A lot has happened since I started this blog up, and it is lazy on my part that I haven’t been writing up the most interesting developments. Going back over the last article I wrote six months back (but never posted) I was in the midst of a DAZ Studio obsession. The post was long and rambling with a tenuous thread of a topic, so I’ve decided I won’t post that. The idea was to give a basic outline of what DAZ Studio is. As I can still imagine doing a lot of character posing in this program I will give a brief overview of what it’s all about.
Daz Studio is a program (both Mac and Windows) perfect for those curious about computer generated images, but not sure how far that interest goes, or how much they are willing to sink into the exploration (Studio is currently free, as are Bryce and Hexagon). Studio also has many applications for professionals, and indeed there are professional artists who use the program as their primary tool.
Demonstration scene provided with DAZ Studio 4 as seen through view port
The program is typically used for posing and arranging premade figures and props into 3 Dimensional scenes for subsequent rendering as either stills, or animation (stills seeming to be the overwhelming application). For the average Studio user, the bulk of their content is made by others and purchased from DAZ3D, Renderosity, Runtime DNA, or
another similar broker. There is also a lot of content either made for DAZ Studio, or compatible (to varying degrees) from sites like ShareCG. One can find content for just about any scene they can imagine. Contemporary, fantasy, sci-fi, and erotica are all common themes.
Rendering of above scene
Studio is a great program for constructing small to medium-sized scenes, and the character posing tools are intuitive, requiring little training to get the basics in order and start rendering (YouTube hosts hundreds of DAZ related tutorials). It may be easy to get started, but it is rare to get good results straight away. With premade content, which presumably comes “ready to render”, the biggest obstacle to creating good images is lighting. Of course there are other things to consider such as scene construction, camera angle etc, but lighting is the issue that comes up time and again for beginning 3D artists (using any 3D software). Thankfully there are hundreds of forum topics, tutorials, and text books devoted to helping you learn the ropes. …But lighting might be the theme for a future post, so I’ll leave that for now.
For anyone with an interest in CGI and what this software can do, even just for those who simply wish to enjoy the work of others, all the major brokers have either galleries or forums where users share their work. deviantArt.com (popular online art community) is another fantastic destination. There are many groups dedicated to DAZ and Poser generated art, and many more groups dedicated to CGI in general.
DAZ-Artists-Guild is a good dA group dedicated to art made with DAZ Studio and related programs.