Blender vs Daz3D: What's Best for You?

[caLTD]

@caLTD answering your question, ignoring the sarcasm and how like it sounds like you are a minor who is just trolling me at this point, trying to irk me, how long it takes to make a customized character (quoting every engineering professor I've had) "it depends".

I tried playing with a concept for "style", where I define style as, first you learn how to art, and after you know the rules, you know how to break them, and your style is just a collection of short cuts and technique one uses. and yes I mean short cuts literally, if most freelance artists could get paid a liveable amount per art piece they make, then there would be a lot of happy people. But most artist don't. Most people (myself included) aren't able to properly perceive the value of making art. We see a character drawing on deviant art, and most of us probably wouldn't spend more than $20 per character. Now lets say we pay an artist to make something, $10 per hour. In order to make a character at a competitive cost, they would have to draw a character in 2 hours. If you freehand it, and use some short cuts, sure, that would be alright. But the issue I find is, most of the time game devs ask either to mimic a style, provide reference material, and or want to parody a character from something else. As a result, the artist now has to meet various expectations. I usually take 10 hours to finish a character if I am making a 2D drawing, minimal shading. and the first 3 hours is just planning and experimenting, trying to master someone else's technique or style. no one's gonna pay me $100 bucks for a character, which at the early point in development is mostly just going to be used as a place holder. It's not feasible, so a lot of artist focus on a style, which can collect a variety of short cuts, which allows them to work at a good pace and buyers must be willing to accept their style.

So for a 3D model, it is the same thing, first there will be planning and experimenting. if a client really wants something specific, I'll spend the first few days (even a week) just communicating with them back and forth, making drawings and test pieces to see if it'll work or not, or to see how much wiggle room I may have. Then I may do a prototype. A prototype can be a quick mockup using stuff I already have, ie, I already have my favorite mesh, with genitals, and body morphs, rigged and ready. The client can even use it if they are comfortable with using blender and using the morphs (similar to daz, just I don't have as many.... sets of morphs. ie it is all for making realistic bodies). this can take 2 to 6 hours. if they really need something custom, like a cartoonish style, then everything is made from scratch, ie block out, sculpting, retopo (probably the most skill focused part and why most don't make from scratch) , repeat for anything that needs it, then rigging, shading, etc. and this will easily take me about a week's worth of employment. I've only every had to worry about making custom stuff for when I am making animatronics for some company, most of the time just reusing my personal collection of assets is enough. even I'm not going to reinvent the wheel when money and time is a concern.

Ufff. here we go.

In short, to create Adult Game (renpy image vn or full 3d). We must not become full 3d artist because it's a full time dedicated job and most of us don't have enough time for that.

Long version.

More than 20 years ago I start to build web sites with php. Then probably 10 years later first php frameworks appeared. Then we all revolt against. Pure php much better, faster, cleaner this that, yada yada and yada.

Sure, from my point of view I was much better php programmer and had lots of clever solutions. However those "Framework guys" get job done faster than me. First I ignore them, then mock them and I start to use framework.

Also I'm familliar with 3d business more than 30 years (not professionally and not continiously) and my first program was Amiga's Sculpt 3D. We try to build letters vertex to vertex connection and I can't remember is there any snap option.

What you did not accept is, Daz3d was 3d content generator framework. I remember in a post in daz forums. Poster say for 600 usd you may have enough assets to create unlimited unique characters even for Game engines. (except hairs and clothes, and genitalia).

From my point I can create daz character I a hour lets make it 2 hours, plus it need lots of tweak in blender. Lets make it a day. In my game Probably I need 20 chars. It takes 20 days or one month. Including face expressions. And mechanim compatible skeleton. Which I got a nice collection in Unity3d.

AND, I do this without become full time 3d artist.

In theory you can create same assets using with blender. But even with full knowledge it takes more time than daz3d. Also you forgot the time you spend to master in Blender. So if we follow your path we need more than a year just handling blender and are we had enough time for this ?

For who want to be full time 3d character sculptor, yeah blender can solve lots of problems. However we cannot compete with blender against daz3d in our narrow focused area.

