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Oh, I think someone else actually posted the model and hair in another thread - I added it to my wishlist to buy and test out later. Have a look at this Shizuka HD Character and Hair for Genesis 8 Female - I am not the best at matching faces but seems pretty close right? The hair looks to be correct too. As the name and description says that item includes both the model and the hair and so could be the missing piece of your puzzle.
Filesize will be bigger the more quality you add, nothing can be done about that. But there is no shame in doing some postwork in GIMP - lots of people do it. So if things are not quite as you hoped or you wanted to ad some feature/effect that you can't do in Daz natively then you should be using other tools to make the best images possible :)
Dear OP, I think you need to give yourself much more time and patience to get to grips with DAZ Studio, especially if you have no former 3D graphics experience. 3D is very different from 2D stuff like Gimp, and so naturally, the interfaces of the programs are very different as well. Don't push so hard, and don't set your sight so exclusively on one specific result that you want to achieve (the Miki likeness). I'd rather advice that after you've now watched some tutorials and have gotten some very good advice on how to start out in this thread here as well, you poke around in the program little by little, maybe put a basic figure into the scene and then basically push all the buttons there are to see what they do. You can't really mess up, in the worst case, you just force quit DS and start a new scene.
Remember also that you don't have to take the poses you bought as they are, you can alter them by moving a figure's limbs directly or by using the parameter dials instead. Same goes for faces, you can make your own expressions as well as face (and body) morphs with the dials, some are already provided with the figure, some need to be bought.
Best of luck to you, if you persevere, you will get there eventually!
@SofaCitizen, I had a look to that model Shizuka, she may look almost identical to miki, but... in part she looks more like a manga character; if you are not familiar with japanese culture, manga is like cartoons.
Haven't you seen Dragon Ball Z? It will look something like this.
I will put in my wish list, if she is really cheap to buy.
I will try to do some renderings and post here so you can have a look how is going my progress.
I have installed Daz Studio in another machine via Install Manager.
I am very pleased the way it has handled the install routine, Daz look much better organized and I will try to do another experiment.
No, I havn't seen Dragon Ball Z or that much Anime/Manga in general - mainly because it wasn't very available and/or expensive here when I was growing up. I'm sure it's different now with a million streaming services out there.
But anyway, not overly good with faces in general so you are probably right that it wasn't the correct model. But as tsroemi said it's not really worth focussing too much on exactly replicating someone else's work - especially when you can mix-and-match models with morphs and textures. Plus some sellers may have custom models that they have crafted themselves and do not wish to sell.
I like to take inspiration from what others have done and I do sometimes start to "replicate" them to better learn but I usually end up making it different.
@SofaCitizen, well is not like I want to replicate all the content the same way as it was created. with the only exemption of Miki, I don't know if I have fallen in love with her face.
When I made a rendering, almost got it right.
Maybe, I will try teaking the images in one way to another.
Also I noticed a great improvement in the way Daz Studio works and all the content is organized via Install Manager.
When installing via Daz Central, the software makess an arbitrary selection of Daz folder in the root directory, it would read C:\Daz in Windows (either 10 or 11) with Install Manager it goes into Program Files for most of the content and Program Files x86 for Hexagon.
I did not modify the install destination, just left it to do the default.
It was great to see the install routine being done with user interaction, wich files to install, newer first or older first.
I will work through and see how it goes, I believe this is much better approach and should be kept that way.
Offline work is good, under online connection, at the top of the main page are some options panel to choose and work with.
I remember you said it would create some confusion if using Daz Central, this turns out to be true.
Cheers!
@SofaCitizen, I have been busy lately, I took some time off to see how it goes.
I have created another render, the first one got over 3,000 px, it was being rendered, sudendly, I dont know if there was a crash or anything else.
I had updated the computer BIOS, I did not found the setting to use optimized settings, after what happened to me I went again and did corrected the problem.
After rendering with Daz Studio, I have cropped the image with GIMP, from 9MB it went down to 4MB.
