In this video I show how to remove vertices from a morphs influence. This can be useful if you want to break a morph in separate individual morphs by body part, accidentally tweak a part of an object you didn’t mean to, or to break a full body morph into separate head and body morphs.

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

In this video I go over where to find the Genesis 3 Hidden Face Bones. These bones are great for fine tuning your character’s expressions and can also be used as a morph resource kit to change their faces.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced

In this video I go over a couple quick tips: setting up Spotlights for Iray in DAZ Studio. From producing softer shadows, configuring spotlight specific render settings, to pointers that should help ease the process of aiming your spotlights.

Skill Level: Beginner

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a big fan of using Iray for rendering with Daz Studio 4.8+. While spending time cracking out on it, I’ve figured out a few things I thought were important and worth sharing. I think they’re especially good to know if you’re considering buying a new GPU.

With that being said, I’m just going to dive right in…

1. • If you’re tweaking a scene, rendering then canceling, rendering then canceling, eventually your VRAM will get full and Iray will stop using your GPU for rendering and switch to your CPU. Which typically equals longer rendering times. It can even happen when letting the render finish completely, though, for whatever reason, it seems to manage the VRAM better in this second scenario.
   • The solution, when it switches over to your CPU, you have to close Daz Studio and restart it. Then everything will be back to normal again. Also, if you keep the number of render preview windows open at a time to a minimum, when your Render Target is New Window, it seems to help the VRAM from getting as full.
   • I have verified that this is a known issue with the Daz Development Team.
   • When it first happened to me I thought one of my GPUs went out. When Iray switches from GPU to CPU I can hear it, because the fans on my water cooler crank up. I then fired up my GPU monitoring software and saw one of the cards wasn’t being used. Long story short, I finally realized the only reason the other card was running was to run my monitor, my GPUs were fine, then I contacted DAZ…
2. • When using Iray with multiple GPUs, all the data being processed for rendering has to fit into each card’s VRAM independently. Which means if you have a 4GB card and a 6GB card, and the scene to be rendered requires over 4GB VRAM, the 4GB card will be excluded.
   • I’ve verified this with folks from both Daz and NVIDIA.
3. • If your NVIDIA card doesn’t have at least 4GB VRAM, Daz Studio will default to CPU rendering.
   • I also confirmed this with Daz. (After the public release of Daz Studio 4.9.)

Well, I hope you learned something! If you found this post valuable, don’t forget it to share it with someone else.

Catch you on the flipside…

LayLo

While working on my latest product (keep your eye out, it should be released soon) I decided to change the name when it was nearly finished. What sounds like a simple task isn’t if you want to also update the texture file names as well. Normally this would involve re-saving all the Material Presets while going through them one by one, updating the path and file name of each texture. With 11 Material Presets for the top and 11 Presets for the pants, each with 3 references to texture files you can see how this could quickly become an annoying task. Fortunately there’s a better way…

This video is probably most beneficial to content creators, but could also benefit any hobbyist that likes to make custom materials for items in their content libraries. I’ve also used the techniques I demonstrate in projects outside of the CG world. They can work great for HTML. Sometime when you’re trying to import a word document into HTML, HTML editors will create unwanted page breaks and other random things when maybe you just want paragraphs. You can use Replace Text to help in those situations as well.

In this video I demonstrate my method of renaming a DAZ Studio product and updating all the Material Presets to use a new folder structure and new material file names.

You can also use these techniques when creating Material Presets as well. Sometimes when creating them, all the settings in the preset will be the exact same except for the actual texture files themselves. I have found it more convenient in certain situations to make one Material Preset, save it uncompressed, create a copy and use Replace Text to change it from referencing one texture file to another. Then just rename the copy, and repeat for all the materials you’re trying to make for that one item. This is especially useful when one Material Preset references the same texture file in multiple locations, i.e. Base Color, Glossy Color, etc. Then when you’re finished creating all the Material Presets in this manner, you can use DAZ Studio’s Batch Convert to re-compress them all at once (I show how to do this towards the end of the video).

I mention WinRAR as my favorite archiving program, here’s a link to the website. It’s not free, but you can download a trial and check it out. The trial never actually expires, after 30 days it will just start asking you to buy the program when you open it up. If you like the program, I’d recommend buying it, you can find it for around $25-$30.

Other programs used in the video (All are Free):

• Bulk Rename Utility
• Replace Text 2.2
• Daz Studio