Daz Studio: Absolute Beginners Guide #1

hey everybody and welcome back thank you very much for joining me today in this video I'm going to do something a bit different and cover the absolute basics of da studio thank you very much for subscribing and hitting the notification icon that really helps me out and of course a huge thank you to all of my patrons and members your names are going to be running across the bottom of the screen and I'm just inquiry grateful for your support so when you first load up that studio your interface is not going to look an awful lot like this there's going to be more panels on the left-hand side and these panels aren't gonna be identical and the first thing I would say about that is do not panic the interface is basically completely drag-and-drop you can move stuff to wherever you want you can undock and then you can redock in any of these tab panes it's entirely up to you where you have things I don't even have a lot of my panes dr2 all I have them undocked and then on my other monitor which allows me more free space to play around with on this side of things so I'm not gonna give you a best way of laying out your windows because everybody does things differently and you will find the more you use des the more you will use different panes so the panes that I use the most often I have on the right hand side here right next to the viewport and then things like my content library my render settings my simulation settings the things that I'd use regularly but not as often as the scene tab while the parameters tab they're docked on the left hand side and also having them on a different monitor it means I can have those tabs nice and big so I can see more of the content in my content library rather than just the one little sliver or the two little slivers of icons that you can see in the standard interface that Bay if you don't have two monitors then always see how you're docked on the left-hand side is fine and then you can expand and retract those tabs by clicking on the yellow bar and beside that tab so that's quite a useful thing to do accessing any windows or tabs that you don't currently have verse is as simple as just clicking on the window in the top bar and then where it says panes or tabs you've got all of your available tabs here and you can toggle them on and off by using this you can also change the color and the general layer of your workspace by going into workspace and selecting layer and then you can download templates and use one of these these are all different personally I don't tend to bother with those but those are options available to you as well so if you're anything like me you've probably downloaded desks to do and jump straight in you haven't really read any of the instruction and he'll saw anything like that which is fair enough so on the top here I've got these are kind of like the buttons that you're gonna use almost constantly you've got the option to add different things and then you've got your different tools here so you can add cameras you can add distant lights you can add point lights you can add linear pointless spotlights primitives like spheres and planes you can create groups at nulls and then if these are kind of like your you've got your move to your pan your pan and button there it allows you to move the camera in the WASD format you've got the selection tool you've got the universal tool I tend not to use it very much purely because there's a lot going on and quite often it's very small on the screen and clicking it's quite easy to miss click so I tend to if I'm going to do anything is I use either the rotate tool or the move tool or the scale tool although to be fair I very rarely use the scale tool then you've got the active pose tool and these are all again I'm not going to go through every single button because we'll be here all day but these are the buttons that you're gonna use on carlac of a fairly constant basis to weather your scenes and maneuver and manipulate things around then you've got your simple new scene open existing file and save those kind of functions are there but those are also obviously available from hitting the file option aren't the top bar as well below that you've got your bridges so you can enable Photoshop bridge you can go into hexagons you can go into ZBrush if you've got it there's tomato doesn't work at the moment so don't worry about that one and then at the bottom here what I've got laid out here is the time line and this is used for animation now it's worth saying right now that studio is not animation software it was never intended to be used for animation it was always for creating 3d still images using the Raa engine it's kind of a function that's been shoehorned in there and it's really not ideal if you want to do really basic animations it's it's okay in a pinch but it's not very intuitive if there's no soft body physics there's no physics at all of any kind in there so if you can use other software I would HIGHLY advise avoiding using bears for animation but if you absolutely have to them that's an option that's there if you really want to get on and do something so now we bring in my other tabs and as you can see I've got shaping which is how you apply morphs to your characters your deform which is how you create custom kind of manipulations of your shapes tool settings now this is going to change as it can text your menu so it will change depending on which of the tools you have selected and again the more you play around with those the more you're gonna get to use this is a lot to talk about in that one so too much for a beginners tutorial anyway simulation settings is where you set up your environment and your simulation options for d-force so who's in default clothing or hair this is where you'll control the overall simulation the overall environment for each individual item there are options within their surfaces tab to enable you to change the properties of each individual d-force item you don't do that from this tab when the settings this is where you're going to optimize your scene and get it ready to render out your final image and we're going to come back to this pane in a moment then you've got your smart content and your content library and this is different because what happens is the content library just shows you everything that you own in a in its file structure as you've got it saved on your hard drive which means if as if you know where everything is it can be quite quick and easy to use but it can