Dazstudio Advanced Rigging tutorial vs daz wiki
Fixme12
Posts: 589
PS: MOD/ADMIN Before you delete this post, report this problem straight into the daz office. To the people that are responsible for daz manuals, advertisement,...
Great that someone is trying to create tutorials! with a fee, for all the work and time taken (no problem with that)!
better a great tutorial, then no info at all.
http://www.daz3d.com/new-releases/advanced-rigging-in-daz-studio-4-pro
What i don't understand, is that daz did not give this info in a great explained manual for all the users.
this is info about things how dazstudio works. (in other words, this is basic info that need a great explained section about the software!).
Maybe it is forbidden to become a PA, is it only a restricted club? I don't know?
What i do know is that it is very frustrating for users that now how to pose a figure and still would like to do more with studio.
I never get a great answer about this subject mostly threads like this just will be removed.
and the deadly daz silence remains.
So this tutorial didn't explain things like
things like Rigidity Groups/Mapping/....
(I can 't find any info about these subjects in the daz wiki)
If i move to the daz wiki and do a search on geo-grafting.
i have this page (http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/terms/geo-grafting/start#fn__5)
How can i learn from that little info page?
When do we see some solution from daz (with manuals), about al these hidden secrets? dazstudio 5?
the wiki docs alone did not work for me.
If you buy modo you get an offline version that explains everytool in the software,
you can move to the online version where videos explain the tool.
And you get a pdf Userguide around 1816 pages that explaining the software.
the reason why studio is free?
A great manual, can avoid so many questions on the forum by users that would like to receive a little more info then a basic how to pose a figure.
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Comments
Does this one cover some of the things you're mentioning? http://www.daz3d.com/rigging-original-figures-in-ds4-pro
I have to say I agree with you. If Daz wants to retain customers they need to show them how to use their software. Not everyone has time to post on the forums every time they want to do something or watch videos. Not everyone learns well from videos. There should be some decent written documentation.
I know both tutorials.., but it's not about these tutorials created by Blondie.
It's about that "this subject is actually basic/standard info about dazstudio needed to all daz users"
info that certainly need a better explaning by the daz team by a great set of manuals.
and not only given these info to a restricted PA vendor club on a hidden PA vendor forum.
Availabe info about the software and how the tools works to create content to all DAZ users.
If you want to address DAZ then do so, using a support ticket.
This is a tutorial, not the only reference material available. There are plenty of forum threads, videos and pages in the DAZ documentation centre on the topics you mention - if you have serious thoughts of being a content creator, especially a commercial content creator, then you are going to have to take the time to work through the material and learn the tools instead of waiting for someone to present you with a step-by-step guide to riches.
Richard, you work for daz..., not?
can you report about this problems to daz?
or do you have too little influence on these subjects?
and i think with a with a step-by-step guide to...
there would be so much more content, and more PA vendors (what would be good for daz)
I couldn't get things done any more quickly than you could by opening a ticket, and in any event while more information and different tutorials are always welcome I don't agree that there's such an utter dearth as you believe.
There is nothing unreasonable for a request for proper documentation, a PDF on even an extensive readme included with all products. Not everyone can pop online to reference a product or plugin.
Since DAZ decided to go the online bit in hasn't solved that issue. Suggestions to go to the Documentation Center and PDF pages does not help if the info is in the form of a Video. I really don't understand a majority of the replies when they mention that DAZ does not use it's own Forum for example, when someone requests info they are told that DAZ employees don't answer forum requests(or they hardly respond) and a support ticket is the only solution available. In my experience I've seen them or their representatives answer post's here quite frequently and in a fair and professional manner.
Not that has anything to do with this particular request but when a poster has to resort to applying a bold request to not delete a post due to likely controversy it makes me at least a little uneasy.
