Absolute beginner, looking for a little help

tomro

Hi - Here's what I'm trying to do. I was asked to build a model of a trading ship as used by an ancient Greek merchant. Literally, build out of solid materials, which would take me years. By chance I stumbled upon a very similar looking virtual vessel, a DAZ "prop" at https://www.daz3d.com/ancient-greek-boat - which I've downloaded, along with the DAZ 3D suite.

What I'd like to do now is adapt the basic prop - for instance, apply an image or pattern to the sail, and similarly decorate the hull, also remove some oars and put some different structures on the deck (boxes, amphoras, perhaps a tarpaulin). It would also be good to be able to show the sail furled. 

Then ideally I'd like to populate the boat with some figures in various poses. 

And add the sea. Does this mean using https://www.daz3d.com/ocean-wide or is there a sea texture available (as ratehr strongly implied in the rendered images at https://www.daz3d.com/ancient-greek-boat )?

All this is to create models for an illustrator to use when drawing scenes in a graphic novel.

So far, I have "switched off" some oars. Wahey! But I can find nothing to help me learn how to use DAZ to do any of the other things I'd like.

Anyone point me in the right direction?

Very many thanks - Tom

 

Richard Haseltine

To apply textures you need to match them up to the UV tempalte - an image file showing the outlines of the mesh that makes up the shape of the model, so that you can see which bit of the image gets applied to which bit of the model. The Ancient Greek Boat seems to have lost its templates - you can make your own in Hexagon (or using the UV Tailor plug-in for DS), or you can use a copy of an existing texture as a guide (this isn't usually advised as you need to keep your own work separate from the content files, but for your purposes it should be OK).

Adding new items is fairly simple - you just need the items, either using primitives, or other products, or models of your own creation (made in Hexagon, for example), load or import them, and use the posing tools to place them.

The tricky bit can be doing things like cutting new holes, if you need to - If you are lucky and your hole lines up with the existing polygons you can just use the Geometry Editor to delete the polygons, or assign them to a new surface and make that invisible, but if not you need to add new edges to the model and some tools that can do that - including Hexagon - will remove the UV mapping, so that the textures no longer work.

tomro

Thanks, Richard - I think I see what you mean. It seems I need to spend quite a lot longer familiarising myself with the tools if I'm to get anywhere. For a newbie, the concept of matching an image to a template which has been lost, so having to create a replacement template in another new application, is somewhat daunting. There seems to be an add-in for the Greek boat which applies some textures etc - https://www.daz3d.com/argos - will this in fact restore the missing template and give me more options? That is, will I be able to swap my own designs in place of those in the "argos"?

I see how I can add figures, and I think I follow the "adding new items" concept - many thanks for that explanation - so I'm positive I can get where I need to, if I can sort out applying images or decoration, as the "argos" add-in seems to offer... and if I understand "bump", "displacement" and "diffusion" maps correctly (or at all).

The steepest section of the learning curve is meant to be the most rewarding, right?

Richard Haseltine

The texture expansion doesn't need the template - nothing inside DS does, it's a guide for texture creation and, as I said, you can use an existing map instead. You don't need to do any UV mapping, just export an image showing the current mapping.

FSMCDesigns

Hi Tom, in reading your first post, please keep in mind that daz studio is not a modeling program, but more a rendering, animation app. You would be better off doing the work you need to do in a modeling app such as hexagon or blender. Also, anything you get from the DAZ store cannot be shared, only the 2D images or animations, so if you are building something for the illustrator, they will have to rely only on the images you render yourself and not the actual model.

tomro

Thanks, Michael - that's really helpful. I'll take a look at Hexagon to help with creating the other articles I wanted in the boat. But surely you're not recommending that I should try to build the entire boat from scratch in Hexagon.

Not having any training or experience in 3D design, I am finding the use of normal English words in novel ways is quite baffling, in the software documentation and these forums. For instance, I understand each individual word in Richard's second message above, but when they are strung together they lose me completely! I hope some glimmer of comprehension will appear in time - I'll run through the various tutorials and see where that gets me...