Time to join in I think.. Poser to Daz Studio
phil_23314
Posts: 0
OK, so, after a long time using all sorts of 3D software i feel its time to get to know something else. I have Poser 9, along with Vue, Maya, Photoshop etc and I'd like to know a few things before I add Daz Studio to my list. I've downloaded it a few times but never saw a real reason to use it as well as Poser for my character stuff. Lately though I've spotted some stuff I like so maybe its time to add it to my list.
Here's what I'd like to know.
Which is the best version of Studio to go for. I know I know its free to download but what add-ons are needed to make it a really usable product?
How easy is it to get to know the controls and interface. Is it close to Poser and Vue?
Is the Genesis figure easy enough to work with?
Although the info on the website tells me a lot I thought it would be worth getting other users thoughts aswell.
Thanks Phil.
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Personally I am not a fan of Daz Studio. I've tried to like it in different versions, but with no success. I find the interface clunky and un-intuitive and I find it frustrating trying to get it to find my content.
My programs of choice are Poser and Vue. Although there are some people who are happy to use both DS and Poser, most people tend to find one interface easy and the other one difficult.
As to Genesis, the DSON importer for Poser 9 or Poser Pro 2012 allows you to use a lot of Genesis content, but you do need a fast machine. I use an i7 2600 with 16 Gigs of RAM and I find DSON importer to be fast enough, but many people find it way too slow.
All of that said though, Daz Studio 4.5 is currently being offered for free (as you already stated in your post), so all it would cost you to try it is some of your time. For that, it's definitely worth a look, as with your experience of Maya you may be one of those people who is comfortable with a different interface. As far as I'm aware, you don't really need any add-ons to use the program and it does come with the Genesis model. Exporting to Vue is much easier from Poser than it is from DS.
Finally, although Genesis can be made to work in Poser, it has much better functionality and access to content in Daz Studio.
If you get time to post back, I'd be interested to hear of your experiences with DS and whether experience of other programs will make the interface easier for you.
Will do, downloading now. Like you said, its free so is worth a try.
A Poser migrant with the same name as me. It's a small world after all.
Firstly, I'd recommend installing the latest version of any software. I'm a former Poser user. I used to use Poser Pro 2010 until around October last year when I moved to Daz Studio to make good use of Genesis (it was either that or pay through the nose to upgrade to Poser 9 or Pro 2012). Here's how I found things.
1) The interface
At first this is probably going to throw you for a loop. It feels very alien to Poser, and might be perhaps your biggest stumbling block in getting to grips with it. I'll stress though, it's not the fault of the software, it's more down to how Poser users have certain expectations which are dealt with differently.
For my part, I think it's a huge leap forwards in terms of useability, and I much prefer the Daz Studio interface to the old Poser Pro 2010 interface for several reasons. Firstly, because the tab system keeps everything neatly ordered and allows you to customize the interface to your choosing. Secondly because the universal manipulator makes moving objects (and finding them) SO much easier than in Poser.
The latter point is most important when dealing with point lights which are extremely hard to use in Poser Pro 2010 because the only indicator is a tiny grey-on-grey circle. In Daz, you'll get a 3DS Max style cursor to translate, rotate and scale objects. The old school Poser interfaces could learn a lot from Daz 4's slick redesign.
2) Smart Content
At first smart content seems quite the opposite. It never seems to show you what you want, and sometimes never what you need. That is, at least, until you figure out how it works. Smart Content is a contextual list of the items installed on your PC. It will only display items which have associated 'Metadata' (we'll get to that later) but it does so in a straightforward manner.
Say, for example, you clicked on the Genesis figure. In the Smart Content you can expect to find all the items compatible with that figure. Clothing, accessories, skins and so on. So, you add a T-shirt and then select that T-shirt. You can now expect to find materials for that shirt, and perhaps visibility poses to change the design. In short, what is displayed depends on what your current selection is.
