A little trick I just discovered
marble
Posts: 7,500
Feel free to add your own tricks and tips but I just discovered one that might be useful to others. I'm sure it is stating the obvious but here goes: I was looking at long hair and noticing that the areas around the ears and shoulders often had hair bending at sharp angles instead of soft and flowing. I was unsure about adding a smoothing modifier in case the hair started clinging to the face and neck. Anyhow, I tried a smoothing iteration of 2 and set the collision parameter to zero. At first look, it seems to do exactly what I was hoping for. I guess I'll find out whether other problems will arise as I use the hair with various poses.
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Here's a quick example using Leyton Hair:
Huh, I'll have to try that, thanks.
Yeah, collision and smoothing modifiers are really useful for collisions when morphs aren't satisfactory. I remember one similar trick to simulate squishing of skin while sitting.
Wonder if this will take care of the elf ear issue I keep running into....
Hi Sonja, are you setting the elf ear morph to zero in the hair item under hidden properties?
That sound like another useful tip. :)
Yes, I used this also on jeans that had poke through...
Maybe it's common knowledge, but discovering the CTRL Z shortcut to zero a parameter has helped me hugely :) is there a hot key list for Daz Studio some place?
Autofit often distorts parts of a hair, parenting it instead usually solves the problem.
I use Alt-Left Click to zero a parameter. Didn't know that CTRL Z would work too. But yes, a great time saver.
I don't know where the hot-key list is - I looked for it quite recently.
Agreed, I always parent any hair made for another figure.
When I tried CTRL-Z on toes that were sticking out of a pair of shoes ( as following the video) it zeroed my entire pose, I don't know why
and when I tried autofitting hair or parenting either it wouldn't move with the pose or the hair morphs weren't available anymore, but I can't remember which didn't work with which, at work and can't check right now.
I often think that Autofit adds too many bones to the hair, which is one of the causes of the distortion....seriously why does a hair model really need the pectoral bones added to it, unless it is a chest length hair?
CTRL-Z is the undo shortcut, so it should only work if the parameter change was the last thing you did.
ETA: and CTRL-Y is the redo shortcut
Either way should move with any pose. Autofit can and will destroy the morphs at times. Sometimes with parenting you have to click into the figure (head or neck, etc) to find the morphs if the hair is poser specific, like the ones from Ali or some other non DAZ PAs
ok I will try that later tonite and see if it works for me, thanks
Doh! Silly me - of course it is - I use it all the time :) Yes - I use Alt-Click for zero parameter.
For hands - I zero by Right-Clicking the hand in the scene tab, select children and then use Alt-Click in the parameters tab to quickly zero all translations.
Oh, now that is very useful. Thanks marble!
Another: Set Focus Script
Just create a Null, put it where you want the camera to be in focus and keep the null selected. Then run the script. Easy-Peasy.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/actions/action_accelerators/start
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/64909/#Comment_64909
Edited to add: an official list wouldn't make sense, as everybody can customize their own DazStudio shortcuts ...
Ooh I need to try this. Ty! Manually wrestling with the camera's DOF is tedious for me.
You can change the navigation with mouse to anything you like, (i use "maya" shortcuts), with the mouse buttons modifiers.
You can find it in Winow>workspace>customize. It's the first thing i change in any new installation.
Second is to change ctrl+y to ctrl+shift+z (redo)
Third to change move, rotate, scale, universal to w, e, r, y. (Many years in others programs)
Took me a long time to figure out how to set up your own keyboard shortcuts, but it can save you a lot of time once you do...
I've only set up two of them, but they save me a ton of time: I've set Shift-Ctrl-C to be "Select Children" (in the Scene Hierarchy section), and Shift-Ctrl-Z to "Zero Selected Items Pose" (in the Parameters section).
So to zero a hand, to use Marble's example, I just select the hand, hold down Ctrl and Shift, and then press C followed by Z. Simple and effective!
DAZ hotkey and time saving tip video
Ah yes - even better. Thanks :)
Given that there are so very few hairs specifically for G3M (which is what I almost exclusively use now), I'm fitting hairs by parenting quite frequently as I have a very large collection of them which will not autofit. It may seem obvious, but what I do to fit them better is to hide all but the cap with the transparency/cut out parameters in surfaces and then translate and scale the cap so it fits the target head, and then, of course, restore the transparency settings to 100% on all the other parts.
As others have said, parenting avoids all the sometimes nasty distortions you can get with autofit.
"may seem obvious " but wasn't obvious enough that I ever did it. I will now. Thanks for the tip!
One thing I'll sometimes do when hair looks choppy is turn up the SubDivision Level. If you don't see Mesh Resolution under the General section of the parameters tab, you can go to Edit > Object > Geometry > Convert to SubD... this will convert it to a SubD model and add the Mesh Resolution parameter.
Increasing the SubDivision level will increase render times, and it doesn't always look better, but sometimes it works great.