Actual working links in the 'Help' menu...

ShelLuser

Hi gang,

I find it a bit dissapointing to discover how poorly the documentation is set up in Daz Studio. When I open the Help menu and click 'user guide' (ctrl-f1) then this URL is opened up: https://www.daz3d.com/dsportal/user_guide_action

... which gives you a nice 404 "Page does not exist".

A bit of studying leans me that the actual URL for the userguide is: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/start

And the same applies to pretty much all other options in that help menu: quickstart guide, video tutorials, faq, tutorials, not even the forum links work!

When trying to get to the new user forum I get this: https://www.daz3d.com/dsportal/new_user_help_forum_action, which triggers another 404.

Submit feedback?  404: https://www.daz3d.com/dsportal/feedback_action

 

So yah, my suggestion would be to fix the help menu because I can't help but be convinced that this would help out a lot of newbies. I can understand one or two inactive links, but nearly all of them?  yikes!

Tamuna

Agreed. This is the sort of thing I expect in long abandoned software. It's made worse by the fact that easily available, up to date resources for learning Daz Studio are already minuscule compared to a lot of other 3D programs.

Richard Haseltine

This is a site issue, not a DS issue - the redirects were lost in the store update and haven't yet been restored.

Richard Haseltine

The redirects should now be working, though the New user help forum link is currently misdirected.

ShelLuser

Richard Haseltine said:

The redirects should now be working, though the New user help forum link is currently misdirected.

Awesome.. yeah, I was aware that the whole thing was server based but... a suggestion is a suggestion ;)

More seriously: from a user perspective it doesn't really matter what the actual cause is, in the end it's something which doesn't work. Thing is... I'm a vivid guide writer and I always pay attention to these things, even if I don't really need it myself anymore. But that's why I made the suggestion: newbies who need this to work most likely won't speak up (it's assuming they find the forums and are willing to participate) and veterans hardly look at this anymore because we don't need it any longer. Yah, but I'm the nut who sporadically does check ;)

Anyway, thanks for the feedback! Sure, Carara isn't exactly the new user forum, but all the other links at least do something useful and I'm positive that this is going to help you guys in the longer run.

richardandtracy

I do feel an on-machine help would be a great deal more useful. Quite a few people use DS on offline machines, so an on-line help is unavailable. Having the option to download a .chm  help (or apple equivalent) of the current state of the online documentation or similar would be exceedingly useful. As would updating all bits that change with the new version uplift (Eg with introduction of Genesis 8.1, changes to the environment tab, description of how to use iRay fog etc). If one of the release tasks could be to do that, I'm sure it'd be very helpful.

The current 'User Guide' pdf (virtually the only downloadable, offline 'help' I can find) is really rather out of date and isn't a comprehensive help. I include this sort of explanation for every command in my Finite Element modeller, and is the level I think is reasonable to show users how to use it. The 'Command Reference' pdf is 244 pages and explains how to use every menu option and every typed command possible in the program. I update it every time I program a new command - I consider the programming incomplete if no explanation of how to use the command is included in the help files.

[and so it continues. I won't bore you further with that command, but it continues for another page and a bit. ]

For the typed commands, even ones not intended for users to use, they are also documented with full syntax and explanation:

This is adequate, takes a bit of time, but is a suitable depth of explanation for someone who has never used the program and needs to know how to use it. It is the level of explanation DS needs. It is a very powerful program & the need for random experimentation due to inadequate documentation prevents most people finding out how to use it to its fullest extent.

In addition to the direct help, I have a 44 page 'Quick Start Guide', which is a bit like a comprehensive version of the 'User Guide' for DS, and a 110 page 'User Guide', which includes 50 pages of 'How Do I...?' tutorials in addition to file format references etc. I feel these are necessary too, otherwise I wouldn't have spent the time on them. That 5.5Mb of PDF's is worth its weight in gold for the program.

Regards,

Richard