Honestly, Blender is pretty amazing. Improvements are constant and the community is actively developing plugins. I think that if I were to do this all again, I'd probably go the Blender route, just because I know that the shortcomings will be improved. Octane isn't an engine I've used (I dabbled in Redshift and Renderman before sticking to Arnold), but I wouldn't be surprised if there is an active movement to improve the flaws in Octane implementation for Blender.
Daz to Maya Workflow (and apparently Dev Log now)
- Thread starter nillamello
- Start date
I had octane for months. Imho it isnt worth it. Because of how it handles lighting (and i think the reason its faster) its renders dont look 'right'.. so you have to do a lot of adjusting. Ive used arnold etc.. overall i prefer iray because it produces very high quality human renders by default. Maybe in a few years when octane has had some work. Right now it seems very beta. Blender really is amazing. When they get rid of their fetish for "being oldschool using 12,000 kb shortcuts " i think it's market will increase dramatically. There literally isnt much it cant do other than what Very specialised software like Houdino, zbrush or daz do.
Octane is an unbiased engine and handles lighting correctly. It's one of the commonly used render engines for smaller scale professional productions that don't need the scalability of cpu renderers. Iray is easier to make good renders in Daz because all the materials are made specifically for Iray on the Daz market.
For blender, if you haven't tried it in the past year I highly suggest you give it a go. Version 2.8x redid the UI and made it more in line with other software. I couldn't use previous versions because it was so frustrating and kb shortcut dependent as you mention. Now it feels so good. The only other software easier than blender is probably c4d.
ill check it out. But look into how octane renders. Its speed advantage is specifically because of the technique it uses.
What technique is that? It's an unbiased Ray tracing engine. Even cycles has comparable speeds to it. Only Iray for some reason is brutally slow.
Because it's a better engine. And theres more to raytracing (which is what rendering actually is) than just unbiased etc. BTW turn off quality and iray will raytrace til hell freezes over. You'll have to read up on octane and rendering to really understand the difference. Theres Nothing wrong with the way octane does it. They're aiming for speed. So octane will render something really good in 5 minutes that will take Iray 15 (made up example). But iray will produce a literally photorealistic.. emphasis on the realistic.. render in an hour or two. Octane will produce an octane render .. without a LOT of octane specific material work. I was looking for a specific example.. theres a magnificent "girl detective" cartoon that uses octane and the artwork is stunning. But very artistic not realistic. Octane by default produces very chalky flat renders because of how it handles light bouncing. Iray.. and vray etc.. dont. Use octane if you like it its a cool renderer.. im not saying you shouldnt
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That's less about Daz though, and more about how some models are free / cheap, and others are the big bux...
- Aug 6, 2016
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Sorry for barging into the thread, but I went through all of it and I'd like to thank you nillamello for putting it out here, when I was making the first renders of my game I went a similar route, but instead of Maya I went 3dsMax, but in the end I had to do so much work that it was just faster for me to stick with daz, even with slower render time.
Now some years later I'm not using 3ds anymore and since blender 2.8 came to alpha I jumped to it and I don't think I'm ever going back, and every day I still think to myself that I would be better working inside blender instead of daz, so kudos for sticking with that and delivering!
And if anyone here has a mapped flow to bring daz into blender, I'd love to hear about it.
Now some years later I'm not using 3ds anymore and since blender 2.8 came to alpha I jumped to it and I don't think I'm ever going back, and every day I still think to myself that I would be better working inside blender instead of daz, so kudos for sticking with that and delivering!
And if anyone here has a mapped flow to bring daz into blender, I'd love to hear about it.
I've recently (finally) had some time to start really digging into and getting familiar with shader customizing in Daz using 3delight, and while that has been great for improving the end result (along with lighting improvements, definitely still need more work there), I'm starting to lean toward switching to Iray (like everyone else did some time ago), because I do like the PBR approach. Downside is only can do cpu renders, so Iray takes a lot longer.
The reason I'm replying to your comment is that the more I work on things the more I realize I will eventually move to something else, like Maya. I use Blender for some basic modeling things, but I haven't gotten into much modeling yet, though I do plan to. While I certainly support the whole community theory behind Blender, one thing I definitely find appealing in Maya is bifrost - does Blender or Daz have anything comparable? I've quickly tried it out in Maya 2018 for some water work, and it's like using modern technology compared to caveman technology versus anything I've found for Daz. And I've read about the latest enhancements for bifrost, making its appeal become even better. Perhaps fluidos can compare a little bit (have not yet spent the time working with it to get a grasp on it), but with basically no knowledge someone can set up a great water scene/animation in no time (literally a few minutes, or if you know your settings prob less than a minute). In Daz, Waves on the Beach is pretty user friendly, but it's just a superficial model, so it's not interactive with other models, and when making large waves and doing closeup shots I've found it be of very poor quality (or perhaps I'm using its settings incorrectly).
