DAZ Studio/Human figures

Welcome to the learning project about software for rendering and animation of human figures and other similar 3D models.

Daz Studio

DAZ Studio is available as a plugin for Bryce and it can also be downloaded and run by itself, without Bryce. Figure 1 shows an example made using the sample character models and props that come with Bryce 5.5 and the Poser/DAZ Studio 3D Models Pack that is also available for free download at several websites.

If you download Daz Studio after installing Bryce 5.5, first run the uninstall option of the Daz Studio installer. Bryce will have done a basic install of Daz Studio as a plugin, and the instructions for DAZ Studio say to uninstall previously installed versions before doing a new install. The "uninstall" option can be found by clicking on the drop-down menu that days "easy install" by default.

Figure 1 shown the "Victoria" character that comes with Daz Studio and the Michael, Aiko and Hiro characters from the "Poser/DAZStudio 3D Models Pack 1".

Animation

For the sample animation (Figure 2) made using DAZ Studio, the "Victoria" character that comes with DAZ Studio was used with the "fairy" clothing and the mushroom and dragonfly props. When you download DAZ Studio, you will have two installers. One for the application itself and one for "DAZ Studio base" content, including "Victoria" and the "fairy" props.

DAZ studio has two ways of associating props with characters. In the is example, the hair prop was associated with Victoria's head by a drag-and-drop of the hair item onto the head item in the list of elements in the scene. For the clothing, the "fit to" property of the prop was set to Victoria.

For this animation there were 30 frames per second at 320 x 240 pixels. Preset body poses were used about every second then adjustments were made for body, limb and wing position as needed. Not every frame needs to be done manually; DAZ studio will automatically interpolate movements for frames that are between the frames you actually edit.

For a tutorial on animation, see Animation with DAZ Studio.

Clothing

Figure 3. Examples of polygon mesh models.
3a. Human figure.
3b. Clothing. Click images to enlarge.

In Figure 1, no clothing props were used. DAZ Studio allows each surface element of a character to be colored and textured. The appearance of "skin-tight clothing" was created using preset coloring patterns that come with these characters.

Figure 3 shows examples of polygon mesh models for a human figure and an article of clothing. Figure 4 shows an example of human figures with clothing props. You can see that clothing models provide unique surfaces to which colors and textures (think of a bumpy fabric weave) can be applied prior to rendering an image showing the model. When you use DAZ Studio, the mesh of an article of clothing does not always automatically take the shape of a character. There are several methods for making sure that a clothing model conforms to the shape of a human figure.

Fitting clothing

Fitting clothing to mesh models of human characters is one of the annoying details that you have to deal with when you use Daz Studio.

Figure 5 (below) shows an example of fitting a clothing model to the mesh model of a human figure. This example uses one of the clothing models made by Serge Marck. The first panel (5a, below) shows pants that were matched to the "Victoria" model that comes with Daz Studio (this is the same character shown in Figure 2, above) by using the "fit to" function. You can see that the fit was not good on parts of the legs. Right below the download link for the pants, there is another link that allows you to download another file (v3legs.zip) that contains an extra tool for making the mesh of the pants model correctly fit to the legs of the Victoria model. Panel 5b shows the much improved fit after using this special fitting tool. Panel 5c shows that the fit is retained after applying a new pose to the Victoria model (the "Hovering" pose that comes with Daz Studio).

Figure 5. Example of fitting clothing and character mesh models.
5a. The blue pants fail to fit the legs of the character mesh after use of the conventional "fit to" feature. Pants and legs appear to pass through each other.
5b. A better fit is obtained after applying the special leg fitting tool from the v3legs.zip file.
5c. The good fit is retained in a new pose without additional use of the fitting tool.

Activities

Take note of the hardware requirements for DAZ Studio. Creating computer-generated video using rendered images is particularly stressful for older personal computers that do not meet the listed system requirements. A video card with 128 MB of memory is listed as a requirement, but you can get started with DAZ Studio if your graphics device only has 64 MB (example, ATI Radeon 9600 with only 64 MB of video RAM). Download DAZ Studio and install it on your computer. Locate the instruction manual (DS_manual.pdf). Chapter 2 in the manual is "INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE". To familiarize yourself with the software, go through Chapter 3, "THE BASICS" in the DAZ Studio manual. Additional resources for getting started: Beginner's Tutorial for Daz Studio and DAZ Studio introductory screencasts.

DAZ Studio

Explore this list of websites and find a mesh model for some clothing and hair that matches one of the characters you have. Note: pay attention to what the DAZ Studio manual says about compatibility with Poser files (see the discussion in the manual for the "Import" File menu command). There are many many Poser files available for download on the internet that are compatible with DAZ Studio. Use Props and models for DAZ Studio as a guide for obtaining and using downloaded content. Upload to Wikiversity an example of a rendered image using some of the props and models you find.
Use the Animation with DAZ Studio tutorial to help you make your own animation using the DAZ Studio software.

External links

Computer Animation/Computer Generated Imagery(CGI) at Wikibooks