Daz Beginner questions

[TommyEsclow]

Hey there,

I'm a beginner in DAZ but i do have experiences with cinema 4d and blender so It wasn't that hard to figure out most of the things fortunately. However, I got a bit confused regarding tips I read mainly in regards of render quality and settings.

I rendered quite a lot of things to play around my first still image scene with max samples on 2560x1440 / quality filter on and set to 1 and then I also rendered images on 4k with quality turned off and recommended settings to make the image smaller later on in order to eliminate noise. It was a guide from a guy called mrknobb. No matter what I tried the end result in making the image smaller compared to the normal procedure rendering in DAZ was way worse. And the biggest issue was that it took way much more time. So that 2k above with max samples took me around 6 minutes while reducing everything and maxing the res to 4k etc. took me more than an hour. I left it on 95% so it could automatically close. And the quality from my 6 minutes render was much better on top of it. I did go for 1:1 in recommended settings which is why I got so confused.

Ps: This is the first render i meant




Regarding Animaiton

So I also played around with animation and it was surprisingly nice to handle. My biggest concern currently is to edit the image series in order to make them a smooth seamless animation. I tried it with Photoshop but it looked kinda bad or at least not to my likening. I'd highly appreciate tips regarding that One way I found was to double the amount of copies for each frame so make it look smoother so it takes like 2 frames to move on but that's not an optimal solution and it still doesn't look right.

Lastly downloadable content

Do you guys use any mods for lightning, rendering or something like that? I'm not using any of those since there is a ton and I'm not sure which is good.


Cheers~

 

[Rich]

I'm not exactly following what you're saying, but...

The idea of "render at higher resolution and then shrink to reduce noise" is something many people advocate. When you do the shrinking, however, you have to make sure to use the correct settings - there are many different ways to reduce an image's resolution, and some of them don't achieve the effect you're desiring. Also, with the newer versions of iRay, you may do just as well by rendering at your target resolution and then turning on the noise filter at an appropriate point. (I don't do the "render high and then shrink," so I can't advise you better on that, but MrKnobb can probably explain in more detail.)

(And your image didn't make it here, so...)

Regarding animations, your choice of frame rate will have a lot to do with how smooth the video ends up. 30 frames per second is relatively standard. I've gone down as far as 24 without too much problem, but lower than that will tend to be visible. There are many tools available that will stitch together an image series into a video. I use FFMpeg, but that's because I'm very comfortable with command line tools. I'm told VirtualDub does a good job, and I know there are others. Remember that when you put the video together, the other key parameter will be your bitrate. Lower bitrates require more compression. They make smaller files, but can introduce artifacts, just the way that compressing a JPEG too much will introduce visible artifacts.

The main add-on I use for rendering is the Batch Rendering plugin from Renderosity. Allows me to spend an evening putting together a bunch of .duf files and then let my computer crunch on them while I'm sleeping.

As far as lighting goes, there are a number of other threads here on F95 dealing with that - I'd suggest you poke around them as opposed to starting up yet another discussion on it.

 

[TommyEsclow]

Hey Rich thanks a lot for your input. The image is back in again I did remove it accidentally.

I'll stick with straight rendering as well rather than going for that trick with resizing.

 

[Rich]

I'll stick with straight rendering as well rather than going for that trick with resizing.

I'm not saying it's wrong, or a bad approach - there are people that swear by it. That's why I suggested involving MrKnobb again, since you can get more specific answers to questions there.

It's just that, for me, it hasn't been necessary, since I do most of my rendering overnight, and my "images per day" limiting factor typically isn't render time, it's the time to prepare the scene itself.

 

[TommyEsclow]

I'm not saying it's wrong, or a bad approach - there are people that swear by it. That's why I suggested involving MrKnobb again, since you can get more specific answers to questions there.

It's just that, for me, it hasn't been necessary, since I do most of my rendering overnight, and my "images per day" limiting factor typically isn't render time, it's the time to prepare the scene itself.

Yes I'm the same as you in this case but I also think with a good amount of VRAM it's simply not necessary to go into that. I guess I just wanted to get a confirmation on that. Oh, and thanks for your insight regarding my animation question. I'll try another option and see how it goes.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

Youre rendered image looks really high quality. Seems you have a fairly good PC?
I render at 2100x1181 resolution. I then add each render to a PS psd file which is 1920x1080 resolution. These i to so post work on and save as 1920x1080.

Animations I use PS to import each render, eg. 200 frames and then PS converts it to an avi file. IT works great. Not sure why you say it looks bad as i find teh PS method is best way.

 

[TommyEsclow]

Youre rendered image looks really high quality. Seems you have a fairly good PC?
I render at 2100x1181 resolution. I then add each render to a PS psd file which is 1920x1080 resolution. These i to so post work on and save as 1920x1080.

I'm unsure what's considered good but I'm just using 2x 1080 currently and have 32 gb ram. This pc is fairly old, though. I wanted to upgrade it at some point hopefully. And no I'm not saying it's bad since it actually works apparently but since it didn't for me for some reason I got confused. I probably did something wrong along the lines. I did appreciate your guide since it helped me playing and figuring things out with the settings. Thanks for that.

Animations I use PS to import each render, eg. 200 frames and then PS converts it to an avi file. IT works great. Not sure why you say it looks bad as i find teh PS method is best way.

It surely does and it was a stupid mistake on my side. I made a simple timeline mistake and had to redo it. Overall I'm content with the animation function in DAZ. The only thing that kinda bothers me are some limited keyframe features which you could find in other softwares like blender or cinema4d. And I wish you could set up the interface to your likening rather than using the standard one since it looks kinda crunched.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

Your GPU's are seriosly great as is said teh render quality looks really good. Just work on lighting a bit more. Philly and Lewdlab are amonst the best to get idea's from.

Daz animations anything is shit, period. Although some devs make it work its' hard work to get daz to make anything work.

For PS have a look at below tutorial on how to get animations working if you not totally sure.

You must be registered to see the links

 

[TommyEsclow]

Your GPU's are seriosly great as is said teh render quality looks really good. Just work on lighting a bit more. Philly and Lewdlab are amonst the best to get idea's from.

Daz animations anything is shit, period. Although some devs make it work its' hard work to get daz to make anything work.

For PS have a look at below tutorial on how to get animations working if you not totally sure.

You must be registered to see the links

Thanks! I appreciate the tips.