modify the reins for this image that I really spent the time needed to understand the tool, at least to the extent needed to get the job done. Since then, I've used D-Form a lot. Here are some of the things I've learned, (some of which are quite basic, but included for anyone who's never tried to use D-Form):

• D-Form loads parented to the object selected.
• You can name the D-Form before it's applied. Very handy if you need multiple morphs to fix an issue.
• There are three parts to the D-form: the field, the base, and the actual deformer tool, (which is parented to the base.)
• The D-Form field loads to whatever size is needed to encompass the entire object. At 100%, the field is very small.
• With the field selected, you will see colored dots, from bright red to bright yellow. The red will affect the object the most, and the yellow will affect the object the least.
• The field transforms are separate from the base/tool. Move, Rotate and Scale to place the D-Form where you need the change.
• The base and tool load in the object center. Move the base to reposition the tool where it is most convenient for you. You can also resize the base to make the tool larger or smaller to fit inside your preview window.
• Any transforms you do to the tool will affect the object. (That's the point, right?) So be sure to use the base for repositioning, etc.
• When you "Spawn" the morph, all the existing D-Forms will be used. So if you don't want to combine D-Forms, make sure to spawn the morph, removing the D-Form(s) for that morph, before creating another D-Form.

Now that I know what I'm doing, somewhat, I use D-Forms a lot.

Oh, my tip to add onto this: You can manually paint the D-Former influence! Just go into the D-Former Field, change the influence to weight-map, then select the object and add the appropriate weight map :) No more messing with spherical fields!

L'Adair

mtl1 said:

L'Adair said:

D-Form!

I tinkered with using D-Formers a couple years ago, but didn't really understand what I was doing, even with the really good YT video I watched on using them. (I needed them for my first ever published render... and what a poor job I did, too! lol) It was last December when I needed to modify the reins for this image that I really spent the time needed to understand the tool, at least to the extent needed to get the job done. Since then, I've used D-Form a lot. Here are some of the things I've learned, (some of which are quite basic, but included for anyone who's never tried to use D-Form):

• D-Form loads parented to the object selected.
• You can name the D-Form before it's applied. Very handy if you need multiple morphs to fix an issue.
• There are three parts to the D-form: the field, the base, and the actual deformer tool, (which is parented to the base.)
• The D-Form field loads to whatever size is needed to encompass the entire object. At 100%, the field is very small.
• With the field selected, you will see colored dots, from bright red to bright yellow. The red will affect the object the most, and the yellow will affect the object the least.
• The field transforms are separate from the base/tool. Move, Rotate and Scale to place the D-Form where you need the change.
• The base and tool load in the object center. Move the base to reposition the tool where it is most convenient for you. You can also resize the base to make the tool larger or smaller to fit inside your preview window.
• Any transforms you do to the tool will affect the object. (That's the point, right?) So be sure to use the base for repositioning, etc.
• When you "Spawn" the morph, all the existing D-Forms will be used. So if you don't want to combine D-Forms, make sure to spawn the morph, removing the D-Form(s) for that morph, before creating another D-Form.

Now that I know what I'm doing, somewhat, I use D-Forms a lot.

Oh, my tip to add onto this: You can manually paint the D-Former influence! Just go into the D-Former Field, change the influence to weight-map, then select the object and add the appropriate weight map :) No more messing with spherical fields!

That only works if you know what you're doing with weight maps. I'm clueless with those. Know of a good tutorial or helpful thread?

marble

bdsinger said:

I animate keyframe by keyframe, and it has to be the day I discovered if you make two consecutive frames identical, it nullifies the over and undershoot.

I found, to my utter frustration, that animating by tweaking keyframe by keyframe caused a lot of jitters in the movement. One of these days I'll get the hang of Graphmate to smooth out those jitters but, in the meantime, I try to leave as much space as possible between keyframes and let the program tween smoothly.

Chezjuan

Drop targets... (left click + alt/drag and drop prop/figure/item into scene where the little yellow circle appears. 

I've been using DS for over a year and just figured this out today... I would have so much time back if I had read the docs earlier :)

 

AlienRenders

I sometimes remote desktop into my machine with my tablet. The one thing that doesn't work is rotating the view as it flies all over the place including sliding dials. Does anyone know of a workaround? Maybe keyboard shortcuts to slowly rotate the view? Does that exist?

