Daz3d Environments: Setting Up The Scene

hey welcome to the first in a series of five tutorials focused on environments my name is ty and I'm from - 3d in this particular tutorial I'm going to show you how I set up Daz studio we're gonna change some of the layout we're gonna add a few hotkeys and we're going to set up our viewports then we're gonna go over some quick tricks that should really help you maximize your creativity and dad's content as a whole so first things first you're gonna see this main viewport there you can see this a little sixteen by nine SafeZone it's kind of cropped but that's only because of my render settings so we're gonna go up to render render settings and we're going to quickly change this so by resetting this away from a proper render output it'll fill the screen so we're saving it from custom to active viewport now the render space is the entire active viewport which is great because we want to see everything we don't want to have this crop right now we don't need the TV save so one of the most important things you know is now having navigates you're gonna hold down ctrl + alt and by clicking your left mouse button you can rotate move the camera around your right mouse button you can pan around and with your mouse wheel you you can let go of control and you roll your mouse wheel in and out you can also do that from the controls up here like clicking and then dragging left and right and slide back and forth or you can rotate same thing with pan you can zoom and then you know there's also this this navigation box which will be used to if you've used other 3d packages like Maya Mac's blender you can click on front you can look on back click on top and it'll automatically pop around it's pretty handy but honestly I don't think there's any better way to navigate than just using control and having full freedom with the three most buttons that's how I do it and that's how I'll be doing it in these tutorials but that gives you a quick kind of rundown of how you can navigate around your viewport so whatever works for you we're going to a little bit more viewport detail a little later on once we've set the scene up the way we like it but first things first we're gonna start closing down panes and moving panes around so we have auxilary viewport which is actually super handy so we're gonna drag it up aside right beside viewport so we can toggle between the two this is really gonna help us out later that so trust me on that you're gonna want exhilarating you port there because we just really want those two options we can get rid of render library we don't need it we just want those two in that tab and then over here we have seen and we have environment we want to keep scene but we want to get rid of environment then down here we have parameters Crowder's are we really helpful shaping we don't need face transfer don't need posing we don't need we're gonna keep services I'm gonna close lights and then we're gonna close cameras now all these panes were closing you can come up to window panes and reopen any of them they're all right there you can put them back dock them where you want but right now we're just gonna clear out the clutter so we want to get the most bang for our buck and really like boiled down to the panes we're really going to use so people who use Maya or any other package will be familiar with scene and parameters parameters like the channel box and scene is like your outliner and so then on this side we have like smart content simulation settings and all the other ones we're gonna start killing the ones we don't need we're gonna keep content library we're gonna keep smart content we're actually gonna change how they work though we're gonna use content library more as our primary and smart as a second now in smart content we're going to turn off filter by context it just makes things a little bit easier to navigate right now filter by context tries to keep track of just what you need it tries to guess and now one little thing I do because I'm an old-school 3d artists I move these the tools and ice tackle on the side because I want to be able to hide everything and have like a really really good access to my viewport so I can really see what I'm doing and really maximize my screen real estate so by having the tools on the left here it just really opens up the whole screen so the next thing I wanna do is change how this looks so we're gonna change the layout of our content library we're just change the display to file but what we're gonna actually do is change it to be do you as list this is a preference you can have it as thumbnails you can have as a list I'm going to leave it as icons though because I like to move around but what's cool about this layout is now we can go to Daz studio my dad's 3d library and I'm gonna just open this up get a little bit more space props and etc and everything is nicely laid out and organized this really helps you get through your files really easy and smooth so now you see this temp file and I'm going to see some scenes in here and this is kind of cheating because this is what we're building towards but in these like tutorials but this temp folder is created by me so what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna want to create this folder for yourselves so what you're gonna do is deselect everything and you're gonna right click and go add base directory it's gonna bring you to your - studio my library and you can go anywhere you want on your computer but I'll leave it here just to keep the folder structure consistent and I don't have to go look for it I know where to find it so I created this temp folder click on that hit select folder and it it'll just create a pop-up that says it added it so now you can select that folder go down there to the plus button and hit scene and what that's gonna do is gonna let you save a new scene so we just want to call this tutorial 0 1 and save now what that does is it creates a new scene down here and there you go there you see it and now it allows us to hit control s and save and say oh I've seen and like when you're working in 3d a lot of times you're gonna test things it's gonna strain your CPU and there will be times where things will crash trust me so one be able to do is have a scene save and every 30 seconds 40 seconds to a minute you want hit control us you're never gonna be upset that you got an extra set but you're definitely gonna be upset if you don't save and you'll lose your scene alright so next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go through some hotkey setups actually no we're gonna start and we're actually going to go back in the content library my 3d library scripts and what we want to do is we want to actually add a script so we're navigate to this by right-click go to folder location and inside the scene file you donated there's a script called view tool toggle snapping so you want to paste that in this scripts