[DAZ 3D] Gotta Start Somewhere

[Deleted member 1957140]

First time trying out lighting in Daz Studio. 2 primitives and one spotlight only. Nothing else. Used Photoshop to reduce some noise. Less than 3 days of experience. Oh and no GPU, thus no iray viewport for real time support. (System hangs. Wipes sweat!!) If anyone ever started out with no GPU, your input about creating VN or just rendering will be very much appreciated.

Spoiler

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

 

[Volta]

All things considered that is miles better than my initial tryouts with no Nvidia GPU, i was using a seriously old AMD GPU on 3Delight, back when that was actually applicable in the mid G3 era.

To be critical for a moment i have to say that the lighting could use work, i don't know how familiar you are with the three point light system used in studio photography (Main/Key + Fill +Back/Rim/Highlight) but useing that terminology for a moment the angle your main light is at is too extreme, using the direction the character is facing as the number twelve on a clock your key light is too close to three o'clock or 90 degrees to the line between camera and subject, this means your not getting enough light on her face, plenty on her body and that looks good but this is only because her body is turned slightly more to the light than her face is. To remedy this orbit the light around her, towards the line between the camera and her, going towards 1:30 to 2:00 using the clock analogy or 45-60% rather than closer to 90%, this will light her face more and significantly liven her up. Alternatively a good fill light from the other side, say 10-11 o'clock at maybe 50-75% the intensity of the key light (at the same distance away from her as the key light or relative intensity is moot) and you'll see a lot less shadowing on her face which IMO is the problem with this image.

Basically everything from the neck done is actually pretty amazing for a first time render on CPU alone, i just thought that a little constructive criticism would probably be useful. I think perhaps i could give better criticism against the raw image without PS involvement but that is because i'm pretty subpar with PS.

If your experience is really low like mine was there are some incredible resources out there, especially on this forum and on youtube, i'd recommend Sickleyield, Parmy Baddhan and Thundorn games youtube channels, all are pretty damn good and Parmy in particular is excellent for beginners through to intermediates, whereas SY is far more of a specific problem solver, she is however extremely good at making Daz contort itself into doing things it would not normally do, she makes a lot of great utilities too, go look in the asset releases section on here and it won't be long till you see an SY utility.

Also pop by my mate Recreations asset and tutorial thread, some good reading and free stuff over there, very much his little info dump https://f95zone.to/threads/my-daz-assets-tutorials-and-other-stuff.28038/#post-1751135

Also keep an eye out for a certain no__name who is IMO one of the most technically well versed DAZ users on here, there are others of course and the "show us your Daz" thread is actually a great place to discuss WIP images with both well versed and relatively new DAZ users so that could be worth a look too.

Ultimately using Iray without an Nvidia GPU is very long winded and not recommended for a dev, it's okay to learn on when just practising in Daz but you aren't realistically going to be able to make enough renders for a decent VN without at least a basic Nvidia GPU if your using iray. Iray isn't the only option though, i would encourage you to look at the octane render engine since it isn't locked to Nvidia and has a plugin for Daz, last i heard it was going to become free, once upon a time a certain thecardinal was very in the know about Octane, could be worth looking at, at least until you pull the cash together for a GPU.

A final note, i'm still using an Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, it's a nice workhorse of a card though far from new, it is very reasonable to use in Daz so long as i don't really overload it, it's not super fast but it handles pinup renders in almost all cases without taking too long, it's not a card i'd consider being a full time dev on though even when backed up by a lot of ram like mine is. What i'm saying is that even a mid range GPU from an earlier generation is still good enough to do a lot in Daz, so long as it's Nvidia you are far better off than not using a GPU at all.

I hope at least some of that text brick was helpful.

 

[Deleted member 1957140]

To be critical for a moment i have to say that the lighting could use work, i don't know how familiar you are with the three point light system used in studio photography (Main/Key + Fill +Back/Rim/Highlight) but useing that terminology for a moment the angle your main light is at is too extreme, using the direction the character is facing as the number twelve on a clock your key light is too close to three o'clock or 90 degrees to the line between camera and subject, this means your not getting enough light on her face, plenty on her body and that looks good but this is only because her body is turned slightly more to the light than her face is. To remedy this orbit the light around her, towards the line between the camera and her, going towards 1:30 to 2:00 using the clock analogy or 45-60% rather than closer to 90%, this will light her face more and significantly liven her up. Alternatively a good fill light from the other side, say 10-11 o'clock at maybe 50-75% the intensity of the key light (at the same distance away from her as the key light or relative intensity is moot) and you'll see a lot less shadowing on her face which IMO is the problem with this image.

