DAZ Studio first impressions

Now, I was planning to make DAZ Studio shader versions of the materials for the First Impressions Dress, or at least approximations. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen any time soon. I gave it a shot, and DS promptly beat me like a redheaded stepchild. (Granted, I am a redheaded stepchild, but that's still quite rude.)

I don't mean to call anyone's baby ugly, but my first impression about DAZ Studio 3 is that it's taken everything that's bad about Poser, and made it even worse.

Takes shaders, for instance. Poser has the Materials Room, which is arcane and kludgy and very painful for any but the simplest of set-ups. But there is a third party scripting engine by BagginsBill that makes things tons easier by allowing you to write materials files in beginning-level Python. (Seriously, I'm only on chapter 4 of "Python Programming for Absolute Beginners" and I can write some pretty bitchin' materials in Matmatic.)

DAZ Studio equivalently has Shader Mixer and Shader Builder. The first challenge was figuring out which to use. Now, I may be talking out my ass here, but as best I can tell, Shader Mixer is roughly equivalent to the Poser Materials room. And like the Materials Room, it is arcane and kludgy and painful. Only Shader Mixer ups the ante by also being almost completely undocumented. Also, I am about 95% certain that there is not an anisotropic specular brick in there, and that is a basic and necessary highlight type. It's critical to anything that has directional grooves or parallel filaments, including brushed metals, hair, and satin.

I'm sure I could find or make an anisotropic shader in Shader Builder, which is basically a renderman shader scripting engine. Only, it's visual. Just like the Poser Materials Room or Shader Mixer, only even more confusing. Yup, you guessed it: arcane, kludgy, painful and poorly documented. Yay!

Now, the ubersurface shader that comes with DS (that's its name, I swear) does include anistropic highlights. I was even able to get a semi-servicable satin with it despite my ignorance. It won't do DS Free users any good, though; you'll have to have Advance to use it. So there I was thinking "OK, maybe I can make this work", and I save my preset -- and DS won't acknowledge it.

I eventually figured out that it was saved within DS's internal faked Poser runtime, and DS wanted it outside of that to even show it, which brings me to my other big complaint: file management.

Poser's native file management is rock stupid. I'm sure the libraries made perfect sense in 1998, but now I want something more like Advanced Library. Forget these top level categories; let me make my own. Maybe I want to organize by figure and have hair and clothes under that. Maybe I want a separate category for clothes. Let me do it; there's no reason not to.

DAZ Studio makes that even worse. You can use a Poser structure -- and oh, apparently it'll refuse to see DS files if you do that, judging by the satin fiasco. Or you can have a bunch of DS folders tossed together. You have to go through level by level to get where you're going, and it's a huge stupid PITA. Just give me a file browser, dammit.  (I'm pretty sure there is a simple file browser in there; I'm just not sure how to get to it.)


Now, I may eventually go to the effort to learn DAZ Studio. But to be honest with you, it is not a priority. First I want to learn modeling with Blender and Python programming. In the meantime, DS users, I apologize. I'd like to give you full functionality with my freebies, but there's a learning curve I'm just not ready to scale.