Tutorials?

[TEWFan]

I know there is a very good tutorial on how to make belts, but is there something like that on renders? I would really love to be able to do some, but I suck at graphics work and maybe with a tutorial I can get better.

[ThomasRiordan]

There's a bunch of tutorials here that explain various things from cameras to lighting. There's a few video tutorials explaining the basics here

 

That should cover the basics of the program. As far as rendering for TEW it really depends on resources and patience. Finding just the right hair or shirt is usually the hardest part of any character. The actual rendering can take a long time depending on the settings you choose such as lightning, textures, etc. The best advice I can give is don't worry about what isn't seen so since most characters are only shown from the chest up in most cases unless you're doing full size renders then you don't really need to worry about pants or that piece of stomach poking thru your shirt. You can just adjust the camera to hide it. Rendering with the background you will be using in game as the background in Daz Studio will save you some time in resizing. Save each character as a scene so you can reuse them later in various renders. It's much easier to do this than recreate the character from scratch if you find better options for them down the line or want to make a graphic.

 

I'm sure some of the better artists here can offer much better advice since I basically learned just by messing around in the program for many months until I got progressively better. I don't even think my first renders had textures. So just play around with the program, read/watch a tutorial or two and have fun with it.

[TEWFan]

Thanks a lot! Where do you guys download the hats, masks, shirts and the like? Is there like a site for these things?

[acidfrehley]

I was looking for this too, thanks.

[ThomasRiordan]

Daz3d

Renderosity

TrekkieGrrrl

Most Digital Creations

Runtime DNA

ShareCG

BlueNotebook

 

The bulk of your models are probably going to come from Daz3d's official site but there's tons of links to stuff in their forums. Most Digital Creations has a really nice title belt prop that should be on the page I linked two. Sha’s Shaders from Blue Notebook work well if you know how to use them. As far as props go you can pretty much use any obj file alot of the time. That opens up alot of doors as long as you can pull the mesh from a game you have and get it into a 3d modeling program and export it to obj format. I've got an entire bathroom made of nothing but bathroom fixtures from the Sims 2 and a few items like a toilet paper roll, towel racks, etc. that are made of primitives (cones, spheres, etc.) it worked for what I needed at the time. So it pays to be creative instead of buying something you might use for just one render and forget you have it. There's only so far you can go with free stuff though...

 

But for whatever model you choose to work with you're going to need 3 things the model, morphs and textures. Now they're running a free sale on most of their models now but the morphs and textures will cost you. You can play with the models by themselves to get the feel for the program but in most cases it's just going to be a plastic looking model and you won't be able to change the shape alot. They might provide a standard resolution map in some cases and you might get a few of the morph sliders but it's limited.

 

There's plenty of free sites out there and I believe on Daz's own forums they have a bunch of links under the freepository. There's plenty of tutorials on their forums too which can be helpful. Even looking at some of the stuff in the art studio can give you some idea of what can be done although for TEW renders you most likely won't go into that level of detail and spend hours rendering something that's going to get shrunk down to a 150x150 square. Some pretty impressive stuff can be done with time, resources and patience the key is to stick with it long enough for things to look good.