New DAZ Studio 4: Graphical User Interface

In this new post dedicated to DAZ Studio we analyze the graphical user interface of the Pro version, explaining briefly the functions of buttons and tabs.

Graphical user interface

3D Viewports

This can be regarded as the window through which you can view the contents of your “virtual room”.

Toolbars

The toolbars contain icons that give access to many common functions of the software.

Help

Below the menu bar is located this toolbar containing two buttons.

1. What’s This?
   With this button, the cursor goes into “what is this?” mode. Clicking on the graphical user interface elements you can get a brief description of their functionality.
2. Help tab
   Opens the Help tab which should contain information about the tools and commands of this software, but at the moment is largely incomplete.

Create

From left to right these are the functionality of the buttons:

1. Create a new Camera
   Create and insert in the scene a new camera .
2. Create a new Distant Light
   Create and insert in the scene a Distant Light, a light that illuminates in a single direction, like the sun.
3. Create a new Point Light
   Create and insert in the scene a Point Light, a light that shines in every direction like a light bulb.
4. Create a new Linear Point Light
   Create and insert in the scene a Linear Point Light that emits light in all directions from a single point and even this can be imagined as a light bulb. But it differes from a Point Light, whose intensity falls off quickly (actually, exponentially) as you get farther from the light, because the Linear Point Lights do not fall off quickly, so their intensity is greater at greater distance.
5. Create a new Spot Light
   Create and insert in the scene a Spot Light, a light that can be imagined as that of a flashlight or a reflector.
6. Create a new Primitive
   Create and insert in the scene a new primitive (cube, cylinder, cone, sphere, torus or plane).
7. Create a new Null
   Create and insert in the scene a new Null, in practice a node with no geometry, to which other nodes can be parented or to which other objects can be pointed.
8. Create a new D-Former
   Create and insert in the scene a new D-Former. This tool allows you to quickly change the geometry of the object which it is associated.

Viewport Tools

Always from left to right:

1. Activate the Node Selection Tool
   Activate the selection tool, that allows you to select a node in the viewport.
2. Activate the Universal Manipulation Tool
   Activate a 3D manipulation tool with which you can rotate, translate, and or scale the selected object.
3. Activate the Rotate Tool
   Activate the tool by which you can rotate the selected object.
4. Activate the Translate Viewport Tool
   Activate the tool with which you can translate the selected object.
5. Activate the Scale Tool
   Activate the tool with which you can scale the selected object.
6. Activate the Active Pose Tool
   This tool allows you to pose a figure quickly, simply by dragging the bones of the selected 3D model.
7. Activate the aniMate 2 Viewport Tool
   Activate the aniMate 2 tools.
8. Activate the Surface Selection Tool
   This tool allows you to select an area from an object in the scene.
9. Activate the Region Navigator Tool
   This tool allows you to select a predefined region of an object in the scene.
10. Activate the Joint Editor Tool
    This tool allows you to select, view and edit the joint of the selected figure.
11. Activate the Weight Map Brush Viewport Tool
    This activates the Weight Map  Brush, a tool that can be used to create, edit and manage your weight maps for the bone or the currently selected node.
12. Activate the Polygon Group Editor Tool
    This tool is used to create or edit groups of polygons on each 3D model.
13. Activate the Spot Render Viewport Tool
    Activating this tool click and drag a  rectangle selection in the scene to define an area to be rendered. Once you release the mouse button it will render the area previously selected in the scene.
14. Show or hide the Tool settings tab
    This button shows or hides the tab with the settings of the currently tool selected from the Create toolbar .
15. Render the Scene
    This button renders an image of your scene.
16. Show or hide the Render Settings tab
    Shows the tab with the render settings, where you can customize the rendering options.

Input Output

Located on the left side of the DAZ Studio 4 default graphical user interface this toolbar has the following functions:

1. Clear the Scene
   Delete the current scene and opens a new one.
2. Open an existing file
   Opens a previously saved scene or a content. Also, delete the scene or any content previously uploaded and replace it with the contents of the opened file.
3. Merge an existing file
   Merges the contents of the selected file with the current scene.
4. Save the current Scene
   Save the scene.
5. Import an existing file
   Import a non native format file and merge it to the scene.
6. Export a file
   Export the selected object in a non native format file.
7. Undo
   Undo. In case of errors you can revert to a previous state of your scene.
8. Redo
   Reinstate the previously reversed action.
9. Send to Bryce
   Send the selected object or objects to Bryce.
10. Send to Hexagon
    Send the selected object or objects to Hexagon.

Creator Tools

Located on the right side of the DAZ Studio graphical user interface this toolbar has the following functions:

1. Show or hide the align tab
   Show or hide the Align tab, used to align objects in the scene.
2. Show or hide the D-Form tab
   Show or hide the D-Form tab, used to edit the D-Former (see paragraph 8 of the Create toolbar) entered the scene.
3. Show the Shader Mixer tab
   Show the Shader Mixer tab, used to modify the shader using connections between shader “bricks”.
4. Show or hide the Shader Builder tab
   Show or hide the Shader Builder tab, used for the creation of advanced shaders.
5. Show or hide the Figure Setup tab
   Show or hide the Figure Setup tab.
6. Display the Transfer Utility dialog
   Show the Transfer Utility tab, that allows to transfer data from one object to another.
7. Show or hide the Property Editor tab
   Show or hide the Property Editor tab, that allows the creation, modification, deletion, selection, transfer and grouping of the properties of an object.
8. Display the Morph Loader Advanced dialog
   Show the  Morph Loader Advanced tab, which allows to import and apply morph target at the selected object.
9. Display the Morph Loader Pro dialog
   Show the  Morph Loader Pro tab, which allows to import and apply morph target at the selected object.
10. Texture Atlas
    Show the Texture Atlas tab, that gathers all the textures of the selected figure, resize and scale them to combine they into a new set of textures. Very useful to reduce the overall size of the images and thus improve the performance in real-time applications.

Tabs

We continue the analysis of the graphical user interface of DS, now dealing summarily some tabs of the program.
Those not mentioned, but also those discussed here will be explored in future posts.

Scene

This tab displays all the objects included in our scene.

Shaping

With this tab is possible vary the shape of Genesis, the 3D human figure included in DAZ Studio. Simply move the slider to the right of each shape. It is also possible to combine multiple shape to get your custom human figure.

Smart Content

In this tab, thanks to the metadata provided with the contents you can directly view all content available for a particular figure or object.
You can find a brief description also in this post.

aniMate 2

This is the timeline of the aniMate 2 plugin .
The blue blocks, called aniBlocks are basically premaded animations.