In terms of US Dollars blender was cheap. However in terms of Time we spend, blender (and any other 3d model generator) much more expensive than daz3d.

And I come this conclusion not from daz3d but from blender. When I start to work to generate adult game, I start with blender and manuel bastioni. At that time my computer so weak and I did not bother find and install Daz3d. I start with Unit3d and Blender with Manuel Bastioni.

After 6 month's I hit the wall. Fitting womans genitalia to manuel bastioni char was nightmare. Plus it can broke the blendshapes which handling expression. Then I give up and start to try experiment with Daz3d. Sure it takes time to get understand Daz3d need better machine. Then volia...

So ? If anyone wants to create 3d characters for Adult Games in reasonable time for non 3d professional.

It should use Daz3d.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

k

 

[toolkitxx]

Frankly said - comparing DAZ with Blender is like comparing modding and programming. They are simply not the same but happen on completely different levels. Any programme like Blender (3DS Max is another example) is simply made to create things from scratch. Of course you can also just edit something existing with it but the entire purpose of the programme is really to create from scratch mostly.

Real artists that have gotten used to a creation tool like Blender will easily be able to achieve similar or even better results than any can with applications like DAZ due to its wider set of tools and less restrictive features.

This kind of discussion is like comparing using Unity vs full blown C++. Unity is just a framework with a C# language interface but in fact the entire framework is fuelled by C++. In the end that isnt really the point why people choose one tool over the other - its the ease of access to ready to use modules, assets etc. Once called rapid prototyping in coding tools quickly became 'frameworks' to ease the user into actual creating something in less time than usual. These tools are meant to introduce people to a process that once was restricted to highly professionals only. They are supposed to be limited as high level features would confuse the target audience more than it would help. It is like Microsoft's policy: They never aimed to make the single best application of a given genre but the best application for the general public.

 

[RomanHume]

I have only recently been exposed to the world of Blender. I have long wanted to build my workflow around Maya just because I'm familiar with it and the results of Arnold Renders are absolutely amazing.

However, I figured in the meantime I'd toy around with Blender for the next year or so because it's free. I'm about half way through a 17 hour course on Blender and I'm finding it uncomplicated and pretty flexible. What I really want to know is how well it does photorealistic characters.

Photorealism in Daz is a mixed bag. Some assets simply have better surfaces than others. And a lot of times the complexity of the scene and lighting greatly impacts the final degree of realism.

I'm just wondering if anyone can comment on Blender's ability to create photorealistic skin. I've run searches and even looked at the Cycles Engine web page but 90% of what comes up are very cartoonish character models. That's all well and good, but not what I'm looking for with my project.

Can anyone direct me to some samples or other work that uses Blender to do photo real people? (I've seen LOTS of samples of Blender's photo real scenery and environments and they are quite stunning.)

I'm not at all afraid of doing extra work to upgrade my characters. I just want an idea of where the bar is set.

Cheers mates, appreciate any info provided.

 

[Egglock]

I would like to preface that my knowledge is somewhat limited in this scope of work, but I'll share what I learn over the years of using Blender.

If you're looking to do photo realistic characters, this comes down to how well you understand texture's and the shader node. Not only understanding those, you have to understand how light, reflections, and sub scattering works. The real world has so much dynamic going on, that it's not a simple plug n play in the virtual world.

Spoiler: Links

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As far as documentations/tutorials goes this is going to be hard, because it involves so much that no one tutorial will cover all the aspects of creating a photo realistic character. Like I mention above if you want a realistic look to your models, you need to know or at the most have a grasp on the following terminology,

1. Texturing (nothing lower than 4k)
Either creating them or find these textures (biggest reason why you don't see realistic characters is because I doubt there are many artist out there than can imitate the texture of real life skin) that's why there's so many cartoony looking characters because it's much easier to paint those.

2. Blender's shader node. (Knowing how to hook these nodes up to get the final results, believe me, when you open those nodes up you'll be overwhelm by the options you can choose from)

3. How to create and or adjust, Lighting, Reflections, sub scattering, AO (Ambient Occlusion), PBR workflow, Normal maps

4. Compositing

So in all, yes it's very possible and doable in Blender, since Blender comes with a suite of powerful tools tailored for not just 3D artist but 2D as well with 2.8 release, with the exception of a one button does all. Even a programmer can write a script to generate a base model, apply procedural textures and colors in the process.