TIP:

Here my most useful tip ever. If your renders ever start to not render quite right or start to take way too long for no apparent reason (this includes iRay in the viewport), click the "Defaults" button next to the Render engine dropdown in Render settings. You'll have to re-apply your settings, but lots of stuff should start working properly again.

To do the same (ie. fix issues) with a figure that is deformed weirdly for no reason, close and re-launch DAZ Studio. Make sure you're in the new scene. Load a default G2F, G3F or G8F or whatever base character. Now your morphs should work including character icons. For some reason, loading a base figure in an empty scene seems to fix a lot of morph issues that clearing the cache won't.

 

tkdrobert

Chezjuan said:

Drop targets... (left click + alt/drag and drop prop/figure/item into scene where the little yellow circle appears. 

I've been using DS for over a year and just figured this out today... I would have so much time back if I had read the docs earlier :)

 

OHH that is a good one!  I didn't know about that one either.

L'Adair

Okay, time to revive this thread.

I think it's sort of a no-brainer we don't think about, but selecting an object and using Ctrl+C will copy the Transforms for the object, (Translate, Rotation, and Scale.) Select another object and use Ctrl+V to apply the copied transforms.

There are so many ways that can be used to make your workflow easier. One thing I like to do when I create instance groups is to drag the original into the group, select it, Ctrl+C it, then one by one, apply the transforms so all the instances are in the same place as the original. I then drag the original back to where I started, (which may or may not be parented to something else.) Now all my instances are easy to find. This works really well when the object is small, like buttons.

But I did a palm-slap earlier today. Like a lot of people, I've been toying with the new dForce and was happy with the results. I moved the figure to where I wanted her, moved her up so her shoes were on top of the pavement, and so on. Then I realized the pose was for high-heeled shoes, but the sandals she was wearing didn't have a heel. So I changed shoes, which modified her feet and threw off the draping of the dress a bit.

Well, I don't know if it makes a difference, but for now at least, I prefer doing my sims with the figure at world center. I was thinking what a pain it was going to be to write down all the transforms when a "lightbulb" turned on. Ha! I created a small plane, Y positive. I copied the transforms from G3F to the plane. Moved G3F to world center, (and used Ctrl+D on her.) A second plane at world center worked for a floor to collide with, though it turned out it wasn't needed. I ran Simulate, and when it was done, I used Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to reposition G3F exactly where I had her before.

Now that's something I wish I'd thought of years ago!

grinch2901

One I haven't seen posted but I use all the time. If you use a d-former on an  item, you can select the item and go to the D-Form tab. There is an option to "spawn morph". If you do it, the original d-former can be deleted and the morph dialed in and used as any other morph. Very useful at times.

gederix

L'Adair said:

Well, I don't know if it makes a difference, but for now at least, I prefer doing my sims with the figure at world center. I was thinking what a pain it was going to be to write down all the transforms when a "lightbulb" turned on. Ha! I created a small plane, Y positive. I copied the transforms from G3F to the plane. Moved G3F to world center, (and used Ctrl+D on her.) A second plane at world center worked for a floor to collide with, though it turned out it wasn't needed. I ran Simulate, and when it was done, I used Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to reposition G3F exactly where I had her before.

Now that's something I wish I'd thought of years ago!

I use this trick a lot (mainly for when premade poses move the character and deselecting transforms in the option dialogue breaks the pose) but with a null primitive rather than a plane.

Which reminds me of a quick posing trick - for when you are going to apply a premade full body pose to a figure but you do not want it to affect for example the right arm (which is already posed with a sword or whatever), select the right collar, go to scene pane, rclick on the rcollar and select children, go to parameters tab options dropdown menu, select memorize selected items pose, apply your desired ful body pose preset, back to parameters tab menu and restore selected items pose. If you deselected the rcollar and children in the process you will have to reselect before restoring I think.

Wonderland

This may be an obvious one, one that I learned in Poser that works in DS for expanding the use of many hair models and sometimes clothes. If you remove limits from length parameters you can make hair or skirts/dresses/pants longer or shorter than intended. Extremes may cause distortion, especially when going shorter, but you can play with it and get cool results.  As obvious as this seems, it can really expand the usefulness of items. I especially love it for making short/medium hair longer. You can get some surprising results. Try it on Georgia Hair, you can really get nice long flowing hair! 

BlueIrene

Embarrassingly obvious, but until tonight, not to me...