3) Content Library
You'll be very familiar with this if you've used the Library pane in Poser. They're virtually identical, allowing you to browse your content folder-by-folder to find what you're after. If you've got a lot of Poser or non-metadata content, you'll find it here.
4) Features
By far the biggest adjustment beyond the interface are the cloth and hair rooms. Daz Studio has no such thing, and it's closest equivalents are the Dynamic Clothing tab for cloth and systems like Garibaldi and Look at My Hair (LAMH) for hair. The problem with the former is you're locked into only using specific clothing items made by Optifex themselves, and you'll need an extra purchase of their plugin to get anything beyond the most basic features. The problem with the latter isn't so much their function, but you will need to make an additional purchase similar to the dynamic clothing.
There's no real face room either. However, Genesis has this pretty well covered as it's the most malleable figure ever released. If you're not already familiar with it, then it's well worth your time to do so.
5) Genesis
This is what made me switch, and I'm so glad I did.
Genesis is a standalone figure which comes with Daz Studio. On it's own it's pretty special as it can form literally thousands of different shapes and sizes right out of the box, and without looking odd. By default, Genesis comes with three basic morphs. Female, Male and child. These morphs can be applied in bits, so I could, for example, use 40% child with 60% male to make a ten year old, or blend masculine in with female features to create an amazonian warrioress.
Items designed for Genesis work in the same way. Clothes and hair will change shape based on the Genesis shape, and do it so well that they rarely need tweaking unless you're using extreme shapes. No longer do you need multiple clothes for different shapes, one size fits all, and the days of magnet fits are in the past. Hooray! An example of this is in the pic below.
I'll freely admit that my decision to move to Daz Studio was originally a matter of cost. I went for the cheap (ie, free) option to get my hands on Genesis. However, since migrating I've found Daz Studio has actually helped my productivity more than Poser did. The interface once you learn it may prove more intuitive than Poser's, and the 3Delight render engine is extremely powerful, though granted not as fast as Firefly.
As a former Poser user I'm happy to say I rather like Daz Studio and I'll probably be sticking with it from now on.
AHH! I've given it a chance and first impressions are good. I seem to have been able to find my way around easily enough and even loaded my Poser Runtime in. It was a bit confusing at first with the Download Manager thingy as I knew I'd re downloaded all my (very) old M3 stuff but it wasn't showing up. It was easy enough to sort out though once I'd realised (realized?) it wasn't classed as a 'Smart' item so I had to go looking for it on the right side of the screen.
I'm having a bit of bother understanding why a character, good old Simon, is coming in at one size yet the wall prop I know is the correct scale in P9 comes in HUGE!.
Still, if everything were easy it wouldn't be fun finding things out.
I've never been a 'fan boy' of particular programs over others, in my job I can't be, but I do think as an extra piece of my 3D hobbyist arsenal Daz Studio is up amongst the best. I'll certainly keep using it
Poser uses very different scaling to Daz Studio. If it's a CR2 file then Daz should scale it automatically, but there are exceptions. I daresay Poser has an absolutely HORRENDOUS scaling system, making it very difficult to get products in and out of it with the majority of other software such as 3D Studio Max and Blender, both of which I use.
However, the opposite should be true. Poser objects tend to be a lot smaller in Daz scale than they are in Poser scale. In the import/export options for Daz Studio, there's an option to convert the units into Poser units. If you import, you'll notice it expands the figure by over 24,000% while exporting shrinks it to less than 0.5%. If you tell me what prop you're using, I'm sure someone can help you correct any scaling issues you might be having.
Thanks for the offer. I'll have to try other props and see what happens. It was a free wall and floor prop from the 'other' site.. Dare I say it.. Renderosity. Anyway, I'm used to having to re scale things as I use Maya to create my own props whenever I find time. It's very satisfying to see something you made from scratch in an image that gets good feedback.
I'm not giving up straight away!