folder once you've done that it'll appear here and we select that we right-click and we go create custom action now this is a really cool tool so you accept that hit ok there's a really cool handy thing that I'm gonna show you how to works so you're gonna want that so once that's there it's good now we're gonna hit f3 and we're gonna rip through creating some hotkeys so the first one is under custom and you're gonna see that view toggle snapping we're gonna right click and say change keyboard shortcut we're gonna change that to s it'll say s is already being mapped but that's ok just accept it we're gonna remove s and a few others anyway so it doesn't really matter now we're gonna go to edit and it's the next one we want and we're gonna go down and find duplicate nodes and duplicate higher node hierarchies you won't actually have duplicate node hierarchies as hotkey so we're gonna set ctrl shift D as our hockey and I'll show you what that does in a sec and then we're gonna change duplicate nodes to ctrl D so this allows us to duplicate things really fast it's gonna make your life so much easier really just leads up our workflow now we're gonna have view controls by default Daz allows you to navigate with wads waes but here we're actually gonna because that's actually I hit that by accident all the time and by leaving wads in place you might actually bump it so what we're gonna actually do is clear these keyboard controls out we're gonna get rid of them we don't want them and they just I definitely don't use them it causes me more grief than help so if you're used to this is this is part of your workflow if your ad as user leave it but if you're not and you're willing to learn yeah trust me stick with me here clear that out all right and then we're gonna want frame we want to change frame selection you won't have a key here but we're going to set it to control F we're gonna use this a lot like a lot that's an important one to have now we're going to viewport tools and work and we're gonna change a lot of these so node selection we're going to change to cue Universal we're gonna change to control T rotate we're gonna change to e translate we're gonna change W and scale we're gonna change to our prim pretty much mimicking Maya or unity so if you you know you're comfortable with those is just gonna make your life a lot easier it's what I'm used to so it's what I what I use so it's just again quality of life so then we're gonna go to render and then what we're gonna change in render by default Daz has renders ctrl R and render settings as ctrl shift our I like to slip switch those myself because I want to open more likely bring up render settings then accidentally render a scene so if I hit ctrl R I don't want to actually see density start a render I just want to open render settings whereas if you accidentally hit ctrl R and render you gotta wait until the render establishes but I just want to quickly view this setting so I swapped these alright so we're gonna hit apply and then what we're gonna do so we don't lose our settings we are actually going to export our settings and we go down to actions and save our actions and we're going to call those you can see I already got tile layout tie action - actions - we're gonna call this tutorial one actions save that way we can always import those back if we need them so we apply that and there's another setting we're gonna use quite a bit so I'm gonna show you that now and that'll make this a little bit easier so we'll accept that all right so we're gonna create a sphere so we can show off some of the stuff we're going to do so go create new primitive and we're gonna pick a sphere world centers fine all that's good so except now we have our sphere now we can use ctrl F to frame now remember that script we installed when you need to rotate we rotate it as we want but if we hit s now we can rotate on the 15s so it snaps to the rotate which is super powerful so you can imagine rotating something 180 degrees rotating some ninety degrees it just gives us a lot of control and flexibility same thing with translate so we hit s but so this is w without s now we hit s and now you see it moves a certain set of units so again super handy okay so that that works for what we want to do but what we're missing now is how to manipulate those things so we're gonna hit ctrl D to duplicate our sphere now if we grab both these spheres and I try and move them watch what happens both spheres are selected you can see them both selected up in the scene pane and those are the parameters we were talking about just like Maya you can translate with the slider and rotate with the slider and you can see up just like the channel box there's other parameters in here - like display you can turn this make it unselectable in the viewport but you can still select it up here you can turn the visibility off in the viewport you make it visible invisible altogether or you make it only not visible and render which is super handy if you want to create layers in your scene and visible and simulation all really Handy's tools really good to know so back to our sphere if I select both spheres and try and move them your assumption would be they both move but they don't by default Daz only moves one of them so what we have to do there's two options you can parent the sphere to the second sphere and to do that you select this sphere and drag it into the other sphere and now you can open and close it and see that it's now a child of the sphere and from that sphere I can now move both of them except which is fine and that gets you kind of a part of the way but you don't want to parent something every time so we're gonna drag this out and unparent it and what we're gonna do now is go window panes and grab one called tool settings and then what we're gonna actually do with tool settings is we're gonna nest this under scenes because we actually use this quite a lot it gives a lot of flexibility and so now what we want to do is go down to Universal in the drop-down and we want to turn on secondary node then we want to do that for rotate and we want to do that for translate and we want to do that for skill now what that's going to do and when we select both spheres and we scale see they're both going to scale rotate we rotate both on their local axis and translate now when we want to move them they move together now we don't have to parent them every time we can just select them both and move them around the other thing I wanted to show you is if I did parent this if I parent something it gives me a lot of flexibility if I select the parent if I select both and come down to the parameters through I can select both in the parameters down there and go to their visibility as a pair see two visible two visible and I can turn both off at once so that's really really nice and that's gonna help us later as we get busier scenes now if you select the primary sphere I can hit ctrl