Thank you so much for providing so many good tips and links. I checked the 3 point lighting system. I initially got the idea of using 3 sources from a YT video but the person never explained anything about why he was putting those lights or where; just did it randomly. So I tried doing something like that. As I am barely scratching the surface, it was a lot to take in. There are other default light sources present too that I had to consider. Biggest issue is not being able to see those lights in real time as every person on YT does it in an iray viewport. So for me it's a lot of trial and error. But this is just for learning.

Out of the 3 names you mentioned on YT, I had already seen quite a few of the videos of the last 2 Youtubers. I'll keep watching them, but I found another Youtuber named Jay Versluis on "The WP Guru" channel that had even easier to understand starting guide, at least for me. I'm reading and watching whatever I can find for the past week and will continue to do so.

Getting a GTX/RTX card is not possible for me right now. As I've been researching, what I found is that almost all people point out that it's impossible to make a VN and necessary renders without a GPU, and I know they are correct. But sometimes you have to make do with what you have and by doing so you can learn a lot more than if you had all resources in your hand from the start. I have an AMD card by the way which is useless in rendering. I had no knowledge of that when I bought it just over a year ago.

I tried to install the octane render plugin but at 99.9% it failed saying something like nvcuda.dll missing. My quick interpretation was that the dll comes from an nVidia driver installed in the system which I don't have; so it won't work.
I'm trying to find a way to make things work for me; messing with render settings like 3Delight or interactive iray render mode, the resolution etc. Also another limitation of cpu rendering is that no matter how much I increase the various render settings or time, the renders will always be way more noisy than with a GPU; someone in YT pointed it out that even if I turn on de-noiser settings, it won't work without a GPU.

Anyway, here is another run of somewhat presentable render with proper 3 point lighting system; although the lower portion is messed up. I need to change the light source from a spotlight to a rectangular primitive.

Spoiler

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

 

[Volta]

YT is always a good starting point for learning Daz, plenty of option too so if Jay Versluis is your guy then go for it, the only one i'd tell anyone to hold back on is dreamlight, very pompous and spends twice the time to explain half the content while extolling their products a bit too much, lots of use of "immersive" and the like, far too pompous for me, they know their stuff of course and make good products.

Octane isn't something i've used personally but i had it on good authority that it wasn't Nvidia locked and that was a big selling point of it, i may be wrong but i think that it worked on AMD, i'd have to check.

As for buying a GTX/RTX card i totally understand, they aren't cheap and often come to more than 25% of the budget for a build for a machine, however don't think they have to be that expensive, i can find a refurbished Nvidia quadro GPU for £80 with exactly 50% the number of cuda cores 5GB of Vram of my current 1060, that is in the UK market so you'll probably do better in the US or Canada or w/e. Quadro cards are intended for workstations, CAD and that sort of thing so they would work for Daz, especially on a very tight budget in terms of bang for buck, they'd be pretty bad for other stuff though.

The new render with the altered lights is good, even with the grainyness you clearly see her features better, frankly it looks like the sort of render you'd do when designing a new character, as a proof on concept to see that you've got their proportions right and that clothes and hair aren't clipping ect. It's a pretty solid improvement IMO.

I know your probably snowed under with things to watch and stuff to learn but word to the wise, the three things i would consider most important to get good at are lighting, which is the single biggest difference between meh and epic renders, posing, which takes a surprisingly long time to do and even longer to get good at and finally character creation, this is optional i suppose but i dial in all of my chars from scratch in most cases, using the wonderful measure metrics to give me an idea of real world sizes, which makes characters look the way i want them to look in comparison to each other and with the scenery.

Good luck and have fun, it can be a slog or really rewarding, often both.

 

[Deleted member 1957140]

YT is always a good starting point for learning Daz, plenty of option too so if Jay Versluis is your guy then go for it, the only one i'd tell anyone to hold back on is dreamlight, very pompous and spends twice the time to explain half the content while extolling their products a bit too much, lots of use of "immersive" and the like, far too pompous for me, they know their stuff of course and make good products.

Octane isn't something i've used personally but i had it on good authority that it wasn't Nvidia locked and that was a big selling point of it, i may be wrong but i think that it worked on AMD, i'd have to check.

As for buying a GTX/RTX card i totally understand, they aren't cheap and often come to more than 25% of the budget for a build for a machine, however don't think they have to be that expensive, i can find a refurbished Nvidia quadro GPU for £80 with exactly 50% the number of cuda cores 5GB of Vram of my current 1060, that is in the UK market so you'll probably do better in the US or Canada or w/e. Quadro cards are intended for workstations, CAD and that sort of thing so they would work for Daz, especially on a very tight budget in terms of bang for buck, they'd be pretty bad for other stuff though.