Daz is a staging software so you really shouldn't expect any sort of non primitive stimulation tools.
I'm not familiar with Bifrost but Blender has a new flip fluid liquid, smoke, fire sim as well as a paid third party sim. Both of these work fine. Although sim capability probably shouldn't be the main deciding factor.
As said post before, maybe wrong but really doubtful Daz devs will implement such things, ain't really Daz selling point. Could argue they bring dForce but it was more critical to their business imo (and lets say it's not the panacea lol). Maybe if they can grab some middleware and implement it but I would't count on it. Daz is a neat pinup simulator, in that way it's really great, but you can't ask for much more imo (well you can but it's gonna be a struggle).
Thank you for input Domiek and no_name, but I think you've misunderstood my question, or partly. Regarding Daz Studio, I'm curious if there are products available, like fluidos perhaps, that are capable of such things. Bifrost is very user friendly as well as offering detailed adjustments, whereas I'm not sure how user friendly fluidos is (though I haven't put any real time into using it to say with certainty). And basically same for Blender, curious about what is available and can interact with other objects - will take a look at flip fluid. My question was not meant as a statement that simulation capabilities was my main consideration for making a decision, whenever that is. From what I know of Blender and Maya, either is an excellent choice for quality work. It's a shame I didn't continue with Blender or Maya when I first tried them in 2002, but I was too impatient then for the time involved with 3dcg work, particularly render time, but better late than never I suppose.
From what I see on this page, Domiek, you seem to use Blender, and you, no_name? And do you use it in conjunction with Daz? Just exporting models then using Blender? Or setting up scenes, animations, shaders, etc?
From what I see on this page, Domiek, you seem to use Blender, and you, no_name? And do you use it in conjunction with Daz? Just exporting models then using Blender? Or setting up scenes, animations, shaders, etc?
Daz is first and foremost a staging software that lets you quickly pose and make some nice renders. Expecting any semblance of parity between Daz tools and full-on 3D packages is not realistic. Fluidos being is user friendly or not isn't really important as every example I was able to find on Youtube made it look like some very low-quality stuff.
I primarily use Blender and only use Daz for the figures/assets. Leaving Daz for any 3D software means months of learning how to manually do stuff that Daz automatically does for you out of the box, so make sure your reason for leaving Daz is worth the time investment. Things like liquid sims you can always do in another software and simply bring it back into Daz.
Fluidos ain't really user friendly, you will need a lot of tries. It's developped by a single person on his free time and it's already a christmas miracle he goes that far but it's nowhere near what you could find in more robust software. If you need fluid simulation Daz ain't gonna be the right tool.
For rendering? An old version of Toolbag when I (try to, Im pretty much a noob) scult/paint. I like it, it's straight to the point. Otherwise I love messing with Iray, sometime give a shoot at Cycle, Eevee or whatever... Tbh engine doesn't matter me much as long I have some fun with it and result are decent.
Instead of dissing DAZ's render ability, consider that
1) iray is among the best there is. It's nVidia, it has GPU rendering and lots of other features, but I give you, the shaders could be handled and managed better.
2) Octane and others, including Pixar's renderman, can be used in Daz. You can have the same render engine as the one you use in Maya.
However, DAZ is made for specific tasks. My claim is that you shoot way over by using Maya, which ... hmm, do you have a legal license for it?
1) iray is among the best there is. It's nVidia, it has GPU rendering and lots of other features, but I give you, the shaders could be handled and managed better.
2) Octane and others, including Pixar's renderman, can be used in Daz. You can have the same render engine as the one you use in Maya.
However, DAZ is made for specific tasks. My claim is that you shoot way over by using Maya, which ... hmm, do you have a legal license for it?
Uhm, Octane works in Daz without any flaws, just sayin.
But, Blender works well with exported Daz scenes. But Blender is not faster even with the same rendering engine.
DAZ is heavily optimized for it's purpose.
Meaning, if you want to use DAZ characters, you should render them in DAZ, otherwise you will have to export them in the right way for rendering in other tools, or you might as well let DAZ do it.
The hell it is? It is a complete modeling, posing, rendering and animation tool.