Jay Versluis I’ve made myself an animated walking Slinky last week! I thought it would be nice to have him join the other figures on my stream overlay. It seems a simple-ish feat to do, but since I’ve built him from scratch in Blender, then rigged and animated him in DAZ Studio, there were quite a few …
Controllers are great little helper dials that can perform a number of functions and make our posing/animation life a little easier. They’re akin to Blender’s Drivers, yet implemented very differently in DAZ Studio. The idea is the same though: make one slider do multiple things, and let DAZ Studio calculate interpolated values. Let’s take a …
In my previous article I’ve explained how to rig a simple cylinder in DAZ Studio using the Figure Setup Tab. While my little cylinder bends, it does so with rather sharp deformations at the intersections to its other parts. The geometry seems to collapse, and in a real life scenario we may find that some …
Believe it or not, the above picture is the result of trying and failing to understand rigging in DAZ Studio for years. I’ve had many attempts at understanding the official documentation on this subject, but severe lack of knowledge and understanding have kept me from transferring this information into my brain. Like many things, it’s …
Smooth Shading is enabled by default for the Iray Uber Shader. This is in contrast to most 3D modelling packages, which disable this feature by default. While Smooth Shading works best for most organic objects, we may occasionally need the ability to disable this feature in DAZ Studio. Some objects are meant to have that …
The other day I thought it would be a hoot to bring in some of the wonderfully modelled low-res Synty Assets and use them together with the high-res characters in DAZ Studio. With access to the source OBJ files this worked out rather well, but it’s a time consuming process importing, shading and saving each …
Although I had decided to find the news popup on every Hexagon start “charming”, it wasn’t until this week that I got a tip from one of my supporters on how to turn it off. I must admit that it does get in the way for quick fixes. Here’s how to do it: start Hexagon …
I keep forgetting how to use Emojis in Photoshop. It’s not all that intuitive, so while it’s fresh in my head, let me make a note of it here. This works for both Emojis as well as special characters. The key thing to remember is that an Emoji is just a regular character typed with …
I’ve been converting hundreds of small props for use in DAZ Studio. To speed-up my workflow, I thought it would be wise to investigate more efficient methods in the process. One such effort is to press a shortcut key rather than navigating to File – Save As – Support Asset – Figure/Prop Asset every time. …
I’ve just figured out a small mystery that I thought I’d share with you. It’s about enabling soft shadows in Unreal Engine, specifically with the Movable Light type. It’s the “expensive to calculate” variety, especially when enabling soft shadows. I’d like to use them to get real time good looking shadows for still images and …
I found this as a dirty printout in the kitchen and thought I’d best make a note of it before it disintegrates forever. This simple recipe makes around 12 waffles. Feel free to half the amount if you need less: 2 cups of All-Purpose Flower 4tsp of Baking Powder 1/2 tsp of Salt 1/4 cup …
Voxels have become a popular way to show off pixelated 3D shapes. For years we’ve been trying to make things look smooth and natural, but with retro being a thing right now, voxels can do the same for your pristine 3D objects that Lomo filters can to pristine photographs: make them look a little weird …
I’ve been puzzled by something for the longest time: when I inspect my keyboard shortcuts in CLIP Studio Paint, what is defined does not match what I need to press for it to happen. Conversely, defining a custom shortcut will sometimes show a combination I haven’t pressed. That’s just “normal” the Bizarro World of CSP! …
I’ve come across Keyed Properties by accident, and was thrilled with what we can use them for. Essentially they let us create a custom slider, whose position behaves much like a little timeline. This has huge potential for anything from an array of facial morphs to various poses or even full body moprhs. It’s the …
I have to be brutally honest with you: last time I’ve tried the official DAZ to Blender bridge I didn’t have a great time. But, a lot of time has passed and several updates have been released, so I thought perhaps I should try again with version 2.3.9. The first hurdle was of course to …
DAZ Studio has a helpful constraints function called Point At. With it we can point eyes at the camera, point a light at an object and do all kinds of other things. Blender also has this concept, but it’s called something else: Track To. Let me show you (and my future self) how to set …
I’ve spent some time this week putting Blender’s new Cycles X engine through its paces. The team have written about their plans, I’m excited about it and I appreciate the efforts it takes to make this work. I’m already very happy with the current implementation of Cycles, and with a bit of time on my …
I’ve had various requests and discussions with supporters recently about what might be a good configuration for a DAZ Studio and/or rendering computer. It’s a good question, and with so many systems and components on the market, I thought I’d compile this article as a starting point. Feel free to ask specific questions in the …
A viewer asked me recently how to get the ZBrush to DAZ Studio connection going step. I’ve explained how to use GoZ in this article, but I’ve not mentioned the pitfalls of the installation process. I thought I’d put this quick article together with screenshots and all. Prepare Install Manager First of all close DAZ …
I’ve been having a hard time pasting in special characters from a script in Clip Studio Paint. I mean those that you don’t commonly find on a US keyboard, like German Umlaut characters or French accents. Although the characters arrive where they should via copy/paste from another app, the font does not match. I couldn’t …
To draw with symmetry, we can create a symmetrical ruler and start drawing with any brush we like. When we switch over to the eraser tool however, only one part of our line is erased. In other words, it won’t obey symmetry by default. It’s relatively easy to make that happen, albeit so unintuitive that …
Photoshop has a neat feature that lets us make adjustments only to the layer directly underneath, rather than all layers on the stack. It’s called a Clipping Layer. Clip Studio Paint has the same feature, but it doesn’t work by ALT-clicking in between layers. Instead, right-click on the adjustment layer (left thumbnail, NOT the mask), …
Image Layers can be rotated, flipped and mirrored in Clip Studio Paint. Choose the Object Selection tool (cube icon), then select the layer and take a look at the Tool Properties. There are two icons with arrows here, one to mirror the layer from left to right, the other to flip it upside down. Hope …
Sometimes it can be hand to turn anything that’s created via Blending Options into discreet and separate layers. Things like drop shadows, outer glows, pattern overlays, that sort of thing. That way we can process them separately or make adjustments or erase parts of those constructions that we otherwise couldn’t do. I keep forgetting how …
I just got hold of a Clip Studio TABMATE controller. It’s a little Bluetooth gadget you hold in your left hand while you’re drawing on a tablet with the other (or vice versa). I always wanted one of those so I don’t have to stretch my arm to reach a bazillion shortcut keys, and to …
The default poses for Genesis 3 and 8 are different: 8 is using an A-Pose, while 3 is using a T-Pose (kind of easy to remember that way). I sometimes have to re-fit clothing from one figure to the other, and as such I need to tweak an A-Pose into the respective T-Pose or vice …
I’ve been fascinated with the idea of using my Genesis 3 characters with newer Genesis 8 figure. There are some benefits and good outfits that are not backwards compatible without fiddling. So I came across two products that address this: RiversoftArt has various products that convert G3 to G8 and back, and then there’s the …
I just watched the above excellent one hour tutorial by Henning and Morten from FlippedNormals. It’s a great “getting (back) into ZBrush” tutorial that covers everything I keep forgetting when I give ZBrush a rest for longer than 6 months. Which is essentially every time I use it. While watching I took some notes so …
There appears to be an issue with the current version of DAZ Studio 4.15. With some hair products, when rendering with transparency (without a dome), hair strands appear sparky. It’s annoying enough on a wide shot, but even more so on a closeup. Take a look at the two versions of the image above and …
If you’ve ever made a custom character from existing morphs in DAZ Studio, you may find it easier to combine all those adjustments into a single slider. This makes it easier to use the character in new scenes without having to set it up again, and can cut down on the amount of morph product …