As to providing a step by step guide to Riches, Microsoft does it with all their developmental software in a basic sense and if one wants to go further they can subscribe to the MSDN but at the very least the documentation is sufficient to learn the Application. Granted they are a Multibillion dollar enterprise but that may be one of the reasons why, the better they supply the docs the more solutions based on their software available.
As long as the Documentation center is to only method of reference these type of posts will continue I'm afraid.
Many if not most complex development applications CHARGE for user manuals, tutorials and other detailed documentation. While some reference documentation may be made available with respect to menu options and capability specifications, user training covering method and technique are not. Users can expect to pay as much or more for thorough training and reference documentation for these type of application as the cost of the user license.
DS is a free product, and the company focuses its development on the core product and associated content. Its what they do best. DAZ encourages the PA and user community to participate in enriching the DS product and user experience with facilities, policies and development kits to further extend the capability and support. This includes documentation and tutorials.
This model is true for many of the best 3d applications. Companies like Digital Tutors, GEEKatPlay and Lyndia are outlets for professional grade tutorials. Digital Tutors is fantastic, but Not cheap, but extremely valuable. Basically the time you invest in "hunt and peck" type development and "redoing it the right way" will be better spent learning it the right way from the start. That advantage costs. If you think DS is a tough learn w/o investing in training - you should give ZBRUSH a go. Its interface is positively COUNTER-INTUITIVE yet is one of the most brilliantly designed UI I have experienced. But w/o training its hopeless to figure out on your own - unless you have the mind of a painter (2d artist). BLENDER is free, but your better off going on a bender than trying to figure out the UI on your own.
What applications are charging for user manuals?
It's not even a question of detailed documentation. The wiki is half finished and abandoned. How is a person supposed to learn how to use this software? The videos are based on older versions of the software and not everyone has the time or inclination to watch videos. Some people need to read to understand.
I was about to ask the same thing.
A better example Poser, is the suggestion because something is paid for a proper manual will be provided for or because you pay a premium is because reference is provided, POPPYCOCK. Poser provides the best reference I've ever seen and it's by far the closest thing to DAZ Studio than any of the programs mentioned in that particular reply.
DAZ Studio was not always FREE and some of us paid for the Content creation tool. It is free now but that should not be an excuse for the lack of a portable means for reference.
Not all products need a lengthy readme or PDF. Some very basic skills need to be a "given" or there would be so much redundant information to push through that no one would be interested in reading when the information was relevant. With the majority of products those basic skills are really all that is required to use the product. The product might benefit from other actions of the user but 99% of the time those are going to be case specific or personal taste related and no amount of writing is going to cover all of those.
Based on the PDF from my last product those are included and available on the users machine for review. And pretty much every complex product I have bought has had the additional information available as part of the product or viewable before I even purchased the product.
Not all products need a lengthy readme or PDF. Some very basic skills need to be a "given" or there would be so much redundant information to push through that no one would be interested in reading when the information was relevant. With the majority of products those basic skills are really all that is required to use the product. The product might benefit from other actions of the user but 99% of the time those are going to be case specific or personal taste related and no amount of writing is going to cover all of those.
Based on the PDF from my last product those are included and available on the users machine for review. And pretty much every complex product I have bought has had the additional information available as part of the product or viewable before I even purchased the product.
I agree, most PA's provide very sufficient documentation so the statement could be construed as a generalization. I guess I should have just specifically said DAZ Studio or The Content Creation Plugin, on that I apologize for any confusion because you are quite right on that account.
Look, I don't want to create a fuzz about this issue but I know it will be asked for and perhaps demanded from time to time. It's one of the reasons I have not participated in the forum as of late. I read the forum on a daily basis and this thread caught my attention so I felt compelled to reply.
I stand by my statement that as long as the Documentation Center is the only means for reference for DAZ Studio or the DAZ original Plugins that these threads will continue.
