DAZ scene with G3 figure showing bounding boxes only

neverstoplearning

I am a retired software engineer with a determination to keep learning new stuff as long as I can. I installed DAZ Studio a couple of months ago and went through some of the provided tutorials including the Barefoot Dancer.  I then discovered that DAZ is not what I need, since I am interested in creating original content for game mods and DAZ has licensing restrictions that prevent it being used for that.

I have become interested particularly in skeletons, and how they fit into figures.  After some learning work in other software, I came back for a quick revisit to DAZ to compare some figure posing features to understand the "universal" requirements for a skeleton.  That is where my problem occurred. I opened my DAZ and loaded the standard Genesis 3 figure into an empty scene.  It showed up correctly.  I then started moving arms and legs to see what is possible, remembering the DAZ sales pitch: "The most versatile and realistic morphable human 3D model on the planet".  Somehow during that process I must have accidentally switched the UI so that all I see now is a mass of white bounding boxes in the approximate shape of the figure (see attached screen capture), but no actual figure.  It was clearly something I did, but I have no memory of doing anything deliberate. I immediately closed DAZ specifying CLOSE WITHOUT SAVING.

When I restarted and reloaded the standard G3 figure it showed up again as "bounding boxes only" ie the mode has been saved outside the scene.  No matter what I tried I could not return to the initial state.  I traipsed over the help and Google for at least two hours, encountering obsolete pages and pages that pointed to dead pages. An example of both can be found on one page http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/dazstudio/reference/menuview#interface_layout which refers to the "View" menu which DAZ 4.8 does not possess, and links to http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?tok=e9ddfa&media=http://documentation.daz3d.com/studio/images/06-04.jpg where documentation.daz3d.com does not exist. I did read some interesting posts on this forum from helpful people whose message boils down to “3D art is hard work and there is no substitute for practice practice practice, but keep at it.”  Seeing the overwhelming positive reinforcement from other people who have been though it reinforced the message.  But perhaps it could be fractionally less hard if there was some attention paid to keeping the official website reference material up to date.

I eventually found in a FAQ (which was almost unusable) that the "View" menu has been replaced by the "Window" menu, but I am surprised and disappointed to see the official website still leading users to obsolete pages. So equipped with the new information, I opened the "Window" menu and looked for anything that resembled "reset to default/standard viewport state" or "set view mode" but without success. So DAZ is effectively disabled.  Do I need to buy something to make it work? I have no problem buying content but it would be helpful if I could be told somehow that I need to. Or should I just uninstall DAZ and walk quietly away?

 

mjc1016

Up where it says Perspective View...that little cube to the left...click it and choose texture shaded in the drop down.

And yes, a number of UI features are 'saved' in the state they were when the program is closed.

neverstoplearning

Correction. Actually the screen capture is of my complete barefoot dancer tutorial, not the initial G3 figure, but it still illustrates the point.  Here is the vanilla G3 figure

mjc1016

Here...

 

barbult

This can happen accidentally if you press the keyboard shortcut CTRL1. Keyboard shorcut CTRL 9 will get you back to the Texture Shaded view. Or, you can use the control that mjc1016 illustrated for you.