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 …
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 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 …
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 …
DMC files are used by Mimic and Lip Sync in DAZ Studio to make a figure move lips in response to an audio file. DMC stands for DAZ Mimic Configuration I believe, and each figure generation needs a specific file to make this work. Every figure including Genesis 3 had such a file in a …
By default, some keyframes in the DAZ Studio timeline just don’t show up. Morph dials and any other options that appear on the Parameters Tab are such culprits. We can see their effect, but not necessarily a corresponding keyframe. I’ve just found out how to make those values how up and thought I’d make a …
Sometimes it’s handy to have DAZ Studio render something in the background, while you’re working on the next scene in the foreground. Sadly that’s disallowed by design, even though it would be a super handy feature to have. Think how elegant the Poser Render Queue or Adobe’s Media Encoder implement such workflows. We’re busy people …
I’ve been playing with the new Genesis 8.1 figure in preparation for a project. Most things seem to be working OK, and as expected – including body morphs and may expression sliders. Something that did not show up was visemes. I use them quite often to create expressions, so they’re very important to me. I …
When you’re releasing a product for DAZ Studio, it’s a good idea to include instructions to give your users all the info they need to make the most out of your creation. You should also include a license that explains what users are allowed and not allowed to do with your product. This means you …
In this article I’ll explain how apply a Mixamo animation to a Genesis 8 (or 3) character, then export the animation to Marvelous Designer, animate a garment and bring it back into DAZ Studio for rendering. This will give us both the rendered character and the garment. There are so many steps to this process, …
The Slash and Spread tool can be used to add fullness to a garment. In the above image I’ve made a simple skirt from two squares (on the left), but after a few strokes with the Slash and Spread tool it looks much neater (on the right). Here’s a clip from when I discovered it, …
In this article I’ll show you the steps necessary to export an animation as OBJ Sequence from DAZ Studio. There’s a script floating around the DAZ Forums by an unknown author, but sadly it’s stopped working after version 4.12. While I haven’t found a way to fix that script, there’s a workaround by importing the …
I always forget how to do this: most viewports can be changed into full screen mode by hovering over a window and selecting CTRL + SPACE BAR. This works great for 3D and node views, less so for things like the timeline or the outliner.
I came across a mystery the other day. It had to do with sewing pockets in Marvelous Designer. I did this in a stream recently, and Christina was kind enough to give me some tips. One of the things that came up was Turned Sewing, and I found the principle a little hard to grasp. …
This morning I’ve noticed that my measuring tool had disappeared from the 3D toolbar in Marvelous Designer. I was using it only last week. I could still get to it using Avatar – Measurement, but the icon had gone. How do we bring it back? And why did this happen in the first place? Thankfully …
Let’s talk about pleats! This has to be THE most award winning unintuitive and confusing tool in Marvelous Designer. Let me tell you what I’ve worked out: There are two pieces to the Pleats Puzzle, and they can be used independantly or in conjunction. We have the pleats fold tool and the pleats sewing tool. …
Sometimes I forget the simplest things, the ones you think you don’t need to make a note of. It’s those very things that can trip you up sometime in the future when you forgot the very basics that only a month ago were so engrained in your brain. True story, it happened to me today. …
If you’ve ever tried to use the Dart Tool to create a dart on the outside of a pattern, you’ll have noticed that it doesn’t work as you would expect. That’s because that Dart Tool is only meant to be used to create darts on the inside of a pattern. To create a dart on …
I had to calculate the length of a vector recently, and had no idea where to begin. In my little farm/planting project, I’ve used Line Tracing to plant a vegetable on the floor. However, I needed a limitation as to where the player can plant things. They should not be allowed to plant directly underneath …
I’ve been able to import Marvelous Designer animations into Blender for rendering! Here’s a short video I’ve tweeted showing my inflatable boat in action: This is how we make it happen in principle. In Marvelous Designer: animate your garment export an OBJ from the first frame export the animation as MDD using the same settings …
Sometimes you might find that the body of the avatar is poking through the garment, and no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t seem to go away. I’m assuming you’ve already tried lowering the particle distance on the garment and smoothed the avatar, and you still have small poke through artefacts. Perhaps try …