Daz Studio - Suggestions for useability
John Biehl
Posts: 7
I recently decided to jump on the DAZ Studio bandwagon, and for the most part I've been pretty happy with the resuts I've gotten.
Having been a Poser user for the last 20+ Years I found it a dificult transition, mostly because of all the annoying things you have to get used to, [read "Put up with"]
Still overall its a decent product and I applaud your efforts in keeping it a viable app for 3D.
In the spirit of making it an even better product, here's some feasible suggestions you should consider.
1.) 0.5 to 1 Second delay for selection highlight (TO ALLEVIATE) blinding flashes.
Possible Epilepsy episodes could be avoided simply by putting a one second or even a half-second delay on the mouse cursor as it passes by objects in the scene.
Trying to get my mouse from one side of the frame to another, should not cause me to reach for a headache pain reliever.
Why does it have to "FLASH" on absolutely everything as it passes by?
Half a second delay - that's all I ask. This would be a wonderful fix I'm sure many people would appreciate.
2.) Get rid of clicking on tabs to hide panels.
The little arrows do a fine job of hiding the panels. Granted they are still too tiny to be of any real use, but still.
I hate it when I'm trying to get something done and I click on a tab and all the panels disappear. WHY DO WE NEED THIS ?
It's a useless annoying feature - dump it.
3.) Search Box - Search Block!
For the most part I LOVE that you can search almost any panel to find something.
I HATE it when you are trying to find something, either an object or a morph and can't because you just realized that stupid couple of letters in the search bar is stopping you from finding it.
A perfect fix would be to make it so the program only holds the input from the search bar till you hit <enter> then erases it! GOD! Would that ever be a welcome relief!
4.) CPU, GPU or BOTH?
Why is it there is virtually no information on what these tick boxes ACTUALLY do? I originally thought that having both boxes ticked would be the best of both worlds, but apparently that's not so.
Doing some test renders on a Victoria 8 (with Monika Hair) I only noticed a few seconds difference on my stopwatch between the three options (CPU, GPU, Both) What's the deal here?
Can't you get the program to render using BOTH? Of course that would require you to have decent coding engineers, so maybe not.
5.) FIT Camera Mounted Headlamps with GELS or Trans Maps.
As a videographer, I sometimes use LED lights mounted on my camera to throw some light on a subject in places where there are low or non-existent lighting.
The use of these on the user created cameras in DAZ is a nice touch, at least we can turn them OFF or DOWN. But why can't they act like real lights?
What would be ideal is if you could arrange it so that there was a dropdown menu next to the "HEADLAMP" where we could load either gels or trans-maps to create an effect.
This should be pretty easy to accomplish and I think it would make a lot of people happy.
6.) Why Can't I save an AREA RENDER!
Sometimes I need something fast that's only part of the picture. I might do an area render and it comes out just the way I like it - perfect! Except DS doesn't allow me to save it!
WTF? I mean it took a long time to do this area render and its exactly what I need - why can't I save it? To make things worse If I accidentally touch it - it GOES AWAY!
This could mean hours of wasted time! That area render process needs a SERIOUS re-think!
7.) No UNDO for adding content - BAD!
This is a huge time waster. I can't believe that there's no undo for adding something to the scene.
Half the time it’s the wrong prop or texture, then I have to go hunt it down in scene hierarchy (because a lot of time its not easily clickable in the scene) and then delete it.
When Poser first added multiple "undos" to their app it was one of the best things they ever did. There's also a HUGE amount of things that definitely NEED to be in UNDO.
(see #13 Prefs Menu)
8.) Reparenting in the Hierarchy Menu - Too wonky to work, too important to die!
Why is it when I want to reparent something in the Scene tab it goes haywire. Once I grab the item and try to move it, nested sections that normally require stupid amounts of clicking,
suddenly start opening all over the place and make it very hard to put the item where you want it. Is there any way to stop this? Oh and of course there's NO UNDO for that either.
