New guy. I have a project and I am looking for efficiency.
Hello all,
I need to put out a 28 page and covers graphic novel in then next 60 days. I do graphic design work often but daz is all new to me.
Story line is written.
Characters are outlined.
Now I need art. Budget for art is $1000.
I am looking for mentors.
Here are my thoughts so far.
Going with all genesis 3 right now.
I need black and mixed characters as well as a broad range of other characters.
If I understand the system. I can build my own characters with morphs. Head, body, ageing and so on? Am I wrong Here?
Bang for the buck bundles? Clothing, hair and characters?
What should I add to my cart to get started?
Scenes. I need houses, city blocks, Stores,inner city, Mansions as well as skyscrapers. Cars, pets and a whole list of props.
And is it just me or does the reach function on the store just suck ass... type in black female and WTF comes up..200 other things and 3 black females mixed in?!?!
Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.
Thank
Mark
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Comments
What type of comic is it? Scifi, steampunk, contemporary, heroic fantasy?
If you're looking for value for money and you need black characters I'd go with the Monique Pro bundle. It's 61% off right now and the skin is phenomenal. One of the best out there.
That's really ambitious. Good luck.
Join PC+Club. A lot of the items you are looking for are available for comparatevely lttle money. Otherwise, you'll blow you budget.
Look out for Zev0 and Sickleyield's morphs for aging and ethnecies.
Also, the Head and Body base shape packages for G3 male and female. Of the base characters, I'd recommend Monique 7/Darius 7, and Lee 7/Mei Lin 7.
You need a few "good skins" for your characters that you can then can trade between the various morph shapes. I recommend George, who's excellent to mix into other characters in small doses for reality. If you need genitalia, you will have to buy at least one Pro bundle for G3 male and female (like, Michael 7 and Victoria 7). Teenagers/children don't have gen materials, by the way. Oh, and watch out when you buy content; while clothes/hair can usually be traded between generations, characters, skins and poses are a bit more complicated.
As for people of various skin colours, you probably best just browse through the G3 categories instead of searching through the store search:
For cities, check out Stonemason. There's also a Resort Island set that has a skyscraper inner city, which is pretty neat. But for proper suggestions a bit more information about the style is neccessary.
You'd also probably want to invest into some pose sets, they usually help as starting points.
There's tons of more stuff... but the foremost question is, do you want to render in Iray or 3Delight? That's important if you are buying older content, like buildings, that often come with 3Delight materials only.
I'm doing a webcomic myself (see links below), and setting up a scene, including test renders, takes quite a bit of time. Also, if you render Iray, you need a decent nVidea graphiccard with a minimum of 4GB VRAM to get halfway decent render times. I render at a size of between 2600x2600 to 4000x4000, using a GTX980Ti, and are anywhere between an hour and several hours for the finished render.
Also, if you haven't, check out the base tut videos: https://www.daz3d.com/help/help-daz-3d-video-tutorials
For quite a lot of stuff, there are also free options available at other sites like https://www.renderosity.com/, https://www.sharecg.com/ and https://free3d.com/ (among many others). There's plenty of options for free buildings, rooms, interiors etc. there. Just watch out for the non-commercial tag.
For clothing one of the greatest sites is Wilmap's (Wendy's) site. All the basic stuff one could need can be found there.
There are also cheaper options (with more features) for genitalia available at a site specialised for stuff to Render erotica.
And You might want to think about using G3 for the main characters, while using Genesis and Genesis 2 for the "fill up figures". The reason being, that there is way more free stuff available for the earlier generations (including stuff like character morph dials, to make your own characters...) These older figures might not look that great in close-ups (depending on how much effort you want to put into finding better textures for them...) but can serve great for more global renders with many different not so important people in the picture.
Maidecker, unless you go back to generation 4, the Genesis generations all have good quality skins, but they are optimized for 3DL. No need to put them down. I'm using G2 for all my main characters, and putting them into the background is stupid, as they are heavier on the polygone count than G3 or G8. If anything, it is the other way around, the newer generations make good background fodder.
I ain't "putting them down" at all. It's just personal taste. And as I only started diddling with DAZ recently, I think of the G3/8 basic figures of being easier to use without having to go on a shopping spree, due to the inbuilt features. And as the proud owner of an Nvidia graphic card, I really like to use IRAY.
Some of said features are available for free for the Genesis and G2 figures, as is a great amount of morphs. Due to the absence of IRAY, these figures serve my purpose (!) better as background cannon camerafodder. Lots of different "persons" to put in the background without having to pay much for them and their stuff = camerafodder.
"might not look that great in close ups" "find better textures" is nor putting down something? I see. Good to know.
I'm also rendering my comic in Iray, so all my "older characters" had to be brought over to Iray. They still use the same textures, just with an Iray shader as base.
But no matter what you use for the front rows... Because I have a lot of people in my scenes, I'm very conscious about the problems of fitting all the things on your card. The older characters have more geometry, and size maps are usually the same as with newer generations. They also come with normal maps, some are HD, which all adds to the load. If you strip down most of the maps from a G2 or a G8 and set it to base resolution, the G8 wins for background use because it consumes less memory.
But then, I just base this on a couple of hundred renders, so... whatever. You do your things. Happy renderings.
