All posts by Jay Versluis

About Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs two YouTube channels, five websites and several podcast feeds. To see what else he's up to, and to support him on his mission to make the world a better place, check out his Patreon Campaign.

DAZ Studio Test Scene – share your Iray Render Speeds

3D

I’d love to see a decent Iray render speed comparison between the current NVIDIA graphics Cards, specifically for DAZ Studio performance. All we need is some data from a static test scene, render it on a variety of systems and compare the results.

Well here’s such a scene! Please download it and render it on your system, then leave a comment below with your GPU configuration and how long it took for the scene to finish.


DAZ Studio Retro Test Scene (42kb)Download

To take a time reading, head over to Help – Troubleshooting – View Log File. Scroll to the end of that file and you’ll see a line that reads something like this:

Total Rendering Time: 17 minutes 20.70 seconds

Paste that line in the comments below, and let me know which Graphics Card you’re using. If you don’t have a GPU, let me know your computer specs (including processor speed and RAM). If you’re game, you can render twice – once with your GPU and once with your GPU, even using both together. I’ll compile a list of the results in an upcoming post.

Thank you for your participation!

About OBS Scenes, Collections and Profiles

2D

When I first started using OBS Studio, I was tremendously puzzled about its use of Scenes, Collections and Profiles. It all makes sense if you know what these mean, which I guess eventually you’ll find out – but I wish someone had explained this philosophy to me instead.

Let me help you with that in this article.

Continue reading About OBS Scenes, Collections and Profiles →

Where does OBS Studio save settings?

2D

I genuinely like what OBS has to offer – especially the new OBS 23. In fact I like it so much that I’ve decided to support Jim and his the entire project through their Patreon Campaign.

Today I’ve “refreshed” my Windows system, which is the system that I use OBS on primarily, and after every good Windows refresh comes that time when you have to restore your machine to a working condition. So the question arose, where did OBS save all my scenes, collections and profiles?

Thankfully, Windows is clever enough to make a backup of the old Windows folder, deep down in which those settings reside (it’s called Windows.old in case you’re in the same predicament). Even if you’re not in this situation, let’s take a look at where those settings are hiding so we can all make a backup and sleep a little easier at night.

Windows

On Windows 10, you’ll find the OBS settings in %appdata%\obs-studio. At least that’s what several forum posts tell us. To the likes of you and me however, that might not mean all that much.

You see, %appdata% is a Windows system variable that contains a path to application related data. Depending which drive Windows is installed on, and what user name you have, its contents varies.

Let’s say my user name is “versluis”, and Windows is installed on the C: drive. This means that the full path to to the OBS data location would be C:\Users\versluis\AppData\Roaming\obs-studio

You can back up the entire folder, or replace the contents of your current folder with that of a backup to bring back all your profiles, collections and scenes.

macOS

On macOS we’ll have to dig into the current user’s Library folder to find the same setup as above. The full path is ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/

Much like in the above example, the Tilde symbol means “your current home folder” (macOS has two Library folders, one for each user, and one for the system). Again, if my user name was “versluis”, then the full path to the OBS Settings would be /Users/versluis/Library/Application Support/obs-studio

I haven’t OBS on Linux, but I believe the setup is similar to the Mac.

Where does DAZ Studio save Morph Files

3D

I have recently explained how we can create morphs for DAZ Studio assets with external applications, and how to apply them to characters and clothing using Morph Loader, or something like the GoZ Plugin. You can watch those videos here and here.

One of my viewers was asking – quite rightly – what to do with the applied morph, and how to save it. The answer to that question is a little in-depth, and depends on what you’d like to do with said morph. I thought I’d expand on the answer I gave Scott in one of the above videos with this article.

Continue reading Where does DAZ Studio save Morph Files →

How to use Reference Images in DAZ Studio

3D, 3D Podcast

In this episode I’ll show you how we can use Reference Images in DAZ Studio. This is not a built-in option, but with the help of a Plane Primitive and a dedicated camera we can use references to help us build scenes, poses and shaders.

We can create as many planes and cameras as we like, and we can place them anywhere in our scene. Sometimes it’s useful to have a character right in front of a picture showing a pose, while at other times the plane may interfere with the scene and only needs to be visible as a colour or positional reference.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 9:50 — 9.0MB)

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How to “transcode” FLV into MP4 files with OBS

Streaming, Video Editing

By default, OBS Studio likes to record files in FLV – for a reason that’s absolutely beyond me. I easily forget to change this setting into something more sensible, which means I frequently end up with FLV files that contain my material. At that point I have no way to edit those properly.

This means I’ll have to transcode my files in order to make them useful.

Or do I? Well, yes and no. Let me explain a bit more about this dilemma.

Continue reading How to “transcode” FLV into MP4 files with OBS →

Creating Depth of Field in Photoshop

2D, 3D Podcast

In this episode I’ll show you how to create an artificial depth of field effect in Photoshop, using the Blur Gallery. This can be useful for cutting down on render time, or to apply to images that have been taken with small fixed focus cameras (like the GoPro).

This technique is similar in style to this new “portrait mode” on iOS devices. The Blur Gallery has a lot to offer, I’m only scratching the surface by demonstrating both the Tilt/Shift and Iris Blur filters.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 20:13 — 18.5MB)

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About that Denoiser in DAZ Studio 4.11

3D, ,

There’s an article by Phil Miller that explains NVIDIA’s philosophy about the new interactive Iray Denoiser.

Thanks to deep learning, NVIDIA’s own DGX-1 AI Super Computer and a lot of trial and error, this machine developed an algorithm that can predict how accurate the final result will look like when only a limited amount of ray bounces are available.

In a nutshell, their Artificial Neural Network went ahead and compared a partially finished render with a finished one, and each time it made a prediction that was not looking handsome, it learnt from it. Eventually they came up with what’s currently integrated in the latest release of Iray, which has made it into DAZ Studio 4.11, and that in turn is available for us to beta test right now.

I’ve run some tests with this new toy, and I’m excited to share those with you today.

Continue reading About that Denoiser in DAZ Studio 4.11 →

Building an Indoor Pool Scene with DAZ Studio

3D, 3D Podcast

In this live event I’ll build a scene with the Hotel Indoor Pool product from DAZ and Imaginary 3D (available for free this week for Platinum Club Members). I’ll explain how to walk through the scene to explore the the whole set, pick a good camera angle, convert existing objects into light sources and add new ones underwater. I’ll throw in some workflow tips and tricks and build the above image.

Any questions, please add them in the comments – or join me on FRIDAY at 10am EST / 3pm in the UK / 4pm in Europe

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:37:35 — 89.3MB)

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Creating ZBrush Morphs for DAZ Studio without GoZ

3D, 3D Podcast,

In this episode I’ll show you how to create a morph for an item in DAZ Studio using ZBrush, without using the GoZ bridge. It works by exporting your object in OBJ format from DAZ Studio, importing and changing its shape in ZBrush (or any other 3D modelling app for that amtter), then re-importing the object to DAZ Studio. This workflow does not require any specific bridging tools that can sometimes be difficult to work with.

This is a follow-up video to my previous one about how to create morphs using ZBrush and the GoZ tool. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYFaIZah6A

For Roger and MH LI.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 8:58 — 8.2MB)

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