Daz Blender Daz or Blender for Animation and/or Rendering?

[ReigningSun]

My new PC has finally arrived (Nvidia RTX 3090, wooh!), and I'm ready to start making some kinky content! I'm not sure if I want to use Daz or Blender, though.

I want to use Daz assets, as there's just sooo many of them and they're all really simple to use. And for making still images, Daz Studio works fine enough. I know how to set up the scene, lighting, etc. But animations are a bit more tedious in Daz. Although I don't have much experience with animations in any software.

I want to make both visual novels and animations. I'm worried if I use Daz for the still image renders and Blender for animations, there will be a noticeable difference in materials, shaders, lighting, etc. So should I use Daz for both or Blender for both?

With the 3090 gpu, 4k images are rendering in like 20 seconds flat in Daz. Haven't tried Blender yet because I've never actually used it for rendering before and don't know how. Is Blender even faster? And should I be using the Cycles or the Eevee render engine?

What would you recommend using - Daz or Blender? For both still images and animations, or separate uses?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Lucky you. Secured money since december, can't find one at a decent price .

Frankly at those speed it's kinda useless to switch over Cycles, outside you want better animation/physics tools. With skin in mind, Cycles ain't got much to put on the table over Iray (or let's say Uber shader) in term of rendering. More control but more than often more worthless noise, especially with a 3090.

Eevee is another category, more used as game engine like/real time rendering. Not a real path tracer but result can be mind blowing. Not sure why people with low spec system don't use it more... But with a 3090 tho I'm not sure lol

Imo install both (and more!)

 

[hardwire666]

Personally I'd take cycles over Iray any day. Iray drives me bonkers compared to the performance I can get else where. Also I'm not working with a 3090 either lol. However even if I was I'd still prefer Cycles since it will allow you to use both GPU and CPU simultaneously for rendering.

I absolutely agree with install them both and more!

 

[ReigningSun]

Personally I'd take cycles over Iray any day. Iray drives me bonkers compared to the performance I can get else where. Also I'm not working with a 3090 either lol. However even if I was I'd still prefer Cycles since it will allow you to use both GPU and CPU simultaneously for rendering.

I was playing around with Blender/Cycles earlier today, following the "donut tutorial". The rendering actually seemed a bit slower than Iray, surprisingly. Took about 1min30sec to render the 4k donut image, but all of my 4k Daz images were 20-30 seconds.

How do you use both GPU and CPU simultaneously with Blender?

 

[hardwire666]

This video will help you out a lot.

You must be registered to see the links

The more you use it the better you'll get at recognizing what you need to do.

*Edit* Also CPU core count is huge with Cycles. There are some hardware situations where Iray would be faster. For example a 6 Core processor 16GB of RAM and an RTX3090. I'm willing to bet Iray on the 3090 alone would be just as fast and if not probably faster than Cycles on that kind of setup. At least for now. Blender 3.0 has a new version of cycles that's supposed to be something like three times faster, which is relative anyway. But first impressions right now tend to align with that statement. But, semantics.

 

[ReigningSun]

Did some more testing after watching that video and brought the render time for the 4k donut image in Cycles down to 47 seconds. Using just the 3090 alone on OptiX instead of CUDA, with 512 tile size.

On a side note, I think Cycles looks better than Iray. Of course, I haven't rendered Daz model with it yet. But just that donut, with one simple light, looks absolutely amazing. Whereas with Daz, you really need great lighting for a great image.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Personally I'd take cycles over Iray any day. Iray drives me bonkers compared to the performance I can get else where. Also I'm not working with a 3090 either lol. However even if I was I'd still prefer Cycles since it will allow you to use both GPU and CPU simultaneously for rendering.

If you create two simple similar scene and put Cycles (and default setup are quite ridiculous tbh) under the same Uber/Iray pressure (reproduce shader layers, lightening conditions, path length/max bounce and so on), rendering time is pretty similar. There is no much magic. Discussion about rendering time (and cranking it) are quite overblown, especially today on such tiny range imo.

As GPU+CPU rendering is great, but it's also great at locking yourself waiting your render(s) finishing without doing anything else (I'm not humanly able to just do that -_-!). Main argument is breaking VRAM limitation, but the gap between CPU and GPU is now so damn huge that rendering in two layers should be a faster option imo.

People may think I hate on Blender, but I don't see a rational (outside learning or being a masochist or a snob) to main on it, if the goal is to mostly use Daz assets, stage a scene and do a pretty image with it. As it's a terribly sluggish workflow to begin with *scratch head* I don't get it.