The truth is that even if Studio were fully documented there would still be a need for and a request of tutorials. The bottom line is that the two are written very differently and while documentation may tell you want something does and a how it may be used it is never going to give the sort of information or be written like tutorials. When I first started out there was rather reasonable documentation for studio. But I still felt the need to write a simple tutorial about surfaces settings because people just didn't get the information they needed from the documentations. Nor did Poser lack documentation back then, but there were hundreds of tutorials on how to accomplish things in poser. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be good documentation for studio. I'm all for that personally. But I don't think that if there were documentation that tutorials like blondie's would not still be requested and valuable. I know I have done my fair share of reading and following information about rigging but I know for a fact I didn't really learn the ins and outs in a usable way like I did with the tutorial. I don't think that documentation would let vendors off the hook for product documentation for use of complex products either.
Not all products need a lengthy readme or PDF. Some very basic skills need to be a "given" or there would be so much redundant information to push through that no one would be interested in reading when the information was relevant. With the majority of products those basic skills are really all that is required to use the product. The product might benefit from other actions of the user but 99% of the time those are going to be case specific or personal taste related and no amount of writing is going to cover all of those.
Based on the PDF from my last product those are included and available on the users machine for review. And pretty much every complex product I have bought has had the additional information available as part of the product or viewable before I even purchased the product.
Readmes don't get included in the newest DS products and they SHOULD be. Prime example? Bot genesis.... people not knowing where to find it, how to make it work, how to change it.... nowhere in the download was there a link or a hint to a readme, nor on the product page. Daz needs to make essential things like that accessible in the DOWNLOADS.
its pretty clear that the quality of Daz is going downhill.
Oh don't get me started on readme's. It's bad enough they aren't included in the downloads but then when Daz can't even be bothered to update their all singing all dancing documentation center with them, it really is enough to put you off buying stuff.
I will agree that a full manual like we had for DS3 would be good to better explain where things have been moved to in DS4. But at the same time the DS3 manual is still available and the core of DS has not changed. But yes, a DS4 specific manual would be nice.
From my days working tech support for a big name company I will say this when it comes to making a suport ticket to address issues, it is best that the customer do it since they can express situations and events unique to their experiance and reasons for using the software. No programmer can experiance everything we do and make the software perfect. We need to give them feedback based on our usage and desires.
It is NOT fobidden to become a PA. Like all the arts, it takes time and practice and more failure then success. I cannot speak for anyone else but I came from traditional arts into digital. The basics are all the same, only the tools have changed. We are not some special breed of people. We all had to learn and continue to do so at the expense of our time, efforts and money.
If posts are getting deleted, then perhaps we need to think a bit more about what it is we want to say before we type it all out. Reread it carefully to make sure it doesn't sound like we are flamming anyone or openly attacking someone. Also, its best if we avoid assumptions about situations we dont understand. Contructive criticism, questions about this or that and expressing concerns can all be done in a professional manner.
belovedalia, I'm just not sure why you singled me out to quote when I very clearly indicated that the advanced information for my products WAS included as part of the product. I'm sorry your so unhappy with us these days though.
With the Install Manager there should be a link to the readme next to its entry in whichever item lists it's in.
POPPYCOCK!!!
POPPYCOCK... POPPYCOCK... POPPYCOCK!!!
I was here last night when fixme12 wrote this post, and almost commented then, but I assumed it would immediately get deleted (chohole was stalking). Glad to see it was not deleted...
First, I am not going to discuss PA documentation included (or not) with products, the merits of third party tutorials that benefit all those who can't comprehend proper (technical) documentation, or the basis of "basic" documentation (not) needed, because everyone can just "play" and learn how the basics work.
I am with fixme12 on this. I have been bitchin' about this from day one, and have said so many times.
I don't fault blondie for creating her tutorials, and am a big proponent of them. I thank blondie for getting the information out there, but not because I couldn't understand "plain" documentation, but because it is either non-existent (to the public), or in a perpetual state of limbo.