In fact there is a HUGE amount of things that don't fall under the UNDO category. Another problem with the Hierarchy menu is that clicking on something in the posing or surfaces menu
opens up EVERYTHING in the Hierarchy menu. Scrolling all the way up to collapse these menus takes even more time, exascerbated by the infinitesimally small size of the scroll bars,
and I'm using a 50" 4K TV as a monitor!
9.)What? No Autosave?
And here you thought those crashes were infrequent! - RIGHT!
I've had to set a timer on my phone for every 5 minutes to save this thing so I don't lose hours of time. FIX THIS!
10.) Symmetry Keys Screwed up.
Why is it you have to literally POUND the keyboard buttons to make Symmetry pop up? What's wrong with that??
And why is it that popup - more often than not CRASHES the app? It doesn't know when it's toggled, and as a result tries to put up 2 at once - which crashes the app.
Same thing happens with the save command if I accidentally press 2 keys at once.
11.) What is with this parenting problem?
I don't understand why creating a group and putting people in it prevents you from selecting anything in it other than through the scene tab.
It also creates massive problems with shells. Can't this be fixed?
12.) Options (Preference Menu) Update
As an Adobe user, I get used to having control of what's going on in my app, like how many "Load Previous Scene" listings I get to see.
The "options" menu that's currently avbailable is almost useless for user interopoerability.
13.) Posing options (By Model)
Its bad enough that most vendors still have no idea how to ZERO the hip joint before committing the pose, But having all these V4 poses, and unusable V5 poses taking up all the screen real estate is too annoying for words. Can't we just have another category "by Model" added to "By Region" or "by Function"? How amazing would that be. Another time waster put out to pasture.
And why is it that even when I "Lock" a figure's SCALE, everytime I add a new pose it changes the scale back to 100%. Can't this be fixed?
Why bother having the "lock" function if it doesn't work?
That's all for now. I will continue to update this post as I find more things that need to be addressed. Hopefully somebody from the DAZ Dev team will look in on this and respond and I can enjoy the same repore I have with Poser in the suggestions area.
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Comments
You can if you spot render to a new window and not to the viewport. With the spot render tool active go to the tool settings pane and select "new window". If you do this it will also do the spot render at the right relative size compared to your full render, not at viewport size.
Saving can take a lot of time depending on the scene, and you can't use the app during save. So autosave could be a real hassle.
There are problems with keybord shortcuts in DS4.12.1.117. Some have been fixed in version 4.12.1.118 released yesterday
When you use Smart content you can use the "filter by context" option so it shows you only items marked as compatible with currently selected figure.
Forums are mostly user to user, so that's not likely. If you want the dev team to see your feature requests you'll need to open a support ticket.
In Draw Settings set the Node Higlhghtiing to Bounding Box only
I'm not sure what you mean here.
If you do decide to submiit a proper feature request I suggest you try to keep your claws sheathed while doing so.
https://www.daz3d.com/marshian-light-projection-system-for-iray (This is designed to thrown more dramatic light into a scene but you can use any image you like - might be what you're after).
Failing that - parent a plane just above the camera and add an image to that in the emissive channel / can't check right now but I think you might be able to add an image to the 'colour' of the spotlight too - could parent that to the camea.
Hey guys - thanks for the help. I'll check out these fixes you suggested and keep trying to find viable solutions to the problems I encounter.
I realize this is just a user to user forum, but now at least I can get feedback enbough to figure out which items above should actually GO into a support ticket.
I still think the autosave should be an option. Since I started using an M.2 system drive even the most complex scenes only take a few seconds to save, so I don't think that would be a problem.
Again - your feedback is most welcome.
Also - I tried the using the "bounding Box only" setting. It leaves a lot of room to pick the wrong surface or part. The highlighted surface is better, now If it would just highlight a half second later!
I love the "it already does this, but we never documeted it so why don't you know about it?" answers, gives me a chuckle.