also be a bit of a pain to find things because you'll find the more products you have you could have thousands of different poses hundreds of different folders and it's gonna become really quite tiresome trying to find things and that's where smart content comes in smart content is a contextual menu that will show you everything that you can use based on what you have selected in the scene now I currently have nothing selected in the scene so I can see on my entire content library within reason but if I was to add a character that this suddenly will change and it will only show me things I can use online character such as poses such as hair such as wardrobe items and things of that so the content library is probably going to be less and less used the more and more content you have there are unfortunately some products that you're going to buy from maybe third party sites or even from the Daz studio marketplace themselves that do not install properly or at all via the desert install manager so you'll have to install those manually and quite often those won't have any metadata attached to them and you probably won't want to spend all of your time adding metadata for products that you've bought or downloaded when they shared it to already be some so sometimes you will have to go back to your content library and find those products manually but the majority of the time you'll be ok just using your smart content so in the render settings once you've got your scene set up you've got everything as you want it this is where we decide firstly what the dimensions of our image are going to be now personally I always render sixteen by nine because that's the resolution of most people's screens these days and most people are still gaming at 1080p so in order for me to and I bought a manual over sampling I render at two eight eight zero by sixteen twenty that's one and a half times bigger than it needs to be but that means that when I shrink it down to reduce some of that noise they're still getting a nice high resolution image it's not going to be blurred or stretched out in any way render type and most of the time unless you're doing animations is gonna say still images and you're going to leave it like that then you say render target I always say new window so if I can see what's happening it allows me to stop rendering early if I can get away with it you can just render straight to a file but then obviously you can't see how old the progress of the render is coming along so new terms I have to just wait for it to finish and I hope for the best again that's probably the least desirable of the two options because if you're fairly new to - you're gonna want to see how your renders look you want to check the lighting you're going to want to check the poses see and everything and you don't want to get three hours into a render only to find out that one of your characters is pulling a stupid facial expression or is clipping halfway through a wall or something so yeah definitely worth leaving it in new window image name you're gonna do that once the render finishes you tell it what name to save the image as and the image path is where you're going to save your images to auto headlamp should always say never there is never ever ever ever ever ever a good reason to use auto headlamp on your cameras it makes your pictures look ugly and it's just don't don't ever use it it's ridiculous render mode photo real no need to change that progressive rendering is where you tell the studio how long you want your images to render for it doesn't mean that if you have them all set to minimum it's gonna render super quick and the image is gonna be amazing this is how you tell their studio I want the render to run for five thousand iterations and I wanted to run for a minimum of five or however many you think you want it to run for personally I don't tend to tell it and anything on time or iterations because the number of iterations that your render is going to take and this is actually quite an important piece of information because I see it misrepresented a lot the number of iterations the image takes does not matter it's going to be different for every image depending on the complexity of the lighting in the scene so someone saying I always render to five thousand iterations respectfully is an idiot your image is done when your image is done so personally why I would say is crank these up to maximum crank that up to sort of like a hundred so you're guaranteed to get at least a hundred iterations max time again crank that all the way up and then you can use your render quality and said it you know Brenda quality one doesn't really make a huge amount of difference is the converged ratio now you're gonna hear a lot of people arguing that the dev site is impossible to get to 100% but I very very rarely leave my renders to run until completion anyway so I'm firmly of the opinion that if you were to set this to maybe four and set this to 100 and then keep an eye on your render as you're doing other things and then when it achieves a ratio or convergence that you're happy with when the noise is a level that you're comfortable with then you can manually stop your render and you know that you've done your best by limiting the conversion ratio what you're risking is having your render nowhere near finished but finishing automatically and then you're gonna have to start all over again so you know ignoring people's arguments about whether or not it's possible to achieve a hundred percent and their rationale behind this my point on this is give that studio as much of a fighting chance of creating a good image as possible even if you're dealing with hardware limitations crank all of these up watch your render if you can't watch your render go out do whatever it is you got to do it'll still begin when you come back and then at least you know the you're in control of when it finishes and - Julia doesn't have to do any of that kind of decision-making for you summarization you just leave max pathlength on - one that controls how many times the light is going to bounce if you mess around with that you can seriously mess up how your eyes are going to look caustic sampler is if you're using glass that reflects light into weird patterns again that's highly situational and 99% of the time completely unnecessary if you're taking you're creating a render of a glass lamp or a grass glass vars that's reflecting light or anything like that then you can use it but otherwise there's no real good