Non taken, at least not from you, cause I really appreciate your work.No offense, but that's not really how photorealistic stuff works.
You have a good way to set up lightning and the whole scene and your models are great.
But, also no offense, it's not photorealistic.
If you do some really close closeups you can see a difference.First of all subd higher than 3 is not only not necessary, but it's also overkill, you won't really see any difference between 3 and 4 but the loss of performance is very much noticable.
But the much much more higher render times is not worth it, I agree.
Correct.Thin walled is not the go to for natural eyes or skin, it's just deactivating SSS which is actually necessary for realism.
I was referring to the "natural eyes" product and my experience is: with thin walled on you get much better results, but render times and vram usage is much higher.
Depending on the scene.In my experience the most realistic scenes use simple lighting, everything else is either for cinematic effects or eye-candy, just because something is shiny doesn't mean it's realistc.
It's correct though that lighting is the key for not only realistic renders, but also perfomance.
Imagine an indoor, dark setting like in a nightclub, for the environment you will have many mesh/point/linear lights.
Put 10 glasses with Iray glass shaders in and it's a nightmare to render. But to get the real environment feeling, you can't get rid of all of the lights.
Outdoor or indoor with normal lights is something completely different.
You can use iray section planes and use a hdri with fill/backlights.
I really do, there are some very good tutorials, I just found the tutorials from it roy, which gave me some nice ideas.There's a lot of misleading information out there regarding daz and rendering, so I'd always take all the information you get with a grain of salt and always question if stuff is really necessary.
You are using Gen3 models which are greatly enhanced.
But would you deny, that a Gen8 with HD skin, good looking eyes, hair and clothes use 2-3GB?