Her first one contained 95% of information I had already gathered, understood, and applied to my work-flow. One crucial piece of information still missing from official documentation was what made it so valuable for me. Not because I couldn't comprehend any technical data regarding the tools usage.
Bonus, though, is I now have a proper "documentation" to reference instead of having to hunt-n-peck through all the scattered limited docs/tuts. I still have to reference others once in a while, but it is now my default go to.
Same will now go for blondie's advanced tutorial. It doesn't have all the answers, but it is a hell of a lot more than DAZ has put out for us. Even so, there is a conflicting section with what I "learned" through the DAZ Wiki's, and come to find I have been doing something wrong for so many months from following the limited official documentation in the first place.
The issue is not third-party tutorials, or how/what someone learns. The issue is the lack of technical documentation for core (read all) details of the "tools" in the software, and how to apply them (and not from lack of understanding requiring a third-party to rewrite it into easier to understand terms).
As someone who uses the Content Creation Tools daily, and has explored (with much trial-n-error) the multitude of buttons/check-boxes/selections, it is very frustrating that I can not reference what a button/function actually does, and must remain in the dark until someone creates a tutorial explaining what it is for, what it can accomplish, or what it can do.
To take an alphabetical analogy of the tool-set, if the tools are represented by the twenty-six letters of the (English) alphabet, roughly five to six of the letters are documented, where as ALL OF THEM should be documented (by DAZ).
And to those saying software doesn't come with proper documentation, or you have to pay extra to learn any information pertinent to the software.
REALLY!?!
Even my demos (Max, Maya, Vue, Poser, Houdini, Messiah, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Modo, Silo, Meshbox, Hexagon 1.0, and etc.) all came with proper documentation that detailed what each and every function/button/check-box does, uses, or applies to.
Hell, I still reference my 3DSMax 6 manual for all the great information pertaining to 3D, and not just the functions within Max.
That's my buck-fifty.
Discuss...
*EDIT: I missed an important part to my diatribe. So, in closing, I shouldn't have even had to purchase a third-party tutorial in the first place just to learn functions of tools in the software. Again, I wholeheartedly thank blondie for creating her tutorials, and I hope she reaps the rewards of her labor, but it shouldn't have been my only recourse.
Really. Let's understand the two things you both are really talking about. Documentation and techniques.
Take zbrush for instance. They have a pdf that talks about the functionality of the application, but then there is a wealth of books that you have to pay for that discuss the techniques of using that program for character creation. Pixelogic's pdf won't go into a workflow for go into creating characters and that's really what you're asking for. Even when you buy that or modo, you get a guide that goes into more detail that someone else actually wrote.
You'll get no argument that the online docs need to be completed so you know what each button does; however, what Blondie wrote goes under the techniques category and isn't normally done by the company writing the software.
My mistake...
I should have included that I also would not be discussing techniques.
"Pixelogic’s pdf won’t go into a workflow for go into creating characters and that’s really what you’re asking for."
No.
I'm not "really asking for" techniques on character creation. That's your bag, not mine.
I'm not "really asking for" techniques of any kind. If I was, I would want to ask for a complete "technique" tutorial from A to B (start to completion) from someone like Stonemason, Mattymanx, Valandar, or even blondies complete "technique" for content creation.
I am not confused with technique vs function...
All I am "really asking for" is proper documentation of the "functions" of all the tools within the software (which usually accompany the software).
I know further documentation, tutorials, and learning are required to enhance ones "technique", but that is not what I need. I have technique "out the wazoo".
I don't need to know how to "bake the cake". I already know.
I need to know what are the ingredients for this "particular cake".
So who wants to be first to pay for and set up their own web page for tutorials? Or create a group for learning how to better use Studio? When I started out with Paintshop Pro, that's how I learned. I joined groups and learned by doing tutorials. Don't want to go that far? Volunteer to finish or re-do something in the Knowledge Center. Check, update, and/or rewrite, if necessary, readme's and metadata. Write a book on it and make some money. Take a look over in the Carrara forum at what Dartenbeck's doing.
