Create a Face Camera in DAZ Studio

Author: Calalene

Tools Needed

• DAZ Studio

This tutorial will guide you in making a Face Camera in DAZ Studio. You can use the same steps to create a camera for any body part you wish.

You need to have DAZ Studio open, and your figure of choice loaded into the new scene. I am using V3. Now, go to the “Create” menu, and choose “New Camera”.

This brings up the “Create New Camera” Dialog Box. (See Figure 2) There is a text box (that probably says “Camera 1” in it) where you can type in a new name for your camera. I called mine “Face Cam”. When you've typed the new name, click “Accept”.

Now, we need to select this as the active camera. There is a drop-down menu box at the top of your workspace that right now says “Default Camera”. Click on the small arrow at the end of this box, and a list of different cameras pops up. The last one in the list should be our new Face Cam. Click on it.

The Face Cam is now the one we are looking through. The view should be the same as the default was. We will change that view now. Go to your “Scene” tab, and open all the hierarchy for the figure (V3, in my case.) Select the Head.

Now go to the “View” tab, and first click the “Aim At Selection” tool (it looks like a red and white bullseye), and then click the “Frame Selection” tool (it looks like a red frame.)

Next we need to make sure the camera stays with the head when we move and pose the figure. Go back to your scene tab, select “Face Cam” again, and drag it down to the “Head”. This will “parent” the camera to the head, so they stay together.

It would be somewhat of a pain to have to go through all these steps every time we create a new scene, so we'll save this as a camera preset. This allows us to load up this same Face Cam any time we wish. Go to your “File” menu, and choose “Save As…”, select “Camera Preset” as the type.

A dialog box will open, you'll want to choose the “Save Selected Camera” option. Next, you will get the standard Windows file browse box, so you can choose where to save the file. I saved mine in Content > Cameras.

The next time you start a scene, and want to load in this Face Cam, go to your “Content” tab and find where you saved it, and double-click the “Face Cam” icon. The preset will not automatically parent the camera to the figure's head, you will have to do that yourself. Also, if you're using a different character than the one you used to create it, you may have to adjust the camera up or down a bit to center the face view. (The camera preset remembers the position of the camera, not what it was “looking at”.) Alternatively, you can make a separate preset for each figure, following the steps outlined here, and name them appropriately.