reason to instancing optimization is an interesting one because this is something that can cause problems in your eyes when you render sometimes you'll see black lines inside the eyes this is a way of removing those lines is by going from cycling through them from auto to memory to speed and then quite often that will fix the issue filtering I would say leave your Firefly filter on because that does help remove those silly little orange dots that you'll get around nominal luminance I wouldn't really bother with that noise t grain filtering lettuce leaf as it is din default honestly B noise and never touch it again this is one of those hotly debated topics D noises as a whole are rubbish they remove detail from your images and they spoil the look they make everything look plastic they make everything look unrealistic if you're seriously struggling to get renders within a reasonable time don't use dashes D noise ax take your images into Photoshop or or whatever software you're using to do your post-production work and remove the noise in that because all that is post de noise it does is blurs your image it's an edge detect blur so yeah it will preserve some of the details bias can I make things look garbage and we're here for photo realism folks otherwise we wouldn't be using I rain so the bloom filter this allows you to create bloom effects and this is one I encourage you to play around with you turn it on and then a whole new bunch of things open up the blur filter radius that enables you to change the size of the blur that's gonna happen with the bloom the filter threshold this is where you tell there's how bright some of the pixels must be before they start getting bloom so basically if you won a light bulb to be bloomed out but everything else to be normal you set this really high rose if you want everything to be blue me than you tests and this really low again highly situational tends not to use it and then I don't even touch them but the last two there's no real need to tone mapping is the next one that you're going to use a lot and this is basically where you set your images render properties as if you were viewing a scene through a camera now I never ever touch exposure value because it's a bit like using your camera in automatic yeah you can adjust it but you have no control over these things having said that in their studio shutter speed f-stop and ISO make absolutely no difference whatsoever and those are just there for people like me who have photography in their hobbies or if you're a professional photographer and are used to adjusting your exposure by adjusting these three properties it kind of gets close to the calculations that you would be receiving if you were doing these adjustments so for example if I was to change my ISO from 100 to 200 the light would get twice as bright if I were to change my f-stop from F 1.2 to F 2.8 yes again it would get twice as dim so those are there if you're not used to using a DSLR then yeah use the exposure value instead and it does the same thing these are just kind of mock-ups to make it easy for people to change their exposure vignette is where you can get of that sort of dark edges around your image which are going to help you create a kind of highlight on the middle but again I don't ever use it I prefer to use juxtaposition and Composition to make with a camera or make the viewers eye look at the subject burn highlights per component and burn highlights and crushed blanks this is where you kind of kind of adjust the gamma and the saturation of your image these four so if you've got a lot of highlights in your image you can sort of blow them out by changing your burnt highlights crushing your blanks these are all terms that you're going to get used to using particularly if you're doing a lot of a photo editing but essentially this is basically how you adjust the brightness and the contrast and a saturation of your image I would never really touch burn highlights across blacks because there's again no real needs to and then lastly we've got the environment tab and this is where we choose how we're going to light our scene whether we're going to use an HDR eye dome which is basically just a big sphere that sits around the entire scene and casts lights around the scene or if we're going to just go with the scene lights only so the lights that we've got in our room or wherever then you can choose to draw the dome or not so you could have it lighting the scene but invisible environment intensity and environment map are basically two numbers that are multiplied together to decide how bright the lights in your HDRI are next we've got the environmental lighting resolution unlike blur again I never ever touched that because most of the time do you want your lighting to be whatever your HDRI is dome orientation X Y and so it just allows you to rotate your dome along those axes in case you want to hide something that's on the horizon or something like that if you want all your viewer HDRI to be the sky or something like that you can rotate it to hide the ground and you can use that as well to manipulate where the light source like the Sun is actually coming from and then dome rotation is just rotation around the X and y axis and that that's really all there is to you can add draw ground if you want to add shadows underneath your character's feet but more often than not unless you're using a perfectly flat floor in a room or something they're probably gonna want the shadows too because naturally from your light source instead I could sit here and talk for literally hours about everything that's available in these tabs but it's far better to stop now while I've thrown all of that information at you and we'll cover some more basics and more beginner guides in upcoming videos we'll probably make this a bit of a series so that you guys can learn the very basics and hopefully start banging out some really good renders thanks very much for watching this I hope you find it useful let me know what you think in the comments below and I'll see you in the next one bye bye [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Game Developer Training

Views: 57,321

Keywords: vn, visualnovel, adultgame, indiedev, indiegame, game development, indie game, indie dev, renpy, daz studio, #vn, #DazStudio, #Ren'Py, #dazstudio, #daz3d, daz 3d, #3dcg, rendering, iRay, animation, photorealism, photography, adobe photoshop, adobe lightroom

Id: 2TyQ7rbu0QQ

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020