I like the idea of the lesson strips. They would be really handy for something I don't use very often. I haven't written any yet, but the instructions are available. Have you written any for your own use? To share with others?
In the past week I have decided I don't use the same DAZ products that y'all use. I have a file of readme's. My knowledge center has instructions. My DIM works. I'm happy with what I've got.
It's a bit hard to rewrite stuff in the knowledge center when you don't have the first clue what you're doing.
I think the rapid development cycles of DS out pace the tech writers at DAZ for the user update. i usually can figure out the latest features. Sometimes I will publish tips about it . Many users ARE adept at figuring out how a new feature functions and what it does (reference manual update) and best to apply it (tutorial). Its part of the "game"... lol not what you want to hear - I'm sure!
I believe anyone who could figure out ZBrush with the supplied PDF alone, could certainly pick up on what the latest feature in DS does with a little experimentation. :)
The DAZ Studio forum of course is the place to share the latest secrets revealed with the other users. Fire away of you have a specific rigging question. Maybe able to help out.
I have a hard time trying to figure out why some don't get what the OP is asking for. In the 2nd paragraph of the post he freely admits that the tutorial in question is worth purchasing and a worth while contribution, we all agree with that.
If someone devotes time and effort it should be rewarded.
What is being asked for is basic and rudimentary documentation for the application in a form that is portable and able to be accessed offline(PDF) not step by step detailed tutorials or instructions as some here think has been asked for.
I hope at least the OP will get what he/she needs without being misunderstood or if I am not understanding it right please reply and set me straight.
As to creating groups or writing our own Documentation seems kind of absurd being as most of us have found a lot of the features of the software by accident and that's hardy a way to compile any technical reference.
;-) True.
Perhaps if he had not titled the post with "vs"? A plea for more complex in house documentation need not even mention the tutorial. Especially since tutorials are written in addition to and not in place of base documentation. Even if there were full documentation there would still be a place and need for well written tutorials as evidenced by the history of both Studio and Poser.
I'm not ready to do any rigging yet. I haven't learned what ZBrush is, but I know it's costly. I would love to see a decent manual for Studio. I would also like some tutorials such as the ones for PaintShopPro. When I'm brand-new to anything, I need the "take jonah.jpg and with the mover tool place him inside the bigfishmouth.jpg." I can then transfer moving an object to what I'm working on. Some of us came into Studio with no art background at all. I have fun, though, especially with the sliders.
I find "basic and rudimentary documentation" already in the Knowledge Center. Every time I check more has been added, so it is not stagnant. The lack of illustrations for the old Wiki makes me want to scream, but some of them I saved before it was the "old" Wiki and they have the illustrations. The pages in the Knowledge Center can be printed out or saved to the OP's computer.
I think what the OP was most upset about was that an individual spent the time to dig out the information, organize it, and get it published, for a price. That wasn't the worst part, though. The kicker was that it didn't come from DAZ, but from outside DAZ. A call did go out to forum members about a year ago asking for help in getting the documentation done. A user did step up and say she would head up the efforts, but I don't know what happened to it;. The DAZ employees have their hands full with a new system for the store and forums, development ongoing for 3 applications, running sales, and replying to complaints.f
The best thing about groups is that someone that has discovered ways to make the program sing and is willing to share that knowledge with everyone else. Over in Carrara a manual is being written by a user. He could just sit on what he has found for himself, but he chooses to share his knowledge and shoulder the work so that all will benefit.
The problem with this is Daz employees are the only ones who know how to use all the tools in Daz and what they're for. So while users can write documentation, it basically a load of guess work.
ETA
Khory I'm well content with your products! I was only saying that some things do not have a readme included when it's very needed, and furthermore it is hard to track down and doesn't have enough info included. I've never had a complaint with your items Khory- sorry it came across that way.