I want to share with you guys my first render with DAZ and IRAY. I am not sure what I am doing, so I used the default settings. For the lighting I used three planes with the Emission shader. Some post work in Photoshop. I really need a better video card, working in IRAY viewport mode was painful. This render took about 2 hours, so I did not want to keep tweaking and re-trying. - lol. I will get better
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Render settings aren't nearly as complicated as they look, you really only need to work with a couple for the majority of your renders unless you want to try all the extra stuff daz has to offer. These are the main settings I change aside from resolution and aspect ratio. I set
progressive rendering to 98-99% to make sure the picture is rendered at a high enough sample size to denoise without losing a lot of detail. I set
pixel filter radius to 1.00 to keep the pixels sharp. The higher the radius the blurry your render will be but setting it lower also adds extra noise that needs to be rendered out so you need to find a balance that works well for you. Lastly in the advanced tab
I use only gpu with optix prime acceleration because I need to keep my cpu free for other things I'm working on while I wait for my renders. As for scene lighting when making portraits or concept renders
I will use paper tiger's quick lights. I only use the first hdri in the set and the basic front key light to make sure all details are visible when I'm creating characters. Lastly if you want to denoise renders
I would suggest using the nvidia/intel standalone denoiser https://f95zone.to/threads/nvidia-ai-denoiser-2-4.35677/ because it's all ai based and conserves details very well compared to daz's denoise feature that just makes images a blurry mess.
If you want to check out other settings like the tone mapping tab then I would suggest setting up a dedicated .duf file for messing around with settings and reading all the documents online about the features because you can do some pretty neat stuff if you know how to balance the tone mapping settings.