Is the wall a PP2 file or an OBJ? If you import an OBJ, you need to make sure you choose the right preset (I don't know if it's been fixed, and since it shows only on clean systems I can't check, but at one time the OBJ import options dialogue was shrunk too much to see the preset list): if importing to Poser with the scale options unchecked works then the Poser preset should give the right size. If it's a PP2 on the other hand then I don't know why it would be mis-scaled in DS.
First, Some words of wisdom - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17351/
DS may not work for you or it may. It is free and as stated already, it will only cost you time.
Having used Poser first years ago before trying DS I will admit that I found it difficult at first to get use to the UI. However, in all fairness, that can be true going from any program to another that performs the same or simular tasks. Having used DS for as long as I have now though, I do find it to be laid out a lot better then the Poser UI and its different Ui abilities and options are prefered as well.
Genesis is a different beast then previous generations and will take a bit of getting use to. I skipped Gen4 for the most part and it took me some getting use to Genesis after using the Gen3 for so long but once you get use to it it make a lot of sense and you should find it to be a good addon to your runtime. Its ability to be male or female makes it extremely inexpensive to buy for.
Glad you're finding it easy to get around. There's so much to learn that is different, like setting up materials in the surface tabs and learning to use shaders (well worth it!) as well as Uber environment lights.
My favorite thing to use in DS is the the Look at My Hair Plugin http://www.daz3d.com/look-at-my-hair
Just makes everything look so cool :) Made the hair for the mermaid with LAMH, water is using shaders.
Genesis was the main reason i started using Genesis and I use Genesis with all my Gen4 and Gen 3 morphs using the GenX plugin to convert the morphs, texture converter 2 to convert gen3 textures to Genesis (who can wear Gen4 textures), and I use SickleYield Rigging and morphing addon to make autofit clothing conversions a breeze! Top shaders: Anything from Maraiah and Fisty and Khory! Atmospheric Cameras, and gel lights round out my favorite things to use. :)
Attaching a pic :)
The mane of the horse belovedalia posted was created by her in LAMH. For a peek of the various (free!) presets already uploaded by Alessandro, go to: http://www.furrythings.com/presets/
I'm using LAMH myself, and I love it.
The first time I discovered DS was back in 2007/2008, and as I was used to 3DS Max, the interface of DAZ Studio became intuitive to me, and I easily grasped where and how. Just creating and posing lights like they're cameras (something you can view through, and see where the light will shine) is a tremendous help.
...for me it was an experience in the opposite direction.
I started with Daz Studio because it was free and there were enough freebie offerings, through both the Daz and other 3D sites, to get a good foothold on how the application works. In a sense it was a fully unrestricted use demo that had no expiration date unlike other 3D products which usually offered "hobbled" trial versions of their applications that were good for only 30 days (fine if you have a month off to play, not very useful when nearly two thirds of your waking day is taken up by RL responsibilities).
Being on a limited budget, 250$ (which was the going price for Poser5 at the time) was a lot of money to drop on something I wasn't sure I'd like or would work for my needs (and due to the EULA, I would be down 250$ if it didn't work out).
As I began to become more involved, purchase content and plugins I realised there were some things Daz Studio couldn't do like cloth dynamics and rigging (at the time) and was able to obtain a copy of Poser6 at a substantial discount (as Poser 7 was soon to be released). Having spent some time with Daz Studio, I found P6's UI to be a bit strange to work with, particularly the lighting system. With Daz I could simply select a light as a camera to assist with aiming and positioning. The "light sphere" in Poser seemed too cumbersome and "twitchy" to me. While the transition and morphing controls were not all that much different to work with, the camera controls seemed a bit more tricky and less intuitive to use that Daz Studio's.
Now one of the major things I liked about Poser was the Material room as it was much more detailed and had better controls compared with the surfaces tab in Daz Studio (ver 2.0 at the time). The other was the cloth room. Being able to do dynamic draping instead of messing around with DFormers (which I never could seem to get to work quite right) to eliminate pokethrough or deal with other fitting issues, seemed so much more elegant.