The new render with the altered lights is good, even with the grainyness you clearly see her features better, frankly it looks like the sort of render you'd do when designing a new character, as a proof on concept to see that you've got their proportions right and that clothes and hair aren't clipping ect. It's a pretty solid improvement IMO.

I know your probably snowed under with things to watch and stuff to learn but word to the wise, the three things i would consider most important to get good at are lighting, which is the single biggest difference between meh and epic renders, posing, which takes a surprisingly long time to do and even longer to get good at and finally character creation, this is optional i suppose but i dial in all of my chars from scratch in most cases, using the wonderful measure metrics to give me an idea of real world sizes, which makes characters look the way i want them to look in comparison to each other and with the scenery.

Good luck and have fun, it can be a slog or really rewarding, often both.

Thank you again. I'm not looking forward to buy older cards. I'll save for a RTX card(2060 super being the lowest). The RT cores make a huge difference in rendering complex lighting compared to older gtx or any other cards.

Okay, this is the new and final render for today, I gotta sleep. Also I couldn't finish it and stopped at only 15% and 720p to boot. The default hdri light that is set in render setting vs my new light set up makes a world of difference in render time. Probably 10 times or more as cpu is too slow for those lighting reflection and refraction calculations. I also tried glossy/wet body but after 30mins it had 0% progress in rendering so I have to settle for more or less matte/defused lighting for now.

I made the new setup from scratch with 3 spotlights. These are snaps of my setup:

The fourth picture has the right depth of field setting that I used in the render.

Also I used a different hair first so that there will be no shadows on the face but it had weird clipping issues on forehead that I couldn't fix with my limited experience. I'm still off with the brightness and positioning but this is a good enough starting point for now. Main light 45degrees right to the camera. Fill light at about 60% lumens at 70 degrees to the left and the backlight has double the lumens of main.

Spoiler

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

 

[Volta]

Thank you again. I'm not looking forward to buy older cards. I'll save for a RTX card(2060 super being the lowest). The RT cores make a huge difference in rendering complex lighting compared to older gtx or any other cards.

Okay, this is the new and final render for today, I gotta sleep. Also I couldn't finish it and stopped at only 15% and 720p to boot. The default hdri light that is set in render setting vs my new light set up makes a world of difference in render time. Probably 10 times or more as cpu is too slow for those lighting reflection and refraction calculations. I also tried glossy/wet body but after 30mins it had 0% progress in rendering so I have to settle for more or less matte/defused lighting for now.

I made the new setup from scratch with 3 spotlights. These are snaps of my setup:
View attachment 749677 View attachment 749678 View attachment 749679 View attachment 749681
The fourth picture has the right depth of field setting that I used in the render.

Also I used a different hair first so that there will be no shadows on the face but it had weird clipping issues on forehead that I couldn't fix with my limited experience. I'm still off with the brightness and positioning but this is a good enough starting point for now. Main light 45degrees right to the camera. Fill light at about 60% lumens at 70 degrees to the left and the backlight has double the lumens of main.

Spoiler

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

Damn, the improvement over just a couple of says is pretty staggering, the way the light hits her hip on the right side is excellent, the key/fill balance is good. I would say though, that a (relatively) very intense backlight isn't common but you do have a little more distance to target on that one so it's not a problem, if you were intending to use the backlight to highlight a specific element on the model, often this is used to give a certain glow to hair, you can look down the spotlight as if it where a camera by selecting it in the top right above the nav cube, this gives you a dot to aim with that you can get quite precise results with by aiming at the outer edge of the hair prop, it's a nice effect and something that is great for portraits. Also DOF can be a little tricky at times but it's good to know your really getting your teeth into that sort of thing, it does make a hell of a difference.

I totally understand the waiting for the RTX card, i've not heard how much of a benefit it has on Iray but the cuda cores alone will be a big help, really night and day for you for sure, that is the sort of hardware a dev would love for a first time project.

 

[thecardinal]

I primarily use Octane, and my current rig is an AMD A4-3420 and I have just a Geforce gtx 1050 card. I do have 16GB of Ram though, which if I remember correctly is sorta what controls your scene sizes. Also for hair clipping issues, if it's the one I am thinking of, change the forehead depth a tiny bit on the character model, and after that you can adjust it on the hair in the parameters tab.

