Come learn the art of 3D computer generated art and animation. This blog deals with the lessons learned and the art created by Robert G. Male using DazStudio from Daz3D.
Also covered are the ancillary software, tools, techniques, and processes needed both before and after rending in the 3D software.
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I can't say exactly when, and it may have been when they gave me DazStudio 4.0 Pro, but the newer Daz versions have ruined Parenting. The idea behind the change might very well have been to make it easier to put an object in a figure's hand. It has been devastating to the usefulness of Nulls though. You used to be able to create a Null, then load in a set of prearranged lights, and parent those lights to the Null so that you could rotate the entire set to fit the orientation of your figure and background set. Now, if you follow that procedure all of the lights jump to the position of the Null. They also, at what appears to be random, change directions depending on the light. Sometimes the angle changes without the numbers for the X, Y, or Z Rotations changing, so you can't even re-angle them easily. If you want instead to parent your figure, sets and props to the Null you have the same problem.
Parenting objects is a wobbly feature now as well. You have to click an item and wait for it to acknowledge the click. Then you have to carefully move the object to where you want it to be parented and hold it there, as items expand and the Scene window jumps about, before letting go when you are certain it will parent where you want. It used to be I just clicked items and they immediately were ready to go and you just moved them without any of this sea-rolling that goes on now.
It used to be that you could also select the Right Hand of a figure for instance and then holding the Shift key and click the Left Collar and all of the joints of the right hand would be selected and the full right hand tree would expand. This function has been lost. You have to expand every part manually now before selecting them. You used to be able to select a number of separate items in the scene and unparent, or remove them, now it deselects everything except for the one that you right-clicked on.
I do not know how to overcome these new limitations that have interrupted the workflow I have had for several editions of the DazStudio software. The only thing to be done is put in a lot of extra effort. Expand everything by hand. Dump everything into a scene except for the lights and parent them to a null before doing anything else and compensate for any changes before beginning any modifications to anything else. This is all on top of even slower opening of folders to select items, Content Library screens that go blank and force you to change multiple folders until items reappear again, and a terrible unsteadiness I've had where I have to save after every two or three changes, and before Rendering every single time a lot of days. Even the box asking if you want to forward the error you just encountered crashes every time you try to use it.
When I was done with last week's image I almost immediately had to start making this week's image. The title for today was self-evident to me after titling the previous one.
The lights are identical in both scenes, but the sweetening process is not identical. It seems almost impossible to have identical sweetening because of the mathematics involved. Different scenes and parts in them create different bases from which the modifications are added or subtracted.
I am back. I did not have the time available to me that I thought I would for today. Still, I made a new picture just for this post. Regular blogging now resumes. One post to come soon has to do with problems that I can only complain about, and do not have any fixes for yet, if they even can be overcome in any decent fashion. Without further ado...
