New User - I want to learn from A-Z

kaloshilo

Hi everyone one. I am running in circles.The Hexagon tutorials from the Daz3d store did not show the type of material that you would find in the Daz3d store. The method of Hexagon seems clumsy and tedious. Perhaps those were just meant to get you familiar. I am also doing iClone and just started Blender. From the Forum below, I saw that Vue is being used. I am trying to become a seller\vendor as well as an artist. I purchased Bryce but now found out that the software is not used in the sellers market.

JimmyC_2009

Hexagon is capable of making almost any kind off model that you can think of (in the right hands)  

What kind of product are you intending to make?

 

patience55

kaloshilo said:

Hi everyone one. I am running in circles.The Hexagon tutorials from the Daz3d store did not show the type of material that you would find in the Daz3d store. The method of Hexagon seems clumsy and tedious. Perhaps those were just meant to get you familiar. I am also doing iClone and just started Blender. From the Forum below, I saw that Vue is being used. I am trying to become a seller\vendor as well as an artist. I purchased Bryce but now found out that the software is not used in the sellers market.

Bryce can be used to render beautiful landscapes and such. One can import the Daz figures to Bryce placing them in the scene. One can also make things with Bryce, much more information is available in the Bryce section of the forums.

Vue has a rather limited market save for those who have purchased some extreme mega edition which allows them to add in purchased from "Joe Public" items.

Blender, if you can grasp its UI, can do lots of neat things. Some vendors do use this program [as well as Hexagon and/or Modo and/or Zbrush and/or ....] It's not so much which program one has, but how well one can use what they have.

3D Coat is a more up-to-date type of modeler including stuff for 3D printing.

Hexagon can do a few things better than some of the other programs, for other things, no.
It is an older program but tends to be more user friendly as far as the UI goes. Zbrush has a free trial available if you want to get a look at other examples of UIs.

Hexagon has a BRIDGE to D/S ... an invaluable tool even if wanting to use the .obj file then in another program, washing it back through to shoot it over to D/S.

The seller makes the products for the artist to use. So firstly as an artist, see how the products work. See what you like and don't like. Then as a seller, make your products "better".

Be patient, it can take awhile.

You may notice that people tend to specialize. Some are good at making hair, others textures, others sets, others clothing, etc. Each category tends to have its own set of challenges.

Also keep in mind your intended market ... models for games are not necessarily the same as models for animation or 3D printing.

 

LegalizeAdulthood

As a n00b modeler, my suggestion would be to start with simpler projects and work your way up.  If you haven't modeled before, my suggestion is that you learn the techniques of "box modeling" and "edge extrusion modeling".  (A good book for this that will lead you through it visually is Polygonal Modeling by Mario Russo.)  Along the way you will learn how the tools in Hexagon map to these different styles of modeling.  If I say to you "always keep clean topology" and this doesn't mean anything to you, then you should learn about this before attempting to make products for the Daz store.  Russo's book will make this clear to you.  His book doesn't rely on a particular piece of software and is readily adapted to the modeling tools provided in Hexagon.

Here are some different types of content from my perspective of easiest to hardest:

• Pose sets: This doesn't involve any modeling at all.  However, posing figures in a realistic manner requires a good eye and patience.  That said, it is simply adjusting the figure into an interesting pose within Daz Studio so you don't need to learn how to create anything from scratch.
• Material sets/shader sets: This also doesn't involve any geometric modeling, but does involve modeling the properties of a material, particularly if your material is IRay based.  This usually involves creating associated image maps to go with the material.
• Morphs: This involves modeling because you are taking an existing mesh and moving the vertices in order to create a morph.  You can't add, remove, or change the edge connections of any of the vertices.  Some people find such a constraint liberating because it focuses their efforts while other people find such a constraint limiting because it prevents them from doing arbitrary modeling changes.
• Props: Technically a prop is geometry with no rigging.  Imagine a simple coffee table.  It doesn't have any moving parts, so it doesn't have any rigging.  However, we might also consider the hot dog cart to be a prop since it isn't a living creature.  However, the hot dog cart has quite a bit of rigging on it because it has many moving parts.  Technically that makes it a "figure".  The complexity of non-rigged geometry can span everything from a coffee table to a complete environment set piece with optional elements that can be added, removed and repositioned within the set.
• Clothing: Making clothing requires geometry to describe the clothing shape, materials to describe the clothing appearance and rigging to allow the clothing to conform to the figure for which it was created.  According to the terms I've used so far, it sounds like it is somewhere between a prop and a figure and that's not an unreasonable way to think of it.  The rigging is generally applied to the clothing by using the Transfer Utility in Daz Studio to transfer rigging from the figure to the clothing.
• Hair: Creating convincing hair seems to be quite difficult. There are additional software add-ons for Daz Studio to assist in making hair and quite frankly, I'm not sure how they work.  However, you can create hair from scratch by using appropriate geometry as scaffolding for blended textures that give the appearance of a certain hairstyle when rendered, even if in the interactive preview window they look a little odd.
• Character: A "character" uses an existing base figure and changes it's shape using morphs.  A character may also have associated clothing and props to fit in with the character's imagined personality.  Sometimes you can create a compelling character simply by using the existing morphs for the base figure, but it is not uncommon to create new custom morphs in order to more directly get the desired shape and appearance.  For instance, it may be simpler to sculpt the characters facial features directly as a morph than to try and understand how to manipulate the existing morphs to achieve the desired facial features.
• Figure: Making a new figure--such as the Genesis 3 Base Male--is quite a bit of work.  Particularly for human figures, people will expect your figure to have the same quality and features as the current free figure from Daz, such as Genesis 3 Base Male.  You will need to create geometry, materials and rigging for the figure.  Rigging here will involve going way beyond the basic rigid deformation rigging that a prop would need for you will need to realistically adjust the shape of joints and muscles as the figure bends.

Having said all that, where does Hexagon come in?  Certainly it comes into play for the modeling aspects.  The Daz Studio/Hexagon bridge simplifies the workflow for creating morphs because the two programs communicate the morph data directly and allow you to skip the steps of repeatedly exporting and importing to get data back and forth between the two programs.

Rigging, including that done for props, is done entirely in Daz Studio.  Hexagon does not have any knowledge of rigging. You can create a morph in Hexagon by moving the vertex positions to their final position, but since Hexagon doesn't have any concept of rigging, you must bring the adjusted geometry into Daz Studio and create a moprh from it in order to view the intermediate states of the morph as you adjust it's control dial.

Primitive materials can be created in Hexagon, but there are much better options for editing and creating materials in Daz Studio, particularly if you get into advanced materials with Shader Mixer and IRay's MDL (material definition language).

Hopefully that helps.

Wee Dangerous John

To get you started here are 2 links to Hexagon video tutorials. The first is a set of 26 shorts which explain what all the tool do. The second link it to Gary Miller's series, these are very good project based tutorials - I think between them you should pick up the basics.

http://www.geekatplay.com/hexagon-tutorials.php