DAZ Studio/D-Form tool

Welcome to the Wikiversity learning project for the DAZ Studio D-Form tool. If you are new to DAZ Studio, start at Rendering models of living organisms or Bryce. This tutorial is an introduction to how to use the DAZ Studio D-Form tool, a way to deform the shape 3D mesh models (see Figure 1). This tutorial gives emphasis to using the D-Former plugin to help make an animation, so you should probably look at Animation with DAZ Studio before using the tutorial on this page.

Introduction
The DAZ Studio D-Form tool allows you to quickly modify the shape of a 3D mesh model that you are using inside the DAZ Studio application. Figure 1 (above) provides a quick example of an animation that uses the D-Form tool. The "horn" was produced using a DAZ Studio D-Former to modify the shape of the polygon mesh that defines this human figure's head shape.

Reading
Make use of the chapter about the D-Form plugin that is in the DAZ Studio manual. Do the two D-Former tutorials that are in the manual. The tutorial below provides an example for how to use D-Formers within a DAZ Studio animation.

Activity
After reading the DAZ Studio manual's chapter on D-Formers and Animation with DAZ Studio you should be able to make a simple animation such as that shown in Figure 1 (above). The rest of this page, below, describes a more complex example of how to use D-Formers in an animation (see Figure 6).

Models
The animation example for this tutorial that is described in detail, below, makes use of the Aiko 3.0 character which can be downloaded for free. Also used: the leotard by Yamoto for the DAZ3D character "Aiko 3".

Morphing laser ball
This example involves three D-formers used during a 30 frame (1 second) animation sequence. A common problem with 3D models is that clothing may not fit perfectly to human characters, resulting in "poke through": skin that shows in a rendered image when it should be covered by the clothing (see Figure 2). You can use D-formers to fix minor "poke through" problems. This example uses a D-former to cause "poke through". Two other D-formers are used to alter the shape of a glowing sphere, creating the illusion of a beam of light that causes the "poke through".

Glowing ball
The glowing sphere ("crystal ball") shown in Figure 2 was made with the DAZ Studio "new primitive" menu item in the "Create" menu. Details for the transparency settings of the sphere are discussed in DAZ Studio lighting.

First D-Former
The sphere of the glowing "crystal ball" was selected and a new D-Former was created. The force field for the D-Former was scaled to a smaller size in order to pull a small spike outwards from the surface of the sphere, just as explained in detail for the "horn" tutorial in the DAZ Studio manual's chapter on D-Formers. This first D-Former could be used to pull a spike-like projection of the sphere towards Aiko's chest (see Figure 3). However, this first D-Former was converted into a morph for the sphere (and named "spike"), and the resulting morph slider was used in combination with a second D-Former, as described below. Refer to the DAZ Studio manual chapter on D-Form for details on how to convert a D-Former into a morph slider for an object like this sphere.

Second D-Former
Rather than just have a spike projecting from the "crystal ball", it would be better to have a broader beam of light. A broader projection from the "crystal ball" was produced by using two cooperating D-Formers. Rather than actually create a new "second" D-Former, the existing one was just re-used after creating the morph slider, as described in the previous section of this page. After making the morph slider, the position of the D-Former's force field was changed slightly by moving the force field of the D-Former towards Aiko along the shaft of the spike. This allowed the "beam of light" protruding from the ball to be made broader at the location where it intersected with Aiko's chest (see Figure 4a). Using both the morph slider and the D-former at the same time gives the illusion of a beam of light extending from the sphere to illuminate a patch of the clothing. Figure 4b shows the location of the controls for this D-Former and the morph slider (described in the previous section).


 * Frame 0. Both the D-Former and the morph slider were set to zero (Figure 4b).
 * Frame 5 The slider for the D-Former was used to pull the spike out at frame #5 of the animation. For frame #5 the D-former was set to 100%.
 * Frame 10. The D-former was still set to 100% and the morph slider was set to 26.1%.
 * Frame 20. The D-former was still set to 21.5%. The morph slider was still at 26.1%.
 * Frame 25. The D-former was still set to -1.3%. The morph slider was still at 26.1%.

Third D-Former
Another D-Former was made and used to push on the small patch of clothing where the "light beam" fell. Just a slight push with this D-Former in frame #15 caused a region of the leotard to sink below the level of the skin, creating the illusion of part of the clothing being "burned away" by the light beam (see Figure 5). Also, by frame 20, the "light beam" was narrowed again, having done its "job".

Final result
For the final animation, the human character was made to react to the "light beam". Sound effects were added using Apple's iMovie and GarageBand.

Activities

 * Upload to Wikiversity an example of your own animation results obtained using the D-Former plugin.
 * Experiment with the D-Former spline editor.

Note: At this time, there are two options for adding video to Wikiversity: animated gif files and OGG format video. You can use software such as GIMP to make animated gifs. The OGG video for this tutorial was made using these instructions.

Other DAZ Studio plugins

 * DAZ Studio puppeteer