Note: Part One of this series is located here.
This is going to be a long post, as I’m doing it with images and text. Yes, it would be easier for me to just record a video, but I really hate using video for tutorials just because Wurdz R Hard. Sometimes written instructions are easier to follows when completing step-by-step actions, rather than trying to pause a video every few minutes. Plus, I’m really old.
Step One: Materials
Your Daz workspace may be set up differently, but you should be able to follow along. From the Content Library tab, go to People/Genesis 8 Female (or whatever) and in Characters double-click the model that you want to use. I have chosen Reese, as per the previous post.
Make sure that you have that model selected (as you can see in the Scene viewport on the far right). Now open up the Characters menu on the left, find your model, and apply the textures. Hopefully Iray, as you’ll get a more realistic end result. Skin, eye, makeup textures are applied to that model, but you may need to open up her dropdowns in Scene to apply things like eyelash materials, etc.
Once you’ve added her skin textures, eye colour, makeup and so on she should start to look a lot more finished – but you won’t be able to see the final product until you render.
Step Two: Adding Hair and Clothing
No one wants to go out in public naked and bald (presumably sans homework as well), so we’re going to clothe our girl. Make sure you have the model selected in the Scene viewport on the right, and then find the hair and clothing that you want to apply from your Content Library on the left.
As per the image above, you see that everything you add works the same way: double-click to attach it to the main figure, then on the right find that item in the dropdown and click on it to add materials, as I’ve added the black texture to the tshirt.
Step Three: Poses
Now we’re going to add some action. I’m going to use a pose from a set here, as that is the easiest way to start, and then we’ll tweak her from there. Again, select your model on the right, then go into the poses that you (hopefully!) have available. You can use a G8 character with a G3 pose, and vice versa, but it will need tweaking (I have a script that converts it for me).
Let’s make her a caster – lord knows there aren’t enough girls in black leather and jeans with magic effects coming off of their hands on book covers, amiright? :D
I’ve used a pose from a commercial set, and now we’re going to customise it. Note the menu on the bottom right: these are the pose controls that can easily bend, twist, or otherwise move body parts. We’re going to change the position of her head by moving her neck, have her look up, etc. There is a lot of tweaking to be done here for truly custom poses, but you’ll learn that as you experiment with it.
Step Four: Basic Lighting
I’m not going to go very in-depth into this (as I said in Part One, this is an extremely basic guide and lighting can be difficult because you can’t see what it really looks like until you render it. This is where some good portrait light packages come in, at least until you become more proficient. This is a good tutorial on Three-Point Lighting in Daz if you want to try doing some custom light setups.
We’re also getting to the point where I’m starting to rethink my life choices, as a video would have been so much easier. :D I’ve chosen a light package on the left and doubleclicked to apply it. This package has a utility for turning the dome off, which will be important for the transparent background that we’ll want for adding it to a background in Photoshop. I’m skipping over tons of stuff, I know – but honestly, a lot of this just requires playing around with it.
Step Five: Basic Render Settings
This is the last step. As you can see on the left of my workspace, I’ve clicked on Render Settings. For this type of work I’ll set the dimensions of the image in the General tab, then open up Progressive Render to set change the settings to the ones shown here: I whack max samples up, and max time as well (so it will allow enough time to render properly). These aren’t exact settings, I just push it up high. Rendering quality I’ll set to 2 or 3, and Rendering Converged Ratio to 98% (you’ll never get 100%). I’m not going to go into what this all means, this will just give you a high quality image to work with. Also, make sure your Engine at the top is set to NVIDIA Iray. Hit the Render button, and you’re done…in a couple of hours. :D
The result? Here is our girl in rough form, ready to be placed into your scene/background (she actually has a transparent background, no removal of background needed). Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to further customise your model, mix models together, and customise clothing.