Another nice thing I discovered with Pro 2010 was that rendering was faster and less prone to crashing than 3Delight was in Studio 3Advanced. It even let me render with ray tracing and occlusion on a 32 bit system.
So, in the end, I have essentially become one of those who works in both platforms using each to the best strengths. Being so used to Daz all these years, the transition to 4.5 was fairly smooth once I had the new workstation running. True, there are a lot of new features and tools I haven't worked with, yet. As to Poser, I am installing Pro 2012 on the new machine for it still has its advantages, most notably, the cloth room with it's "open ended" dynamics and materials room with better MAT zone definition. Poser also works better with the Marvelous Designer2 clothing modeller.
In addition I also have Carrara 8 Pro, Bryce 7 Pro, Hexagon 2.5 (if they ever fix the instability issues), Blender 2.6, and the PLE version of Vue11 Infinite.
One needs more than a hammer in the toolbox to build a house.
Er guys, no offense, but this is NOT a "why I chose Daz over poser/ why i chose Poser over daz" and probably not a good idea to derail the thread into that! Plenty other threads for that. The OP wants info on things to use in Daz to get the best Daz experience, and using it better, and probably not stories about Poser/DS. :)
To the OP, you might want to make sure you get the genesis Generation shapes, so you can use all of A3, H3, M3, D3, S3, A4,H4, V4, M4, G4, F4, and so on in your Genesis shapes. That also lets you fit clothes from them to Genesis using autofit. Creature creator morphs also add a lot of fantastic variety.
...I would also consider Genesis GenerationX which will allow you to load morphs and custom character morph sets from the older generation figures you have into Genesis.
Autofit is good but not perfect as it doesn't do very well with long skirts/coats or footwear. There is a utility available in the Daz store that helps tremendously with this:
http://www.daz3d.com/sickle-rigging-and-morphing-system
Heh I did already mention both ;)
...ooops, just trying to get the train back on the track.
Glad to see that you're liking DS. Since it's currently free, if it offers anything extra to your workflow then it's good that you can take advantage of it.
Dynamic clothing in Poser and DS are vastly different. The cloth room is built into Poser since version 5. You can covert any conformer to full dynamics by exporting as an obj and reimporting or by spawning it as a prop in the Group editor. You can also take a conformer like the MFD into the cloth room, clothify the skirt part and run the sim.
At present, DS does not have this option. You have a free player included in DS but you will have to purchase the cloth control plugin separately. It's been a while so it may have been updated to 64 bit but at one time you needed to have the 32 bit version of DS installed to use it if you were using the 64 bit. If this had been updated, don't jump down my throat, I already stated it's been a while.
If you purchased any of the Python scripts or add ons for Poser, they will not work in DS. DS uses QT scripting language whereas Poser uses Python.
To answer your questions, transformations from Poser to DS might be a bit difficult, have to get used to different interface. DS as any aplication is on it's own, and needs to be learned ;)
The version which is now availible for free DS4.5 is good version, has almost all the addons ( like Uber Envoirment, which works pretty much like IDL in Poser, and HSS shader, which is really good :) ) To get the best effects of those first browse trough some tutorials to see which dial (slide) do what :)
Genesis is really easy in DS, you just load the figure, clothing, hair, do your posing, and that's it. DS has Autofit tool, which allows you to use any clothing made for gen4, and if you have iconinc shapes for gen3 also their clothing. Also can still use their textures, since it comes with different UVmapping, which you can just choose from dropdown menu.
At the end it is all going itno what you will prefer ;)
WOW! All this interest, thanks guys (and girls) for all the feedback. Like it has been said earlier, I'm not after a 'which is best' just another goodie to use in my favourite hobby number 2 (Number 1 is, and always will be, Electra Cruisers... WHEE!). :-)
I tried out the DSON gadget for Poser and it works great. All I have to figure out now is if I can add the Genesis add-ons and morphs. I'm not sure if I can add extra morphs to it via Poser or if I have to go through Studio. The basic characters are a bit limited and I'd like to find out if I can do this sort of thing before I start buying stuff.