I want to know if there are some more aspects to fine tune the image.
Yeah, real life does get in the way quite often, unfortunately.
I can't comment too much on the lighting or render stuff since I am also too new. However, from a practical perspective you could tweak her pose/positioning as her toe is on the ground but her bottom and hand are floating. Alternatively, add a step that she could be sitting on and is behind her feet? Also, it looks like you have some poke through - both on her right-thigh and in her hair. Probably not the best person to suggest how to fix those things. Perhaps check that the hair is correctly parented to the model as it should auto-fit. For the thigh poking through the stockings I don't know if there is a better way but when it happens to me it's a case of playing with the size a little and the smoothing modifiers and hoping that a combination of those resolves it without breaking something else.
@SofaCitizen, The lighting, I have to look how it works.
Is a bit hard to know how to position a figure in the ideal spot.
For the hair, it has happened to me several times, I have tried several time to fit the hair with no success, I need to nail this annoyance once for all.
How is going for you? have you got something done yet?
I will go to the drawing board again and see how it goes later, is like piloting an airplane, MS Flight Simulator to be exactly; too many controls here and there until you crash the plane. :(
Yeah, these things are annoying - I have yet to have hair that clips but I have had several outfits that have been a bit of a battle to remove all poke-through.
I've been making a bit of progress here and there. Not quite posted anything yet but I am close on a few. I am about 90% done on one for the Book Lover's Render Challenge thread after discarding the previous idea as I couldn't make it work. And I have two others that are about 90% and 70% done. I probably should just post the 90% done soon if I can't figure out what's missing from them so someone else can help me point out what they need.
@SofaCitizen, Glad you are going well.
Please post me the link for the thing you looking on, I want to have a look, just for curiosity.
Me, I try to get unstuck with the non fitting elements.
I am doing other things apart trying my luck with 3D Modelling, I have to provide support to my relatives with their Mobile Phones and Computers.
They ask me to do the impossible, as if everything is magic.
I will try to look for some answers later.
@Halcon Bluesky yeah, that's pretty frustrating - I've been in that situation before and it is often a thankless task :( Hopefully with a combination of teaching them a little and some gentle persuasion you can get them to understand that sometimes what they ask for is not so simple and that there is more to their request(s) than they realise.
After the last post I did come to the conclusion that I cannot always wait for the image to perfectly match what I have in my head. I think part of the problem is that it's easy to see an image as "unfinished" while it's still in DAZ because you have all the controls and assets right there just waiting to be used. So I made a few tiny tweaks (that no-one else will notice) to one of the scenes and rendered it. Then I set it as my desktop wallpaper on my Mac for a bit which helped "solidify" it in my head as a finished image. That gave me the confidence to post it to my gallery - I would have posted the link here at the time but you need to wait for a moderator to approve it and so I had to wait till this morning. You can either see it in my gallery or I will try and post it to this message also.
@SofaCitizen, Congratulations! That picture really looks good.
You got a girl, a dog and a utility car down the road.
Quite impresive.
I have purchased several videos at discount price.
Wish you could have them, this is the list of the videos if you are interested, have a look to the individual description.
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-1-software
https://www.daz3d.com/1-2-great-art-now-surfaces-tab-magic-revealed
https://www.daz3d.com/1-3-great-art-now-parameters-tab-hidden-secrets
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-2-scene-making
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-2-1-advanced-scene-making
https://www.daz3d.com/3-2-great-art-now-posing-102-tools-tricks-for-easy-posing
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-4-camera
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-5-lights
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-6-rendering
https://www.daz3d.com/7-steps-to-great-art-now
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-step-7-postwork
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-bonus-animation-101
https://www.daz3d.com/great-art-now-bonus-modeling-101
To be honest with you, I have had just a glimpse of it, I will watch it one by one and try to understand the techniques employed on each video, you can put these on your wish list as well, also there are conditions from the videos author, if you have the opportunity to get em, better read the readme document attached with each compressed file.