Just work with the Octane plug-in, streamline stuff. Figure out little things to do to make it go faster for you. My current set-up takes about 7-10 seconds to render one character sprite and does it cleanly in less than 20 iterations -

 

[Deleted member 1957140]

Damn, the improvement over just a couple of says is pretty staggering, the way the light hits her hip on the right side is excellent, the key/fill balance is good. I would say though, that a (relatively) very intense backlight isn't common but you do have a little more distance to target on that one so it's not a problem, if you were intending to use the backlight to highlight a specific element on the model, often this is used to give a certain glow to hair, you can look down the spotlight as if it where a camera by selecting it in the top right above the nav cube, this gives you a dot to aim with that you can get quite precise results with by aiming at the outer edge of the hair prop, it's a nice effect and something that is great for portraits. Also DOF can be a little tricky at times but it's good to know your really getting your teeth into that sort of thing, it does make a hell of a difference.

Yup I know those aiming through light or camera controls. In fact my key light is pointed at head; fill and back lights are pointing at lower neck(shoulder area) so that they are at about middle of the frame that I'm rendering to illuminate the whole frame evenly. I could bring the back light closer but I found it simpler to manage my light intensity when all sources are at same distance. I read that at same distance the back light is usually 2-3 times brighter, sometimes even 5. I tried something like that you said to focus on hair or make it glow, but all it did for me is to create a lot small white pixel around the edges of hair. I guess the cpu can't handle that kind of lighting. It renders just fine with evenly distributed light coming from long range but is unable to render focused/intense lighting up close. I'll play around to find a balance.

The DOF really helps to brighten the eyes if I do it right or they look hazy. I had those bland eyes at first and I was looking up on the internet to find a solution. A lot of people talk about translucency and setting it to zero etc. Mine was already at 0. What I found that as I move the camera from where I initially created it; the DOF area moves if the camera initially wasn't pointed exactly at a part of the body. Once I solve it, the eyes liven up. Just a little thing I found by myself.

 

[Deleted member 1957140]

I primarily use Octane, and my current rig is an AMD A4-3420 and I have just a Geforce gtx 1050 card. I do have 16GB of Ram though, which if I remember correctly is sorta what controls your scene sizes. Also for hair clipping issues, if it's the one I am thinking of, change the forehead depth a tiny bit on the character model, and after that you can adjust it on the hair in the parameters tab.

Just work with the Octane plug-in, streamline stuff. Figure out little things to do to make it go faster for you. My current set-up takes about 7-10 seconds to render one character sprite and does it cleanly in less than 20 iterations - View attachment 750170

Wow, that art style looks so cool. It's something like cartoon shaded in Daz but clear. Is it possible without octane plugin in Daz?

I've mentioned it earlier in my post that octane plugin does not work on Daz without an nVidia gpu. It searches for a lot of things that comes with nVidia drivers. I tried to just download few .dll files or so on and it installed but in the end it didn't work saying nvidia driver not found or something like that.

Now more to the commercial side. As far as my limited research goes, I've found that high quality renders get the most pledges on Patreon. Of course there are some special cases but mostly it's all about the renders. I recently was playing a VN that was posted here, I won't name anything; it has excellent renders. I visited his/her Patreon page and found that just after 2 releases he has more than 100 supporters. Even the creator posted that he was amazed. I found very few reviews here as the game is fairly new and all are praising the renders and giving 5 stars. So I went ahead and downloaded it mostly to learn why a new game gets success.

What I found that it uses the most used fetish in adult VN genre(you can guess). After the initial scene or intro, whatever you call it; literally in the second scene MC walks in to her "Landlady's" room and starts internal monologue that he has never seen her this way and wants to do unspeakable things to her. Zero depth in story, zero progression or character building. I've played many games of that genre by now but it was unbearable for me to play further. So I deleted it. I can guess similar things happening with MC's "Roommate".

One day I want to make games like one DEV I would most definitely name: PhillyGames. Specially the story and character building side. Another Dev(I won't name) who has probably the biggest growth in less than a year(earns more than PhillyGames in this small time); also has zero depth in the story and characters but you can "DO" way too many females and no repercussions. I guess people also like mindlessness and just click away to unlimited H-scenes; also the renders are moderately good.

So right now I'm kind of rocking my head around on what to produce with my very limited hardware and not make it a complete failure. I don't have any drawing skills or money to hire someone to do it for me so I'll have to stick with Daz and its 3d models and filter my entire production process in a certain way(like yours or that cartoon shaded style in Daz) to make it presentable. If there are other options than Daz that uses cpu, I'd like to know. I have a 2nd gen i5(4-cores) and 4GB rx560. It's same as gtx 1050 but 100% useless in this case. Can play Witcher 3 high settings at 40+ FPS but can't render .

 

[thecardinal]

Wow, that art style looks so cool. It's something like cartoon shaded in Daz but clear. Is it possible without octane plugin in Daz?

I'm sure it is, there are toon shaders sold on the Daz store. My way needs Octane, so it's a learning curve. But I don't use lights, so I deleted that information from my brain.