How can I begin with 3D Graphics?

[L7Bear]

Background:
After thinking about doing something like this for years I finally got off my ass and started writing. In a week I had a 20k word novella. I've got enough content in my head for two additions to that story of about the same size, but I'm confident in that part.
I have over 15 years of programming experience in unrelated fields, but have been working almost exclusively in python for the past couple years so adapting the novella to Ren'Py shouldn't be a problem.

Problem:
I have no graphics experience.

Concept:
I have a scene in my mind of a simple 3D scene that I want to start with - nighttime, outdoor lighting & moonlight, backyard of a 1 story house, pool in the backyard, woman swimming in the pool, man standing by the back door watching the woman swim.

Goal:
I would like to be able to start out as a graphics n00b and somehow generate the basic scene I described above within a reasonable time frame (i.e. 1 week or so.)

How can I achieve that goal?
I assume the popular answer will be to mention specific software (DAZ Studio, blender, HoneySelect, etc), but that is only part of a solution. So, the real question is:
How do I use (insert your preferred program) to create a scene like what I described above?

 

[caLTD]

First, making games like making automobiles, you can produce everything in house, however you are not AAA grade studio so you go shopping (internet) buy (or download) parts (in games we call assets) to make game.
Every game needs assets, whatever you see at the screen called assets and you program the interactions between them and player.

Then Daz vs others.

I try to explain programmatically. Daz3D, HoneySelect, 3dVilla was kind of frameworks.

Most of things are ready to run. Chars, clothes, props, textures, materials, lightning like everything you need for a VN is ready. f95 community excels at Daz3d and daz3d assets. You can easly find whatever you need for daz3d.

You just need to learn their interface produce your desired scenes as bitmap files (png,jpg etc). Then make it interactive slide show using renpy or similar frameworks.

Blender and other 3d systems are like programming languages like (php, python, c#). At start you don't have anything you have to learn interface to how to create your characters, create your clothes, furnitures anything you need in the scene you have to create or find. Very similar to creating a framework for yourself. Its requires good experience and time.

Finding 3d assets from internet not so hard. However fitting them in the same scene make them look natural is requires experience like kind of writing multithreading coding class experience. Because of this there is no Blender, Maya, 3dsMax based vn here. All of them based Daz3d or HoneySelect and some other minor 3d Scene framework.

And Daz3d haz one godamn problem. It needs really good rig. Daz3d aims best. