3D-Daz A few test renders of a new character

[Ifmonger]

A pixie character designed for my visual novel project. Constructive criticism is welcome.

 

[Pururun]

Nice! Are they supposed to be a small fae? Obviously you can't just put a tiny humanoid in a VN where players can't see it, but in still shots like these it'd be great if they were measured up to an apple or something.
Good luck regardless.

 

[Ifmonger]

Nice! Are they supposed to be a small fae? Obviously you can't just put a tiny humanoid in a VN where players can't see it, but in still shots like these it'd be great if they were measured up to an apple or something.
Good luck regardless.

Thanks - I'm actually going to do a bit of a spin on pixies for my story (sorry, no spoiler). But this one will be about half the size of a human. You'll find out why when I finally post the story. I think by the end of August, I'll at least have a decent demo to post.

 

[Ifmonger]

My day job has been taking more of my time lately, but here are a dozen of my opening scene renders I'd love to get some feedback on.
The demo for the VN has had to be postponed until mid-September, but I'm still working on it.

 

[m4dsk1llz]

Here is what I see, but I am no expert, the images are a bit noisy so either add more light sources or use a post render denoiser. the other thing that I find distracting is the character skin tone that keeps changing, compare the front views in image 9 and 12.

 

[VDM_Games]

I agree with m4dsk1llz, I think the main issue is inconsistency with the lighting so that is where I would recommend experimenting with

 

[Ifmonger]

Thank you for the feedback. Yes, I've been experimenting with lighting and render settings. Don't know if it's just Daz, but finding it difficult to have consistent renders from one shot to the next, even with the exact same settings. May have to change the image size to twice my target then shrink down for clarity and then some post processing. Not sure I want to have to do that for every single shot, as I'm planning for hundreds of them for this story.

 

[AnchovyFuta]

Thank you for the feedback. Yes, I've been experimenting with lighting and render settings. Don't know if it's just Daz, but finding it difficult to have consistent renders from one shot to the next, even with the exact same settings. May have to change the image size to twice my target then shrink down for clarity and then some post processing. Not sure I want to have to do that for every single shot, as I'm planning for hundreds of them for this story.

I also had problem with noise, what m4dsk1llz is true but you could mess around with the render settings on progressive rendering, I set my max samples to 10k (but if you render on 4k I would advice to set it to 20-25 or even 30k but normally 25 is good enough) and rendering converged ratio to 99% (if you set to 100% your image will render forever so 99% is already good.) and that fixed the noise. Hope that helps in someway

 

[m4dsk1llz]

Yes you could go to 99% convergence but that usually isn't necessary, 97% is usually enough and then just try setting the max time to around 30000 and the max iterations to 15000. Even at 5K or 6K that should be plenty. That last 2% will take as long as the previous 50% to render.

Also learn about ghost lighting and HDRI lighting for outdoor scenes. More light helps a lot with render times. One last thing, if you are using an Nvidia 20 or 30 series card, increase your max path length to around 8 or 10. The default is -1 and that will keep path tracing until Iray is satisfied and usually averages a length of 23 which will slow down render times.

DAZ will also render faster if you skip the new window and render straight to a file, but if you must see it updating a window, then set the interval time to something like 30 seconds or more.

Just note that max render time and max iterations is not a combination, it is either / or for DAZ and will stop at whatever comes first. So if you set only the max iterations to 25 or 30K it is likely you will never get there as the time limit will probably always expire first.

 

[Ifmonger]

I also had problem with noise, what m4dsk1llz is true but you could mess around with the render settings on progressive rendering, I set my max samples to 10k (but if you render on 4k I would advice to set it to 20-25 or even 30k but normally 25 is good enough) and rendering converged ratio to 99% (if you set to 100% your image will render forever so 99% is already good.) and that fixed the noise. Hope that helps in someway

Thank you, will try that

 

[Ifmonger]

Yes you could go to 99% convergence but that usually isn't necessary, 97% is usually enough and then just try setting the max time to around 30000 and the max iterations to 15000. Even at 5K or 6K that should be plenty. That last 2% will take as long as the previous 50% to render.

Also learn about ghost lighting and HDRI lighting for outdoor scenes. More light helps a lot with render times. One last thing, if you are using an Nvidia 20 or 30 series card, increase your max path length to around 8 or 10. The default is -1 and that will keep path tracing until Iray is satisfied and usually averages a length of 23 which will slow down render times.

DAZ will also render faster if you skip the new window and render straight to a file, but if you must see it updating a window, then set the interval time to something like 30 seconds or more.

Just note that max render time and max iterations is not a combination, it is either / or for DAZ and will stop at whatever comes first. So if you set only the max iterations to 25 or 30K it is likely you will never get there as the time limit will probably always expire first.

I've copied and pasted your post into a note will try all of the above and thanks