@Halcon Bluesky Thank You :)
I am certainly happier with it now that it is a rendered image - perhaps the others that I am working on are now not as far behind as I thought.
Thanks for the links, I will check them out after work. I have watched quite a few YouTube videos but some other sources of information could always be useful - particularly the scene, camera, lights and postwork ones I think.
Good lighting I struggle with - on the submitted pic I just used the HDRI for the sky light and rotated it to get the effect I wanted. The next one I am working on is a much harder one to do that since it's a lot darker in general and so I am struggling to realistically light it sufficiently. Also, with the postwork I have seen some people go over HOW to do certain things but I am still not sure on the WHY you do certain things. Maybe I don't have the right experience or "artistic eye" but even tho I can see the differences between their before and after pictures and I can agree that the after picture is better I am not able to look at the before picture and know what can be done it it to make it better. Also animation and custom modelling are also things I have not delved into yet.
@SofaCitizen, You are welcome.
@Catherine3678ab, @SofaCitizen could be posssible if you can edit-update my name in page Number 1, hope this not too much to ask, I can't edit these entries myself, thanks!
All done - let me know if I missed one!
@SofaCitizen, Thank you very much!
I am satisfied with the results.
How you ar going with your work progress with Daz?
I went to see some tutorials, I will try to follow the instructions and advice.
I am still doing some experiments with the sofware controls, at least I am going, only thing are the backgrounds not what I expected with as I beleive some more are needed.
Wish I could buy some more items from the store but I can't, I have so many things to sort out at this time, some bills and essentials, so I can't afford to buy anything until I can have a better opportunity; I will stick to what I have and be on the lookout for some freebies.
And as I write this, have you got some of the recent offerings in the store?
Grab em before its replaced by new free items.
Yeah, I grabbed some of the weekly freebies but they are a little old so not too sure how I will use them. It can get pretty expensive to obtain the items you want, even if you wait for them to go on sale, so finding some freebies is always nice. There is a Freebie Challenge in the forums to try and make a good scene with free items. I haven't done a good job of locating freebies that have sparked an idea in me so far but that might be worth a go to get a bit creative without spending any money.
I think I am doing OK at making a bit of progress. I have spent far too long on my next render which is a very silly one but has allowed me to work with decal nodes, instances, normal maps and volumetrics which has been a nice learning experience.
@SofaCitizen, Old or new, it does not matter to me, as long I can use it and I can develop my skills with that, I am more than very happy with it.
I will try to do as much as I can to overcome the obstacles, then I will try my luck with this kind of content.
At least, there is an incentive to put to good use the freebies, that's a noble and trustworthy initiative.
For the Gallery, it will take some time, I will watch the videos and start doing the things that are mentioned there.
I would have preferred the written stuff, I can follow up with that, the videos do not have a close-up, so how can you work with that, I may ask.
Other members, have got plenty of experience with graphic manipulation.
I do not have the latest photoshop program, I have a very old one I can dust off and start using it if I could, but I am affraid because is old, there will be some incompatibility issues when using it with Windows 11.
I am an amateur/enthusiast at heart, just the basic knowledge when using GIMP and Paint.net, these programs have its strenghts and some drawbacks; anyway, I use them.
GIMP is good for transparencies, while Paint.net is good with colors and some other image editing.
Ahh, yes of course, everyone must work to their own situation and of course Photoshop is very expensive if you are not using it daily to make money. Also, it is probably overkill for any of us hobbiest who just want to tweak our renders a bit. I only use it because Creative Suite is a tool my day-job requires and so since working from home became a thing in my company I needed to install it on my mac anyway. However, GIMP will probably be absolutely be perfectly fine for you to use and I am sure many here on these forums will be using it on their renders. "Photoshopping" has also kinda become a word in it's own right and so some people may just say they "photoshopped" their image but actually used another program.
I do agree that sometimes written information would be better for the reasons you mention, yet video is becoming the route of choice more and more frequently. This information could be out there in written form just less pushed by the Google algorithm and so more tricky to find? However, it would still be good to watch all the videos you can to give you a good understanding and then try out some of the ideas and if you get stuck anywhere then you can probably post here and someone may be able to help you.
