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Description
Well this certainly isn't anything to get excited over, but I thought I would show my current DAZ Studio interface and give a few tips to any fellow users that might help your workflow a little.

You can see I have four tabs at the top, Assembly, Posing and Camera, Surfaces, and Rendering, but I really spend all my time in this one (Posing and Camera). However, if you're used to Poser and it's "rooms', or if you're not using a 1920x1080 screen resolution like I am, you may prefer to set up tabs like this so you can put only the necessary panels in and save room.

I also like keeping Puppeteer open (the panel on the top left with the dot) because in addition to being a good animation tool, it also acts as a "super dot" function (for those who used the UI/Pose dots in Poser). All you have to do is select the item from the drop-down box above (where it says "Genesis" here) and click anywhere in the grid to make a dot. The dot will save everything about your figure, the pose, morphs, position, etc, so you can fool around with new poses or morphs and then just click the dot to revert it to that preset. Make multiple dots for all the presets you like and save them with your scene, then right-click on one for options to update or delete it.

There are three views open here, but I edited the toolbar (in the Edit -> Preferences menu) to add quick choices of a one, three, or four window view. In the main view, I'm looking through the "Camera Face" camera while I morphed Smacky's face. The top-right one, "Camera Full" shows the entire figure. The bottom one is actually looking through the spotlight (Uberspot), and has always been one of my favorite features of DAZ Studio. By looking through it in a separate view, you can use the movement and rotation tools just as if the light were a camera, and see the lighting change in your scene in real-time.

I also discovered today that you may need to adjust Shadow Bias depending on the distance of your character and other items in the scene. I couldn't figure out why it was looking like Smacky's eyelashes were coming out of her eyeball. Disabling shadows using the Ubersurface had no effect, but it was indeed shadows being cast with my Shadow Bias set to .10. When I raised it to 1.000, the shadows on the eye were gone. However, when I zoomed back out to the view shown, the shadows reappeared. I raised the Bias to 1.5 and they went away again. I love DAZ, but these are the kinds of things that having a manual would really help with.

Anyway, I'll be adding Smacky's braided hair next and then do some postwork tests to rebuild the presets that I lost. Thanks for taking a look and for your patience while I get things back in order. I'm also pushing for this interface style (Darkside) to be included with the free version of DAZ Studio so that everyone can use it. Hopefully they'll listen!

Description
Well this certainly isn't anything to get excited over, but I thought I would show my current DAZ Studio interface and give a few tips to any fellow users that might help your workflow a little.

You can see I have four tabs at the top, Assembly, Posing and Camera, Surfaces, and Rendering, but I really spend all my time in this one (Posing and Camera). However, if you're used to Poser and it's "rooms', or if you're not using a 1920x1080 screen resolution like I am, you may prefer to set up tabs like this so you can put only the necessary panels in and save room.

I also like keeping Puppeteer open (the panel on the top left with the dot) because in addition to being a good animation tool, it also acts as a "super dot" function (for those who used the UI/Pose dots in Poser). All you have to do is select the item from the drop-down box above (where it says "Genesis" here) and click anywhere in the grid to make a dot. The dot will save everything about your figure, the pose, morphs, position, etc, so you can fool around with new poses or morphs and then just click the dot to revert it to that preset. Make multiple dots for all the presets you like and save them with your scene, then right-click on one for options to update or delete it.

There are three views open here, but I edited the toolbar (in the Edit -> Preferences menu) to add quick choices of a one, three, or four window view. In the main view, I'm looking through the "Camera Face" camera while I morphed Smacky's face. The top-right one, "Camera Full" shows the entire figure. The bottom one is actually looking through the spotlight (Uberspot), and has always been one of my favorite features of DAZ Studio. By looking through it in a separate view, you can use the movement and rotation tools just as if the light were a camera, and see the lighting change in your scene in real-time.

I also discovered today that you may need to adjust Shadow Bias depending on the distance of your character and other items in the scene. I couldn't figure out why it was looking like Smacky's eyelashes were coming out of her eyeball. Disabling shadows using the Ubersurface had no effect, but it was indeed shadows being cast with my Shadow Bias set to .10. When I raised it to 1.000, the shadows on the eye were gone. However, when I zoomed back out to the view shown, the shadows reappeared. I raised the Bias to 1.5 and they went away again. I love DAZ, but these are the kinds of things that having a manual would really help with.

Anyway, I'll be adding Smacky's braided hair next and then do some postwork tests to rebuild the presets that I lost. Thanks for taking a look and for your patience while I get things back in order. I'm also pushing for this interface style (Darkside) to be included with the free version of DAZ Studio so that everyone can use it. Hopefully they'll listen!