 

[Deleted member 207364]

I'm just wondering if anyone can comment on Blender's ability to create photorealistic skin.

Can anyone direct me to some samples or other work that uses Blender to do photo real people? (I've seen LOTS of samples of Blender's photo real scenery and environments and they are quite stunning.)

Looked around a bit and found bunch of examples that you might find interesting

Angelababy -

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Jen -

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Racer Girly Concept -

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My Blender Projects WIP -

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Skin shader test render? -

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Daniel Craig -

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Procedual Skin Texturing -

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Human Progress - By ChrisJones:

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I love Chris Jones's work. I think

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and

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were made/rendered in blender too. You should totally check out this

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he made. It's awesome.

 

[RomanHume]

Looked around a bit and found bunch of examples that you might find interesting

Angelababy -

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Jen -

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Racer Girly Concept -

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My Blender Projects WIP -

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Skin shader test render? -

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Daniel Craig -

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Procedual Skin Texturing -

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Human Progress - By ChrisJones:

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I love Chris Jones's work. I think

You must be registered to see the links

and

You must be registered to see the links

were made/rendered in blender too. You should totally check out this

You must be registered to see the links

he made. It's awesome.

Thank you for taking the time to share those links. Some of those are very impressive indeed.

I have no doubt that the key to photorealism is going to be in properly setting up the nodes. I was just starved for examples of what Blender was capable of when it came to photorealism. Definitely a lot of potential there.

I've completed about 10 hours of Blender training as of today. The course I'm reviewing was written prior to 2.8, so there are definitely some changes to the interface, but so far a quick google search has been sufficient to show me where things have been relocated or remapped in 2.8.

While I will always have a special hard-on for Maya, I am very impressed with the versatility that Blender offers for free. It really does seem to be a pretty thorough package. I look forward to exporting one or two Daz characters and playing around to see how far I can push the definitions.

I am quickly thinking Blender might be an excellent solution till the day comes when I can actually afford to use Maya full time.

Thanks again for sharing those samples! It's definitely what I needed to see to convince me to keep going forward with Blender.

Cheers mate!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

If it helps, I recently did some test renders with my new skin shader v2 prototype (a node tree for blender), and I think it shows promise. Once it is complete I'll publicly share it as I did my old skin shader.

A preview of my old skin shader (and old render set up)

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The most recent test earlier this morning, same scene (new skin shader and my modern rendering settings),

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Shader when viewed from a distance,

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and when viewed moderately close (there is a glare effect on top due to the test was for something else)

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In the future with a bit more work, I'll probably have another image ready that is really zoomed in so you can see the pores and the texture detail that is procedurally generated.

The one thing I would like to do in the future but not too sure how to start would be micro wrinkles, used for when the skin is stretched or compressed, it is amazing with realistic renders in lots of test, but you only really get those when you do special image capturing of a real face, and i have no idea how I'll add those details in after the fact, since that is a lot of sculpting with no good references on the nature of micro wrinkles, most papers and reports gloss over the details of the micro wrinkles but I think they will be important when I want to move to animating my characters.

 

[Bladebur]

This is a pretty cool topic. For me, the idea solution is using DAZ for the assets and Blender for finishing and rendering.

DAZ is still a Poser clone. It's designed in a way that easy things (posing existing figures) are extremely easy, but hard things are very hard to do, sometimes even impossible. Let's say you want to build a character from pieces you've purchased at DAZ, customize its appearance dialinga few morphs, use a pose from a library you've bought, and get a good render of the result. This is damn easy and you get a result in seconds.

Now let's say you want to further customize this model. Perhaps edit some clothes to change a few pouches, change the pose so the model grabs something at the scenery, build or change a few scenery props, or tweak the meshes to fix some poke-through or weird muscle deformation at an angle. DAZ requires external software to do some of those things. Others can be done inside DAZ, but the tools available are poor and slow. Even making a full pose for your character is somewhat cumbersome in DAZ.

