New to DAZ questions...Feel Like a Kindergartner with a Crayon!

gnc78236

Well...don't ask why an old guy would want to start with all this digital imaging...stuff. I used to do photography but that was a land far away in a time long ago. Rekindling that hobby has led to...this!

I feel like the five year old with the upside down crayon in his hand and chocolate milk dribbling down his chin.

Things I have learned so far...
DAZ Studio - AMAZING!!! What can I say, it opens up a whole new world of digital art. So many...possibilities as Spock is fond of saying.

I don't know as much as I think I do...first install was on the 'old' computer, a six year old laptop with one GB memory. It worked, about all you could say. Finally upgraded to a new machine with more...stuff. Along the way I did...something, probably when I was trying to get some content to show in the smart content pane and resetting the database...and some other things I shouldn't have fooled with but that was after I screwed up the install in the first place by downloading IM first then DAZ and THEN trying to make it work (Five year old with a crayon, remember) sooo....dump everything and start over with a clean install as it should be. Now I'm back to where I started but it's not like I lost anything. Any content I created was just stuff I played with learning the program.

Tutorials are good, documentation is good but I have some questions; yeah, I bet the answers are where I already looked but -->Five year old w/crayon here.

Some content like Free weight gym shows in the content library under poser but not in the smart pane. I can use the drop down right click tab and make that show in the Smart Content pane, right? Or, is there any reason to do this?

Under save and save as, I learned that saving a character only does that, not clothing. Saving it as a scene without sets or backgrounds and stuff work but it there a better way to save a character with clothes, poses and materials?

If I want to say, save a facial pose without any of the rest of the figure, can I do that? I tried this and well...I discovered some poses aren't compatible with some clothes. When the toes stick through the shoes like Jethro...hey wait...there might be something there...!!

I learned along the way how to parent items...duh!!! (And how not to) But I'm still working on this!

I'm just learning lighting...wow! Tried some presets and some of my own actually not too bad! I did read a thread about parenting a camera to a lighted plane...gonna try that.

Primitives...hmmm. Is this where walls and floors come from and furniture...could I make my own walls and floor out of primitives and then add textures and mats, etc to that or is there another way? Yeah, I haven't even tried making clothes yet but one thing at a time!

So far I've managed to create a nice tiny little world with buildings, people and such WITH lighting and when I rendered it it looked pretty ok. Well, to this five year old it did!

CyberDog

I can't answer all your questions but I will tackle a couple.
If I remember correctly, only content that contains meta data will show in the smart content pane. There is a way to create it but I have not taken the time to learn it. I don't use the smart content pane very often.
If you want to save a character with clothes poses and hair, use save as scene subset. When you do that, you will get a pop up window that allows you select what gets saved.

JimmyC_2009

Primitives…hmmm. Is this where walls and floors come from and furniture…could I make my own walls and floor out of primitives and then add textures and mats, etc to that or is there another way? Yeah, I haven’t even tried making clothes yet but one thing at a time!

Primitives are not really much use for anything like that, although you can use them at a pinch. Most people would use a modelling program of some kind, like Blender or Wings3D (free) or Hexagon (cheap, and sold here). 3D modelling is another skill that needs to be learned, and modelling clothes takes a great deal of knowledge of modelling.

If I were you, and feeling adventurous, wanting to do a bit more to make the scene unique, I would start by re-texturing clothing in a paint program like Gimp (free) Photoshop, PaintShop Pro or similar. In the Store here, on the Product pages, there is a tab called Resource Files, which contains texture templates where you can sort of colour them in, like a kids colouring book), and make them your own,

I am sure you will find what you want to do in the fullness of time, but we will still be here to help. I used to be a photographer myself many years ago, and I recently took it up again. I am retired now, and I do this 3D stuff for a hobby. I find it very interesting, but it takes a long time to learn all the ins and outs. You never run out of new things to learn using 3D stuff.

Hope you enjoy it here, and post any questions taht you have, I hope we have helped a bit for now, but if there is more you need to know, fire away.

gnc78236

Thank you all! Obviously, there is LOT to learn and the temptation is to go too fast and end up in the deep end....BTDT, LOL.