Hey ho, something else to play with I suppose.
Just been asked to look at developing for UDK now.
Install the morphs such as V5 to the same runtime as you installed the Genesis Starter Essentials and the Poser Companion Files.
When you next load Genesis into Poser via the DSON, you will see the morphs listed in the parameters dials. V5 will show up as Actor>Female>Real World (or something to that effect). You can then dial the morph and it will appear.
Depending upon your system specs, if you have a load of morph sets attached to Genesis, you may find a slight lag in loading.
The biggest slow downs can come (again depending upon system specs) is the transfer of active morphs from the figure to the clothing.
I have found that to minimize slow downs, set your figure morphs before you add your clothing and before you hit transfer active morphs. Especially if you are mixing figure morphs. The script will run one every item of clothing conformed to the figure every time you use it. There's no way to tell it to only do it one a particular clothing item.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for that, it sounds really easy. Pity I'm at work or I'd try it right now. Don't mind a bit of slow down, it gives me time to think. :-)
I have M3, V3, all the Poser characters and even a few odd ones so I guess I'll need to update my characters now.
As one of those who are using and liking more than one software (see my signature): Welcome! :)
I've gotten very good results from the 3Delight renderer DAZStudio comes with, but if you want seriously real-world renders from DS4x you should try LuxRender. I've been very happy with Luxus for that, but a lot of people swear by Reality.
Nice post! I am one also, used most modeling apps, used Vue, used Bryce, used hexagon, used Poser from version 5. Currently i have poser 7 and 2012 installed, DS 4.5, Carrara 7 pro, Blender, 3DSMax, Gmax and Sketchup pro also, LOL.
Gotta say, DS 4.5 with all it's features gets most of my time for rendering.
I too have quite a few different programs. I bet no one can guess which one I use the most out of all the ones I have :roll:
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, could it be.................Bryce LOL
I really liked Bryce, especially the lighting, i just hated the render times.
I did not know we had that in common, Matty. Though I think I took to Genesis like it was a very natural fit... Maybe it was the fact that I was out of 3D for so long that D|S 4 and Genesis (I started off with D|S4 basic, I forget what it was called, below "Advanced")... I found D|S4 to be amazingly comprehensive and easy to deal with. I never, ever got into the Content manager, though, and I consider it to be a little redundant... especially since, Unlike Poser, the DAZ Studio does not force you to let it catagorize content by file path.
Having the freedom to put things where I need them to be makes my life sooo much easier than it was using Poser :) I have every single one of my characters saved as Scene Subsets in Studio/My Library/Characters with a copy of the default, basic Genesis saved under Studio/My Library for instant, easy access...
And I moved all, and I mean every single pose, up to My Library/Poses. I don't have to go under My Library/People/Genesis/Poses/etc/etc/blah/blah/blah/
I don't know about Poser 9 or 2012, but you couldn't even think about doing something like that in P6!
All by itself, those are huge selling points for me with DAZ Studio... haven't even touched on the 3dgasm I had when I found out Genesis was SDS and D|S4 used a high end render engine...
Gen 3 for Genesis, you will need the Gen 3 iconic shapes for Genesis
http://www.daz3d.com/gen-3-iconic-shapes-for-genesis
The link is for the bundle but you can purchase M3/V3 and others separately if you wish.
For using Gen 4 you would need the Gen 4 iconic shapes
http://www.daz3d.com/gen-3-iconic-shapes-for-genesis
M4 and V4
http://www.daz3d.com/v4-and-m4-shapes-for-genesis
I'm finding iconic shapes (both 3rd and 4th generation) to be one of the most used things in DS4 for me because it allows Autofit to fit older items to Genesis with it.