Also, DAZ is slow. The viewport is really slow and some operations (most of the advanced tools, like vertex painting) are excruciating. Things like posing or animation are way faster to do in Blender, and you have a lot of tools, tutorials and workflows to make your work even faster as everybody uses Blender as an advanced 3D suite.

But Blender is no substitute for DAZ. You need to be a pro (and a very good one) if you want to model and texture a human and get realistic results. And DAZ's models are the state of the art. DAZ clothes are a hit and miss, though.

For me, the ideal solution is using DAZ to get your base assets (base model, hair, some of the clothes) and then build extra elements (scenery, some clothes) in Blender. Sometimes I've done the final render in DAZ using IRay, but I'm not a big fan. It's slow and, despite the render engine being very powerful, the DAZ interface is not ideal to navigate and tweak a complex scene.

Currently, I think the best solution is using Diffeomorphic's scripts (

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) to move your model to Blender including materials and do the render there. You lose some quality in the materials since the originals are made for Iray, which is noticeable in things like skins. But render times are better and you have a ton of options to tweak everything. This is especially interesting in 2.8, where you can use Eevee, the realtime render. I did that for a game recently and render times were essentially zero. I rendered about 30 variations of the game's main screen, at 4K, and it took me about one minute.

 

[Eroseason]

best way is to mix both for me.
model.pose,animation from daz3d.
for rendering blender eevee is best option.

to export scene/animation/pose to blender use this script

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Spoiler: here is few example of animation i render in eevee

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Spoiler: more example

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gpu : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M
each frame took 45 to 55 second at 1920 * 1080 resolution.

one more advantage is eevee real time engine you see change in light real time.

Spoiler: Real time

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[Bladebur]

I think I used mcjTeleBlender a long time ago and it had a lot of problems with materials, missing textures, etc. I didn't know it was still actively developed. How does it work nowadays? Does it create Eevee/Cycles PBR materials?

One think I like about diffeomorphic is the number of extra tools it integrates, wich allow you to do things like import DAZ morphs, expressions and poses, rig the model with IK widgets, etc. It even allows you to use adjustment morphs so you can have exactly the same tweaked deformations you have in DAZ.

 

[Eroseason]

I think I used mcjTeleBlender a long time ago and it had a lot of problems with materials, missing textures, etc. I didn't know it was still actively developed. How does it work nowadays? Does it create Eevee/Cycles PBR materials?

One think I like about diffeomorphic is the number of extra tools it integrates, wich allow you to do things like import DAZ morphs, expressions and poses, rig the model with IK widgets, etc. It even allows you to use adjustment morphs so you can have exactly the same tweaked deformations you have in DAZ.

You must be registered to see the links

beta version support eevee

 

[Saki_Sliz]

This is a pretty cool topic. For me, the idea solution is using DAZ for the assets and Blender for finishing and rendering.

DAZ is still a Poser clone. It's designed in a way that easy things (posing existing figures) are extremely easy, but hard things are very hard to do, sometimes even impossible. Let's say you want to build a character from pieces you've purchased at DAZ, customize its appearance dialinga few morphs, use a pose from a library you've bought, and get a good render of the result. This is damn easy and you get a result in seconds.

Now let's say you want to further customize this model. Perhaps edit some clothes to change a few pouches, change the pose so the model grabs something at the scenery, build or change a few scenery props, or tweak the meshes to fix some poke-through or weird muscle deformation at an angle. DAZ requires external software to do some of those things. Others can be done inside DAZ, but the tools available are poor and slow. Even making a full pose for your character is somewhat cumbersome in DAZ.

Also, DAZ is slow. The viewport is really slow and some operations (most of the advanced tools, like vertex painting) are excruciating. Things like posing or animation are way faster to do in Blender, and you have a lot of tools, tutorials and workflows to make your work even faster as everybody uses Blender as an advanced 3D suite.

But Blender is no substitute for DAZ. You need to be a pro (and a very good one) if you want to model and texture a human and get realistic results. And DAZ's models are the state of the art. DAZ clothes are a hit and miss, though.

