DAZ Studio Quick Tips: Hidden Face Bones

January 29, 2017 2 comments

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

2 Responses to “DAZ Studio Quick Tips: Hidden Face Bones”

  1. RacerDC says:

    Thanks so much Laylo. You’ve been a great help. Love your work also. Quick question — have you ever used an external renderer say Reality or Luxus (LuxRender), or for that matter Octane? They advertised they could take outputs to the next level of realism. Wondering if you’ve heard anything good or bad, and whether it’s worth the money or not? Or perhaps you might be interested in checking them out, if you haven’t yet. Appreciate your honesty.

    Thanks much always. You’re an inspiration

    • LayLo says:

      You’re welcome, I’m glad to help! And thanks for the complements! I didn’t sleep well last night, reading you’re comment helped pull me out of that drowsy slump…

      As for external renderers, I used Luxus once, and when I say once, I mean literally once, one render lol. I don’t have Reality or Octane, but I’m the most familiar with Octane out of the three. I haven’t spent much time looking into Reality or Luxus, so I know basically nothing about them, unfortunately.

      Octane seems cool, it also has “Out-of-Core Textures Support” which should allow you to GPU render larger scenes with less VRAM by storing some of the textures in your RAM instead. I would be interested in checking it out some day, but I choose it over the other two mainly because I want to buy Maya and I think I could use the same shaders in both Daz Studio and Maya with Octane. Which brings me to my next point.

      I’m pretty sure with any external renderer you’ll need to re-setup your shaders. I’m not sure how familiar you are with the process. Daz Studio gives the illusion that all you need to do to set up a shader is double click and then tweak some settings, but that’s because they’ve already built out the shading networks…

      It depends on the renderer, but sometimes shading networks can be 10+ or even more nodes put together like branches in a tree. I just want you to be aware, you may need to spend a few hours building out your first shading networks (you may be able to find some pre-built available to download) to render a scene.

      I know some Daz PAs render with Octane from time to time, but I’m not sure what motivates them to do so. I’ve seen beautiful renders come out of all three of those render engines.

      If realism is what you’re after, I feel Iray can pull off some decent photo real renders. Another point I would like to make; I’ve heard it said a lot in CG, it’s not so much the tools, but how you use them. Meaning the difference between “good” and “bad” render engines is probably a large percent subjective as long as they support what you’re trying to render (like volumes for example).

      I’m sorry I don’t have more experience with them. The two render engines I’ve used the most are Mental Ray and Iray.

      Because I want to ultimately render in Maya, I’ll probably end up purchasing Vray, Mental Ray, Arnold, or Redshift. I came up with that list, simply because it seems to be the list of render engines most of the big studios use…

      I might buy Octane as an intermediary step, before going all in with Maya, and then who knows, I may be so happy with it I don’t purchase one of the others.

      Well I hope this long-winded reply provides a little insight at least. Let me know if you end up choosing one and what you think of it!

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