shift D which we set up earlier and that's the duplicate hierarchy nodes and it duplicates the entire hierarchy so it'll copy you see how it copied the exact same two spheres and kept the same parenting so that's super handy and so I can select both and I can delete it then I can change the names by just clicking on the text we're going to use that later so remember that and right now in our perfect second perspective view main viewport we have we currently set to texture shaded smooth shaded is nice and hidden line removal is really nice most people are familiar with wireframe and if i duplicate this object you can see right through it and we control D and you can see all the wires that build this object you see through them so now if I change this to hidden line removal it's as lightweight as wireframe but it gives me a sense of depth because it occludes the background objects so they cut each other so that's really nice now if I choose to talk for you every single time I wanted to switch to wireframe so I could see through things I would have to come through and manually change this texture shaded to wireframe every time now that's gonna slow you down we don't want to do that so we come into our auxiliary viewport which we saved earlier we changed that to top view we changed that guy to wireframe I can now switch between viewport so I can leave this in perspective and this one in top view and I can change this the front view side view whatever and now I have this handy second viewport that allows me to do that kind of navigation and detail things imagine I was putting things on top of each other so we hit control D we duplicated it we line it up I would be able to really see where that layout is and how it lines up without messing my initial viewport so another neat trick I'm gonna show you but first things first let's save our workspace so Windows workspace save layout as we'll call this tutorial 0-1 layout and what this is gonna do is it's gonna save all the things we've done the panes the layout so if you ever lose it you can come back so for whatever reason your layout resets the viewport workspace and select layout and in here you'll see tutorial layouts and you can jump back to where you are and you don't lose all this work so that's super handy so remember this tool settings we set well if you look at our sphere from the side view you can see that the pivot is at the very bottom so if we duplicate this sphere and let's say we want to be like a stack of spheres we want the sphere to be right on top there's two ways we can do this we can eyeball it duplicate and put it there and it's pretty close okay and that gives a wide translation of about 100 and we duplicate again and if we didn't have such an easy number as a hundred we wouldn't keep that consistency so now we're at 199 instead of two and so on and so forth it's gonna start getting off-kilter it won't be perfectly aligned but if it's a hundred because we know that we can actually hit this widget see this little gear we hit click on that and go to parameter settings we can actually change the nudge for the sphere we can set it to a hundred so this is based on centimeters good to know that that's the units but now we know it nudges a hundred so if we duplicate a sphere again and come over here to Y translate and just hit plus it'll automatically move a hundred use control F and you can see it by the way control F with something selected will frame the thing you select but if you hit Q and select nothing and hit control live it'll show you the full scene so that's a really handy tool uses all the time so now if we duplicate the sphere again nudge it up another now you can imagine we're stress stacking these perfectly and they line up perfect imagine your staff things lining up walls your have the ability to do very easily very quickly line things up accurately and precisely and clearly see how fastest is duplicate nudge duplicate nudge you can see how powerful that is so super handy trick good to know now imagine let's delete a bunch of these guys let's imagine our pivot isn't where we want it so we'll frame on the sphere the pivot currently is at the very bottom what if we wanted it in the center of the object well we know this sphere now is a hundred units high so what we can do is actually go to our tools and go to joint editor so the tool is called joint editor Alt shift J is the default hotkey and open up joint it you're gonna see a red joint and a green joint we don't have to worry about the red look at joint but if we select the green guy we he actually has his own values and we can manipulate those to make sure he's exactly half way we can see the actual Y X positions for the actual pivot itself we can move it with these sliders or set up type in our values so here in Y position we can just type in 50 and we now know it's dead center because it we know the other two are zeroed out and because we know the series 100 it's dead center in our sphere you can see that and if you change the orientation of the pivot you'll see the banding matches but we're actually gonna order the sphere itself and close joint editor go to select if we go to rotate we can now rotate on the pole our sphere rotates like you'd expect like like imagine if you're gonna plan it or anything like that or a basketball spinning you would want it to spin on its poles not from the point you want it to spin from the center point right so it becomes a lot more valuable because you can actually rotate it I just turned on the wireframe so you can see it instead of rotating like that from the base pivot so by moving the joint around you can control how you can manipulate it okay so in summary here are some of the tips and tricks we covered in this tutorial save your work constantly you will never regret having too many saves I showed you how to use the auxiliary viewport as a secondary viewport so you have a second viewport in wireframe you can leave as top or side so you don't have to switch both camera and shader every time you move between your views and remember wireframe is great to see through things whereas hidden line removal is great to show depth but both are lightweight shaders and will help you navigate heavy scenes quickly I showed you how to set up your content library and remove any excess clutter so you can see what you need and Daz at your fingertips and then I showed you how to set up hotkeys that make sense to you to help you move quickly and efficiently and not have to dig through menus and then I showed you how to save your workspace and save your your actions so that you're not having to do this every time you load Daz studio so thank you for listening and join us for the next environment series tutorial one where we will help you think like a storyteller so you can achieve your vision

Channel: Daz 3D

Views: 24,650

Keywords: Daz3d

Id: w7ZDHjjozd8

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020