The Geometry Editor: An In-Depth Tutorial Guide

The geometry editor provides a powerful tool to enable you to fix and edit your existing content and even create new model content. It also acts as an in-built "kit bashing" engine, maximizing the use of your content library and allowing you to split models into more components.

Dawn Spears provides an in-depth set of tutorials including a wide range of 14 case studies to demonstrate how effective the geometry editor is. She includes best-use examples of the editor tools, as well as caveats where in some cases other software may prove more effective.

Tutorial set total running time: 3 hours and 3 minutes

This product contains both a set of 13 MP4 files and a searchable video library version with optional captions. Any word or phrase spoken during the recordings can be searched for across the entire library.

Video 1: Introduction to basic geometry

Aims: Understand the very basics of how 3D models are created and why we need this as a foundation for geometry editing.

• How models are constructed of vertices, edges, and polygons
• How to view these in the viewport
• Why the different wireframe views are useful when editing geometry - which one does what etc.

Video 2: Overview of the geometry editing tool

Aims: Understand the uses and limitations of the tool and when to use it over other methods such as hiding a body part/surface

• Where to find it.
• How to dock/undock the pane
• The importance of the tool settings panel
• The context-sensitive right-click menu
• Linking back to the basic geometry intro, how to use the different selection modes.
• Note that we will mostly be focusing on editing polygons as this is most useful for us as render artists.

Using the tool to remove polygons

• Different selection modes (marquee, lasso, and drag)
• The selection modifiers (grow/shrink/connected and loop)
• Why loop selection is so important
• Importance of orthographic views for accurate selections

Video 2a: Adding the Geometry Editor tool to the toolbar

• Aims - Learn how to customize the Daz toolbar
• A walkthrough of customizing the Daz toolbar and how to save it

Video 3: Case studies 1 & 2 (removing polygons)

• Aims - Understand how removing polygons can be used in real-case scenarios (in this case making windows)
• How to put a window in a flat wall plane - Alien Corridor Prop
• How to put a window in a full geometry (inside and outside) and plug the “holes” -
• Stucco wall plane

Video 4: Case studies 3 & 4 (removing polygons)

• Aims - Learn how we can use the removal of polygons to edit clothing items
• How to shorten a dress and remove sleeves from clothing.
• How to cut trousers so boots fit better
• Fixing troublesome poke-throughs

Video 5: Case studies 5 & 6 (removing polygons)

• Aims - Learn how to use Daz primitives to make our own lighting props and add these to a scene. Dealing with problematic hair
• How to make a cut-out sci-fi lighting from primitives for scene lighting
• Removing hair sections from the face, how to recover if you accidentally go too far.

Video 6: Case study 7 (removing polygons)

• Aims - Understand that we can apply these techniques across many applications e.g. environments.
• Editing environments, removing leaves from a scene where they are blocking the camera.

Video 6a: An examination of standard quad mesh vs a Marvelous Designer mesh

• Aims - Understand why some meshes may look quite different from each other and the ways we can deal with that.
• Demo of both meshes side by side.

Video 7: What are Surfaces and how we can use them

• Aims - Understand what a Daz surface is and what they are used for. Learn how to
• use the Surfaces tab and Tool Settings tab to make easier selections
• Revisit the dress shortening scene and make our own edits and add trim details
• Making areas of fabric transparent/sheer
• Making areas metallic
• Making our own surfaces on existing models
• Assigning shader materials to them

Video 8: Case Study 9 (Adding glowing strips to clothes and footwear — Saving your creations as presets)

• Aims - Learn how to add LED-style lighting to garments to create a sci-fi/Cyberpunk effect.
• Understand how we can then save these assets as wearable presets so we can use them again in a different scene.
• Adding glowing strips to clothes/shoes
• Using material zones to add transparency to areas
• Saving your creations

Video 9: Case study 10 (Making clothing out of primitives and surfaces)

• Aims - Understand how we can edit Daz primitives to make a simple clothing item
• and how we can use surfaces and dForce to texture and fit it correctly.
• Making a striped skirt and using dForce to fit it to the model
• Using different d-force settings on different zones (belt vs fabric)

Video 10: What the Rotate Triangulation of selected polygons does.

Video 11: Case study 11 (Kitbashing texture sets)

• Aims - Learn how to create your own combinations of textures
• Using surface copy and paste to make new texture combinations on an outfit.
• Using geometry editor and surfaces to remove parts of a texture set and reuse that on a different set.

Video 12: Splitting models into parts

• Aims - Understand how we can use geometry editor to split models into separate smaller parts. Understand that while this is useful it is more time-consuming than using traditional 3D modeling software.
• Why might we want to split models into parts?
• How to use Daz to deal with imported models from places like Turbosquid or
• KitBash3d that are all “lumped together”
• Case study 12: Splitting part of an outfit to make a separate belt
• Case study 13: Splitting a railway track from a subway station scene
• Case study 14: Splitting buildings from a large set (example used is by KitBash3D)

Video 13: BONUS Section - Making everyday objects from primitives

• Aims - Learn how we can make and texture everyday objects using Daz primitives and geometry editor
• Making a champagne glass and filling it with liquid
• Walkthrough of cocktail table scene as examples of other ideas

Sample Tutorial Segment

About the Presenter: Dawn Spears:

Dawn Spears lives near London and has gained a broad range of experience in DAZ Studio. She is a professional illustrator, regularly creating custom-made and engaging book covers for authors. She also is a 3D model content creator using ZBrush and Marvelous Designer, most recently creating custom models for an architectural visualization studio. Additionally, Dawn is a qualified teacher, specializing in computer science and is used to helping students understand complex ideas with step-by-step and bite-sized explanations.