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In my first Daz Studio tutorial I will teach you how you load and customize a character.

Daz Studio is a free 3D program in which you can make 3D scenes and animations.

Loading your character or any item is the start of every 3D scene and what I show you here goes for every object. You may find them in a different folder though.
And wouldn’t 3D pictures be boring if everything looked the same? This is where customizing comes in.

A short explanation of the most used functions.

The 3 main tabs

The 3 main tabs are Load, Pose / Animate and Render.

In both Load and Pose / Animate you can load various objects and add lights, movement, poses, skins and change colors.

In both Pose / Animate and Render you can move objects around and rotate them.

And in Render you can render your 3D scene into a picture or animation and make some last changes by moving items around and using the Parameters tab.

Content

In Content you will find the following folders :
Camera ; camera’s can be used to quickly view a scene from a various point.
Faces ; here you can find pre-made face morphs and expressions.
Figures ; here you can find the main characters (people and animals), various items like clothes, scene’s, hair, furniture etc.
Hair ; here you can find more hair.
Hands ; here you can find hand poses.
Lights ; here you can find pre-made lights.
Poses ; here you can find pre-made poses and animations and skins for characters and items.
Props ; here you can find similar items as in figures.

Studio

Here you find pre-made shaders and scenes. Shaders are layers that you can put on items to give them different effects like making something look wet, really shiny or make it look like a fabric etc.

Scene

Here you can easily look up various items and parts of them and select them. It also has shortcuts for making those parts (or the entire item) invisible and un-selectable. Not being able to select a part can be really useful when you are working with mist (which will cover a large area) for example so you don’t keep on selecting the mist instead of the ground. With main items it’s often easier to select them in the screen then having to look them up under scene.

Powerpose, Parameters and surfaces.

In Powerpose you can quickly move a move-able part like a arm or foot.

In Parameters you can move around, rotate and scale (=make it smaller or larger) a item, add morphs and expressions and use options like visibility, selectability, shadows, point at and fit to (this makes a item automatically fit to another, like a piece of clothing for example).

In Surfaces you can change various settings like colors, shininess, make something see through (opacity) and reflection.

Render

You use render to make the actual picture (aka renders).
Here you can set options like the size, shape, render style and various animation settings.

There are 2 render styles : normal and cartoon.

Normal

Cartoon

Various buttons.

These buttons are for moving the scene around :

And these have options like adding a background, scaling, moving and rotating items and parts :

Adding new items to Daz Studio.

The items that you buy from the official website often have a installer that will automatically put the right files in the right folders but not all of them. Nor do the items from other stores or freebies.

Luckily most people who make items help you out by putting the items in the folders where they belong and you only have to unzip the downloaded files and look up the right folder to add them too.
These folders can be found in : My Computer -> Local Disk (C:) -> Program Files -> Daz -> Studio -> Content (-> Runtime).

About Daz Studio 3

There aren’t that many differences between Daz Studio 2 and 3 so this tutorial is still valid.

Daz Studio 3 does have some more light and surface options which makes it worth it to upgrade. And the Pro version comes with the basic Animate.

I have noticed that it takes longer for the program to “realize” that you’ve added new items or have reorganized them when the program is running.
You can quickly solve this by going to : Edit -> Preferences -> Directories.
Remove the line saying : C:/Program Files/Daz/Studio/Content and then Add this folder again and Daz Studio 3 will show you all your new items straight away.

There are two thing you need to keep a eye on by the way.
1) Once you have started or loaded a project in Daz Studio 3 and have saved it there, you can’t load it in Daz Studio 2 anymore.
I have noticed that a skin shader for example didn’t work in Daz Studio 3 so I had to re-add the skin and pick another shader.
2) Not every addon is compatible with Daz Studio 3 yet but Daz is working hard on fixing it.

Step 1 : loading the character.

When you start up Daz Studio the screen should be looking something like this :

It sure looks empty so lets find someone to play with.
Double click on Content and then double click on Figures and look for your characters.
My favorite character is Victoria 4.2 (V4) so I’ll be using her.
Simply double click the character you want to use and it will load.

Note : the base for Victoria 4.2 is free but she wont have any morphs. Those have to be bought separately or you can buy Victoria 4.2 complete with morphs, poses and some basic hair and clothes here.

A quick note on selecting a item.

When you double click the item you will always select the entire item and when you click it only once you will select the part of the item you are clicking on.
So if you just click on the head, you will only select the head.

If you keep Ctrl pushed in, you can select various parts of the item.

In Scene you can also quickly select various items by keeping Ctrl pushed in or you select a entire row by keeping Shift pressed in. To select the entire item, just click on the name of it and this automatically mean that any changes apply to the entire character.

A item will be selected until you un-select it.

Step 2 : morphs

With some characters you have to add morphs to make changes to their appearance.
To add morphs, select your character by double clicking it, or you can go to the tab namedScene and select her there.

In Content double click the folder named Poses.
Once you have found the morphs for your character (morphs only work on the character they are made for), double click them, while making sure that your character is selected.

A quick note on morphs.

Morphs only work on the character they were designed for.
There is a exception for the V4/A4/G4 and M4/H4 series since these characters built to make sure that most morphs and items are cross-compatible.

If a morph doesn’t seem to work then it either wasn’t made for that character (or item) or Daz Studio needs to be restarted.
The latter is a known bug that they are working on.

Step 3 : customizing the skin.

3D pictures would sure get boring if you couldn’t customize your character, so let’s start with giving her a nice looking skin.
You can get free skins or buy them in various stores.
I’ll be using a free skin called Matia.

To add a skin, select your character again and in Content double click the folder namedPoses.
Once you have found a skin you want to use, double click it (make sure that your character is still selected) and the skin will appear on your character.

Step 4 : customizing the body.

Ok, so now she has a nice skin (skins rarely have clothes added so get used to seeing a lot of naked bodies), let’s change her body a bit.

You can buy and get free pre-customized characters but I prefer to make my own.

For this you have to be in the Pose / Animate tab.
Look at the right of the screen and there you will see the Parameters tab.
Make sure that your character is selected and you’ll see various tabs.
Scroll down to the one named Morphs.
Here you’ll see all kind of options like full body, upper torso, arm-hand etc. of which you can change the values.
Play around with those until you give her a figure that you like.

After a few minor changes my character looks like this :

Step 5 : customizing the head.

The next step is to give her a nice face.

instead of double clicking, only click once on her head. This will give you various parts of her head that you can play around with like Full head & Face, Upper Face, Eyes, Ears etc.

I really like fantasy so I gave her elven ears.

Step 6 : expressions.

She still looks kinda boring doesn’t she?
So now I’ll give her a expression.

Expressions can only be found under the head morphs (see step 4).
Instead of going to the tab named Morphs, scroll down a little bt and go to the tab namedMorphs / Expressions.
Here you’ll find a lot more options to play around with.
Play around with them until you get a expression that you like.

You can also buy or get free pre-made expressions.

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