For me, the ideal solution is using DAZ to get your base assets (base model, hair, some of the clothes) and then build extra elements (scenery, some clothes) in Blender. Sometimes I've done the final render in DAZ using IRay, but I'm not a big fan. It's slow and, despite the render engine being very powerful, the DAZ interface is not ideal to navigate and tweak a complex scene.

Currently, I think the best solution is using Diffeomorphic's scripts (

You must be registered to see the links

) to move your model to Blender including materials and do the render there. You lose some quality in the materials since the originals are made for Iray, which is noticeable in things like skins. But render times are better and you have a ton of options to tweak everything. This is especially interesting in 2.8, where you can use Eevee, the realtime render. I did that for a game recently and render times were essentially zero. I rendered about 30 variations of the game's main screen, at 4K, and it took me about one minute.

awesome!
I didn't know about this plug in, I'll check it out

 

[Saki_Sliz]

veu

best way is to mix both for me.
model.pose,animation from daz3d.
for rendering blender eevee is best option.

to export scene/animation/pose to blender use this script

You must be registered to see the links

Spoiler: here is few example of animation i render in eevee

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Spoiler: more example

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

gpu : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M
each frame took 45 to 55 second at 1920 * 1080 resolution.

one more advantage is eevee real time engine you see change in light real time.

Spoiler: Real time

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

very cool, I think i have seen some of your work on reddit

 

[Yustu]

This is something that is very useful and probably better then teleblender:

Daz native file importer for Blender - diffeomorphic:

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EDIT: posted this without reading thread, I see it's already shared.

 

[RomanHume]

I would like to preface that my knowledge is somewhat limited in this scope of work, but I'll share what I learn over the years of using Blender.

If you're looking to do photo realistic characters, this comes down to how well you understand texture's and the shader node. Not only understanding those, you have to understand how light, reflections, and sub scattering works. The real world has so much dynamic going on, that it's not a simple plug n play in the virtual world.

Spoiler: Links

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

As far as documentations/tutorials goes this is going to be hard, because it involves so much that no one tutorial will cover all the aspects of creating a photo realistic character. Like I mention above if you want a realistic look to your models, you need to know or at the most have a grasp on the following terminology,

1. Texturing (nothing lower than 4k)
Either creating them or find these textures (biggest reason why you don't see realistic characters is because I doubt there are many artist out there than can imitate the texture of real life skin) that's why there's so many cartoony looking characters because it's much easier to paint those.

2. Blender's shader node. (Knowing how to hook these nodes up to get the final results, believe me, when you open those nodes up you'll be overwhelm by the options you can choose from)

3. How to create and or adjust, Lighting, Reflections, sub scattering, AO (Ambient Occlusion), PBR workflow, Normal maps

4. Compositing

So in all, yes it's very possible and doable in Blender, since Blender comes with a suite of powerful tools tailored for not just 3D artist but 2D as well with 2.8 release, with the exception of a one button does all. Even a programmer can write a script to generate a base model, apply procedural textures and colors in the process.

Oh man, I'm so sorry. Somehow I missed this post and skipped to the next one.

Just wanted to thank you as well for taking the time to respond and offering up some references and links!

 

[RomanHume]

So I took my first go at it today. I spent the last 24 hours studying Blender's interface and doing some research on different node configurations people have used to get photoreal skin. For being self taught in a 48 hour period, I don't think the results are that bad. Definitely a lot of room for improvement but it's a good starting point. I look forward to exploring this software some more.

Thanks again to everyone who replied and offered up some info.

(1-min test render)

Spoiler

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[Saki_Sliz]

very cool!

 

[Egglock]

Oh man, I'm so sorry. Somehow I missed this post and skipped to the next one.

Don't sweat it.

Looking good on those renders. Best of luck to your journey.

 

[NSUDEV]

You guys who use Blender, I've been hearing a lot of hype over 2.8 and Eevee, would you say this will be a game changer for the ero space or will people still mostly pre render their scenes?

For people who follow this kind of content very closely and can identify the tech, what's the most common software used to animate and render, is there a particular "winner" if we're talking numbers?