Your main problem is the time and money, 1000$ is not a lot, specially if you didn't surf database for weeks to know well the possible purchases or if you buy out of time and when there's not optime sales for them. I expended each month for the last two years from 400$ to 1000$ without pause, but I still have a wishlist of ten pages, and I only buy on good sales
Save your money, dedicate time to surf DAZ everyday, take it calmy for 6 months with Platinum Club membership, study suggestions, compare products, and wait for the best sale for them to hit. At the end you will have x4 more tools and more suited for your purpose. While you wait for the right sales to happen and expend the money slowly, go search freebies and try to use them in DAZ.
Patience is always rewarding. At first I only invested 50$ or until 150$ a month.You could do similar for 6 months.
Buy Genesis 8 pro bundles at the right moment when are released, like now Claryssa. Is the cheaper way to get a lot of characters, clothing, poses, hairs and skins. Sometimes the rewards of pro bundles is what you really want. Example if you buy Claryssa now you can get Sunny 7 for free, and does have poses for acrobatic gymnasties that's very handy for an action graphic novel, and you could get dragon 3 pro bundle for free or another bundle. Start from there.
My advice is get all Pro Bundles when they are new released. Is more efficient to have more content. Usually 1 or 2 Pro Bundles are released each month.
Then have this https://www.daz3d.com/ej-ethnic-beauties-for-genesis-8-female-s
and use the free black and mixed skins of genesis 3 essentials and 8 than come with DAZ.
After some weeks when you have studied what tools, props and scenarios you need, go for it.
I sure hope "$1000 for art" means "$1000 for art supplies" and that's not what you're getting paid altogether.
If it is all for art supplies I'd suggest waiting until the next gift card sale and throwing it all into a gift card. That should net you at least an extra 11%.
Wait, halt, hold on a moment. This is explicitly for a commercial project, according to the person requesting information, and they're new, AND they have a time crunch.
Do not use items from free sites unless you want to spend time perusing licenses. Anything you purchase from Daz or Renderosity can be used in commercial projects, subject to the terms of the EULA; that's actually baked into the standard EULA for the sites. People putting items on free sites frequently restrict to personal use only, or explicitly forbid commercial use. Unless they want to dedicate a lot of time to going through the various licenses or confirming that they're allowed in commercial projects, working with the larger brokerages like Daz is probably the best way to work.
That said, the combination of restricted time and restricted budget and being new to the program are likely to make things ... difficult. To put it mildly.
And yes, the search function on the store is not the best. It works best to search using Google with site://www.daz3d.com/shop followed by your search term.
Also, if you make your purchases today -- Friday, January 26, 2018 -- there are several pro bundles in Fast Grab for 70% off. No idea if this will last all weekend long.
Also today (and for however long the banner lasts, which unfortunately is not stated anywhere): if you purchase one of the items on this page, you can also get a 10%-off gift card, which will help defray the costs somewhat.
That's why I included "Just watch out for the non-commercial tag" in my post. And from what I've seen during the last couple weeks going through the different sites offering freebies, about 75% of these come as "personal and commercial use allowed". And it's usually not very time consuming to check for these licenses either, as in most cases I've seen, the statement which use is supposed to be allowed is right there on the download page...
Yes, it's not too hard to find commercial use freebies. Just make sure for a graphic novel if you don't want a huge list of names added, don't take the ones that require credit for commerical use.
Also, honestly, with this short a deadline and no DS experience? Buy everything (and try to buy everything from DAZ so it works with Smart Content). You will at least probably spend less time figuring things out.
Zevo's Skinbuilder for Gen 3 Females would take care of your darker skins easily and its not difficult to use at all.
Also Sim Tenero's Randomizer will broaden your pool of characters exponentially. Find several sets of morphs )the Monique Pro Bundle was a good suggestion) Also Sickleyields Faces of Earth Africa will give you a great set of morphs to randomize. The Randomizer super super easy to use and you can create hundreds of characters very quickly. Quickest way to do it is add all the morphs you want to use and save it. Then its just a matter of loading the preset and clicking the button til you get something you like.
You will need to get a few morph bundles to get the different ages and shapes- genesis 3 body / face morphs, growing up for genesis 3 that kind of thing. Out the box you're going to be quite limited with what you can do especially when it comes to different ages.
$1000 can get you far if you're willing to wait for sales and get what you need as they come up, but as others have said I would definitely recommend getting the plat club as that will give you hundreds of cheap items and a base 30% on all daz originals.
2 months is a very short time to get up to speed and learn something you've never used before with a customer waiting. Not that it can't be done, but I see plenty of opportunities for time lost on stubborn frustrating little details that one will invariably struggle with (and eventually resolve or find workarounds for, but not immediately) that could easily cause you to miss the deadline and get all cranky at the same time. With that in mind, I would try sticking to the most basic of tasks for this first run. Unless you have reason to do otherwise or it negatively impacts your design, try to stick with out-of-the-box everything; characters, poses, etc. If you finish early, save a copy of that, THEN start the experimentation process, so that if it doesn't go as planned, you still have a completed fallback point you can use. Poses that interact with objects are a time suck (holding things, for example). Background details can be a one-click solution or a very slow process depending on whether you are using a pre-built scene or trying to arrange every object in a crowded one. There will invariably be flaws, be prepared to strategically place objects to quickly hide them, or learn depth of field to blur them, or spend the extra time learning how to fix them.