I've often wished there was an easy way to save resources by quickly deleting items not shown in the viewport when a large set is loaded, and I'm almost blushing to admit that it only just occurred to me that all I have to do is click on each object in the viewport to highlight it in the scene tab, then make it invisible. Do this until the viewport is empty of everything in the set, then go down the list in the scene tab and delete everything in the set that has an open eye icon beside it. Then unhide everything that I wanted to keep. This is actually quicker to do than it is to write, and takes no time at all.

If you too were born blonde, then this tip is for you :)

MarkIsSleepy

Astracadia said:

Embarrassingly obvious, but until tonight, not to me...

I've often wished there was an easy way to save resources by quickly deleting items not shown in the viewport when a large set is loaded, and I'm almost blushing to admit that it only just occurred to me that all I have to do is click on each object in the viewport to highlight it in the scene tab, then make it invisible. Do this until the viewport is empty of everything in the set, then go down the list in the scene tab and delete everything in the set that has an open eye icon beside it. Then unhide everything that I wanted to keep. This is actually quicker to do than it is to write, and takes no time at all.

If you too were born blonde, then this tip is for you :)

You might also be able to select everything in the viewport and then just press control+shift+i to invert the selection, then hit delete. No need for the steps where you hide and unhide things.

BlueIrene

MDO2010 said:

Astracadia said:

Embarrassingly obvious, but until tonight, not to me...

I've often wished there was an easy way to save resources by quickly deleting items not shown in the viewport when a large set is loaded, and I'm almost blushing to admit that it only just occurred to me that all I have to do is click on each object in the viewport to highlight it in the scene tab, then make it invisible. Do this until the viewport is empty of everything in the set, then go down the list in the scene tab and delete everything in the set that has an open eye icon beside it. Then unhide everything that I wanted to keep. This is actually quicker to do than it is to write, and takes no time at all.

If you too were born blonde, then this tip is for you :)

You might also be able to select everything in the viewport and then just press control+shift+i to invert the selection, then hit delete. No need for the steps where you hide and unhide things.

Oooh! That's a better idea :) I'll try that next time.

Havos

Astracadia said:

MDO2010 said:

Astracadia said:

Embarrassingly obvious, but until tonight, not to me...

I've often wished there was an easy way to save resources by quickly deleting items not shown in the viewport when a large set is loaded, and I'm almost blushing to admit that it only just occurred to me that all I have to do is click on each object in the viewport to highlight it in the scene tab, then make it invisible. Do this until the viewport is empty of everything in the set, then go down the list in the scene tab and delete everything in the set that has an open eye icon beside it. Then unhide everything that I wanted to keep. This is actually quicker to do than it is to write, and takes no time at all.

If you too were born blonde, then this tip is for you :)

You might also be able to select everything in the viewport and then just press control+shift+i to invert the selection, then hit delete. No need for the steps where you hide and unhide things.

Oooh! That's a better idea :) I'll try that next time.

Don;t forget that objects off camera can still have a significant effect on the final render. They can either appear on a reflected surface, or more likely, will affect the lighting of the scene if they are blocking some light source. This is particularly true for indoor renders. A white wall behind the camera could be bouncing off a fair bit of light, and this effect vanishes if it is hidden.

BlueIrene

Havos said:

Astracadia said:

MDO2010 said:

Astracadia said:

Embarrassingly obvious, but until tonight, not to me...

I've often wished there was an easy way to save resources by quickly deleting items not shown in the viewport when a large set is loaded, and I'm almost blushing to admit that it only just occurred to me that all I have to do is click on each object in the viewport to highlight it in the scene tab, then make it invisible. Do this until the viewport is empty of everything in the set, then go down the list in the scene tab and delete everything in the set that has an open eye icon beside it. Then unhide everything that I wanted to keep. This is actually quicker to do than it is to write, and takes no time at all.

If you too were born blonde, then this tip is for you :)

You might also be able to select everything in the viewport and then just press control+shift+i to invert the selection, then hit delete. No need for the steps where you hide and unhide things.

Oooh! That's a better idea :) I'll try that next time.

Don;t forget that objects off camera can still have a significant effect on the final render. They can either appear on a reflected surface, or more likely, will affect the lighting of the scene if they are blocking some light source. This is particularly true for indoor renders. A white wall behind the camera could be bouncing off a fair bit of light, and this effect vanishes if it is hidden.