@SofaCitizen, so you work in graphic design, aren't you?
As far as I know, Adobe and some other software companies are out of touch, the leasing model is atrociuos, one thing is normal users need to use a decent software and the other hand command a high price for business, this is not a viable solution; as most business struggle to maintain a cash flow for everyday running costs and individuals need a useful software without sacrifice too much.
I love the idea of the free software, as many people can find it too expensive to buy a software, unless the cost of many being sold online or in a physical store could offered to a reasonable pricing.
If my conditions change, I would donate to these organizations that provide free software, as a thank you for their effort.
Blender, Krita, GIMP, Paint.net and others, the effort these people work hard to provide some useful software to the people, moves my heart, I can't find words to express my gratitude.
I will say this over and over again, if I can overcome all the obstacles to master Daz Studio, I will pledge myself to help others to realize their dreams.
@Halcon Bluesky, I work in the Print Industry but not in a creative role. So mainly have Photoshop because I need InDesign, Acrobat Professional and to some extent Illustrator. I fully agree with you tho - Creative Suite used to be worth it when you could get the subset packages (e.g. Creative Suite Design Standard) for one-off prices. But that ended after CS6 and then you only have the option of paying to rent everything - even if your company has no use for half the packages.
I do have hope that the free software and also the reasonably-priced alternatives - like the Affinity applications - keep making improvements and eat into Adobe's dominance.
@SofaCitizen, InDesign, isn't that used for Desktop Publishing?
Your task is probably to design posters and some advertisements, isn't that?
For PDF documents, I use MS Word as part of the MS Office 365 assigned to me via Technical College.
I am tempted to dust off a CS product I got for long time, I hope it still work well.
I have uninstalled Daz from one machine, I plan to install via install manager.
I used a relative machine, and done some renderings with that, but the Windows 11 OS is constantly crashing, I believe the problem is the memory (RAM) installed, as I have been testing how it goes with a much better processor.
@Halcon Bluesky, yes that's what InDesign is for and is one of the main tools I use for my day-job - thus I also have access to the other Creative Suite apps by default. If I did not have that installed for work reasons then I would either use "Affinity Photo" for any render postwork (since I bought that shortly before being able to install Creative Suite on my home computer) or GIMP. I think for anything we would likely need to do to rendered image could be accomplished by any of those tools.
Nothing is getting right at the moment.
I have tried to make a render, something is missing.
I made the installation using the Daz Install Manager, the files for the installation are a whopping 18 GB in size, if going back to Daz Central, the installation will point to C:\ drive instead of the default C:\program Files.
When I tried with another machine to see how it goes, the install went smoothly, unfortunately, that machine has to be checked if there is any problem with the internal components.
I will have to uninstall everything and try again!
Oh dear, it doesn't sound like you are having a good time :(
I know with DIM you can change the installation paths if the default does not work for you - I assume the same goes for Daz Central.
Hope you can get it sorted!
@SofaCitizen, at the moment I am looking at this info "Downloading and Installing DAZ Studio: a guide and FAQ" there are several pages, I will try to gather the most important parts and get into action to fix up this messy situation.
Also, I have tried to render something without success, am thing the installation is the problem.
Hmm, well yeah, not being able to render is a significant problem. Good luck with the reinstall!
@SofaCitizen, I gathered the most important info from the 16 pages I metioned you before.
I will keep trying to render the images the way I want, sure I am doing it kamikaze way, because I did not pay attention to the videos, there is no close-up, the only tutorial is the "Barefoot Dancer" more of these kind of tutorials are needed, the videos can lead up to total confusion and more stuff-ups :(
@SofaCitizen, I have re-installed Daz Studio via DIM, is working ok at the moment.
Meanwhile I am trying something more different, I am watching some of the videos and taking notes, at the same time following the lessons.
Hope this may get me moving in the right direction.