 

[hardwire666]

(and default setup are quite ridiculous tbh)

Ridiculous is being very nice lol.

I also tend to forget the reason I prefer cycles is because it gives you more options. Iray has some, but nowhere near enough in my opinion, or at least not the ones I want. As well my current rig is more suited for CPU rendering with GPU as a bonus. So i do have these built in biases.

Both are capable of producing a great image. It really does all come down to preference and what your machine can do.

 

[ReigningSun]

People may think I hate on Blender, but I don't see a rational (outside learning or being a masochist or a snob) to main on it, if the goal is to mostly use Daz assets, stage a scene and do a pretty image with it. As it's a terribly sluggish workflow to begin with *scratch head* I don't get it.

Well I want to do 3 things: still images for VNs, short looping animations for VNs, and longer animation videos. Daz can do the first two just fine, but the animation controls are very lacking for longer, more complex animations so I'd be using Blender for that. It's a little weird to re-import back in Daz, so I'd probably be rendering in Blender for the animations. I just haven't decided yet if I want to use Blender for everything or if I'd still be using Daz for the still images. I like Daz, but I also think I might just want one workflow instead of two different ones.

 

[hardwire666]

Well I want to do 3 things: still images for VNs, short looping animations for VNs, and longer animation videos. Daz can do the first two just fine, but the animation controls are very lacking for longer, more complex animations so I'd be using Blender for that. It's a little weird to re-import back in Daz, so I'd probably be rendering in Blender for the animations. I just haven't decided yet if I want to use Blender for everything or if I'd still be using Daz for the still images. I like Daz, but I also think I might just want one workflow instead of two different ones.

My experience with going between Daz and Blender has a been a year long struggle to find a workable pipeline. The diffeomorphic plugin works pretty damn well, but for me still has issues. Generally because of genitalia and so on. Basically I've found it to be such a pain in the ass to try and do that even though I'm not an IRay fan I just find it more efficient to stick with Daz when using Daz assets. I'm not saying don't it. By all means do!!! Have fun and learn! Just saying it's not as straight forward as one would hope some times. Which is usually the case when jumping between 3D packages.

 

[Synx]

Eevee is another category, more used as game engine like/real time rendering. Not a real path tracer but result can be mind blowing. Not sure why people with low spec system don't use it more... But with a 3090 tho I'm not sure lol

Imo install both (and more!)

Eevee requires a lot of tweaking of render settings and doesn't do well just out of the box. Main reason why it's not used much on here, it requires a fair amount of effort. It can create some amazing stuff for sure especially for hardface survices.

And it has some cool options. Like I watched a tutorial a while ago where they split RGB into 3 input nodes and then used three sun lightes with red, green, blue color respectively to color the model. Makes a good and easy way to create stylised/cartoon shading.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Eevee requires a lot of tweaking of render settings and doesn't do well just out of the box. Main reason why it's not used much on here, it requires a fair amount of effort. It can create some amazing stuff for sure especially for hardface survices.

Yeah, definitively 'trickier' than Cycles out of the box... But I believe if you're a bit used to Cycles it should not be that a huge step. Converted few (good) Iray skin for Eevee maybe a year ago or so. No principled hair is a tad bit annoying, some concessions have to be made in skin layers (iirc simple gloss, no dual lobe/any coat etc) but overall results were really cool, not that far away from Iray/Cycles.

And it has some cool options. Like I watched a tutorial a while ago where they split RGB into 3 input nodes and then used three sun lightes with red, green, blue color respectively to color the model. Makes a good and easy way to create stylised/cartoon shading.

Sounds definitively like a fun thing to try

 

[WarpedGaming]

@ReigningSun I'm new here but I also have a 'stock' computer (a 2015 iMac) but I basically live off doing video editing, 3D modeling/animation/rigging, etc as a freelancer and selling my own special products. But instead of purchasing a more powerful system I just use Cloud services (iRendering.net for Daz and Blender) and a MUCH cheaper service (Vagon.io for my Blender, Unreal Engine 5, Adobe Suite, and Video Editing)

But I'm just now getting into developing my first AVN but I will be posting a lot of the progress of my novel as it comes along here so you're welcome to follow alone for any advice as my normal workflow is using both Daz and Blender together.

But to be honest it really comes down to a matter of preference and what works best for your workflow.

WarpedGaming