Thanks. These days I'll have considered that before deciding what I don't want in a render, but it might be useful for others reading who still have to learn from making the mistakes I've made previously :)

SauronLivez

Astracadia said:

Another 'why haven't I been doing this sooner?' thing is adjusting hair when trying to fit it to a figure before parenting. Viewing it in wireframe mode was the best I could come up with to enable me to see what I was doing with the scalp, until the day came (after many months of doing it in this dopey fashion!) when I realised I could select the material zones of everything except the scalp and hide them, quickly adust the hair (the scalp of which is now clearly visible) then bump the opacity of the material zones back up again. D'oh! :)

Awesome tip! you don't know how long I've been doing it the 'old' way you described! Can't wait to fit some new hair on an old character now!

5200north

nonesuch00 said:

DaWaterRat said:

Better still, you can look through distant and spotlights (select from the camera dropdown) to "see" their position...

Oh, that is nice

Oh my god, this is once of the most flustrating problems with daz studio and itd be right in front of me from the beginning. I've spent what seems like hours clicking and clicking TINIEST LITTLE BOXES, TINY TINY TIN BOXES UNDER MORE TINY TINY BOXES! 

You are my new hero

Ryzen said:

You can hide lights and entire characters with groups.

Create -> New Group.
Parent character/light to group.
Hide the group, and everything under it disappears.  No need to uncheck a dozen checkmarks to do it.

 

JQP

Best thread ever.

On the subject of the Alt key, I was recently semi-shocked to discover someone who didn't know that Alt-clicking a parameter resets it to zero. Then I realised that I knew about it because it's always worked that way in Poser, and DAZ sensibly kept the same shortcut in DS. The person had never used Poser, so wasn't aware of it.

I never knew about this, and I used Poser for many years before moving to DS. Thank you very much. I was just thinking for the umpteenth time that they need a "zero" button on parameter dials, and couldn't figure out why they didn't...

You can hide lights and entire characters with groups.

Create -> New Group.
Parent character/light to group.
Hide the group, and everything under it disappears.  No need to uncheck a dozen checkmarks to do it.
 

Yep. I use this a lot, which is why I haven't moved on from DS 4.8 yet. Groups don't work for me in later versions (parenting and unparenting via the scene pane locks up the app). Unfortunately, up to my current version, there's been a bug in group visibility inheritance; groups parented to other groups don't inherit visibility properly. If you toggle vis on the parent, the child node forgets what its previous setting was. E.g., if I turn off vis on a parented group, turn off vis on its parent group, then turn vis back on for the parent group, the parented group's vis gets turned back on, when it should stay invisible throughout.

Do this with your light and camara rig to move them all at once (or just parent them to each other)

Do it with each individual character to render one a a time.

Do this with your set to turn it invisible to get clutter out of the way and work on the main model's pose or texture

They're also good for streamlining the save process in scenes with stuff that slows down save times. I put my main posing figures into A, the figures conformed to them into B, and everything else into C. The stuff that slows down save times is always in B and C, and conveniently, I work on that stuff far less frequently than I do on the stuff in A. Every so often I save the whole scene, but mostly I'm just saving A as a subset, and it goes really fast. When I'm ready to close the scene, I save everything together. Saves a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted twiddling my thumbs.

I usually part out my scenes for quicker opening and merging, too. Sometimes I want all the hair that goes well with the character, and sometimes I just want the two or three best, etc.

I think my favorite part of groups is that you can use hierarchical poses on them. Toss five figures into a group, pose them, select the group, and save as hierarchical pose. Now you have a group pose that you can re-use (with a couple of caveats; TL;DR version, make sure you use the pose on the same group of base figures, added to the group in the same order, if you want reliable results).

~

I just learned that view translation is a lot more interesting when the figure's hip translation dials are locked. When they're unlocked the figure moves around when you drag a part, which ruined the appeal for me. When they're locked the figure stays in place, and only what I find to be the appropriate nodes are moved. I just discovered this today, so I plan to start messing around with view translate in the near future. I've long ignored the several methods for posing figures, including the pose tab, the powerpose, and IIRC another which has slipped my mind. I just use the parameters tab. Very old school, I guess. Maybe I should try diving back into some of those alternatives...

In the sene tab, if you select multiple bones that move in the same direction, (for example the left and right foot bones of a figure,) then in the parameters tab, also select the same, you can move them at the same time.

You can also rename the transform dials so they show up as duplicates in the various panes, and can thus be selected at once. Can't recall which figure, but recently I had to do this for exactly this reason (the dials were named differently on different nodes, obviously).

Biggest thing for me relatively recently was the ability to clone parameter dials to other nodes. I kept trying to sort the hideousness of the root node parameter groups, but the data would never save properly. A bunch of it was always resetting itself to factory defaults, which is worse than not having the feature at all, really (it makes an even bigger mess than you started out with). Someone here (probably the esteemed Mr. Haseltine) told me about cloning/creating aliases (on the hip node by default, but wherever you like), and it turns out they save properly and stay put, at least far better than the originals do, to the point where I haven't noticed any orphans. I now have all of my morphs impeccably sorted into three main groups on my hip node: pose controls, head, body. I can save just the head or just the body of a shape I've dialed in very quickly, I just uncheck the root node box, and select the box I want on the hip node. Of course, finding parameter dials is much easier, once they've been properly sorted. Protip, if you hide all the dials you've cloned elsewhere, the dials for new morphs you install are way easier to find (and add to your cloned dial collection).

Are there any tutorials on how to use the geometry editor tool? I've never used it.

If you kinda know your way around 3d, you should just dive in and start playing with it. It's powerful, well-implemented, and intuitive, IMO. You can save out specific parts of a prop, redo any or all material zones, etc.

Somebody mentioned the memorize/restore process. Trouble I have with that is, it seems to flag non-zero (/non-default-value) settings as default and hide them from the "currently used" list. (You can see the values change from white to grey in the parameters tab). Which pretty much destroys most of its usefulness, IMO.

JQP

I had to make a separate comment about dragging and dropping content into DS. How the holy #(@(*! didn't I know about this? And from Windows Explorer, too? I am simply flabbergasted that I never knew about this. I've been using DS for years and years and years. Like since early version 2, and I had no idea. Now I want to know how long the feature's been there, so I can figure out how long I've been completely oblivious. In my defense, double-clicking on DS content in Explorer doesn't load it into DS, IIRC, so maybe I just assumed based on that.

Now I'm wondering if someone has made a widget for Internet Explorer (or a DS-oriented Internet Explorer replacement program), so that content displays like in the DS library ("combining" the image and the actual preset). I know about P3DO and most of the other third party options, but the only one I ever found useful was Advanced Library for Poser, which has been showing its age ever since the DUF format came out (ALP can't differentiate the various DUF types, which seriously degrades the search function).

Now I'm turning over in my mind everything I know about Windows Explorer, its enhancements, and its replacements, wondering how I can speed up my workflows. For one thing, I use a great WE widget called QTTabBar that turns WE into a tabbed file explorer. It has a ton of other features, too. I've long wanted a DS library with tabs.

Nath

One I learned on Facebook: you can apply partial poses by selecting the relevant bodypart(s) you want to apply the pose to and doing CTRL-click on the pose you want to apply. Then select 'selected' for both Nodes and Propagation.

Blind Owl

If ever a thread deserved a sticky...

Robert Freise

Blind Owl said:

If ever a thread deserved a sticky...

+1

Cybersox

 

 

Blind Owl said:

If ever a thread deserved a sticky...

No kidding! 

Here's one that doesn't exactly count as a DAZ trick, but I imagine a lot of folks can relate:  I've always had a problem watching a lot of video tutorials, especially long ones, as even on a 30" monitor, a lot of the text and fine detail can be hard to see and no two people ever seem to record at the same volume.  Plus I have a tendency to fidget if my hands aren't occupied.  Then we recently bought a TV with a built in ROKU box and wifi receiver, so these days I watch all the YouTube and Vimeo tutorials on the bigger screen while making and eating breakfast and adjusting the voluime with the remote.  So much simpler and more comfortable!

 

Serene Night

This is a dumb thing but I don’t get how to move the sun sky dials when they are in a scene with sun sky mode.......  is there a trick to it? 

NorthOf45

Under Render Presets/Iray there is "Sun Dial Set". This will put a sundial control at the origin of the scene. The elevation and azimuth (heading) dials are controled from the "Sun Chain" node, or drag the "Sun" node around, but that only moves in a limited manner, so you need to be in the right position. In Environment, set "SS Sun Node" to "Sun Dial -> Sun Base -> Sun Chain -> Sun" node. Now the light will follow the sun dial settings.

Otherwise, the Environment will expect Latitude, Longitude, and time at the location of the render, which might not be what you want, and trying to figure out where and when you want to be could be a real pain.

I hope that's what you were asking...

Szark

I have a start up scene loaded with a Camera (headlamp OFF) and a Sun Dial due to me woirking in Iray much more than 3DL these days

.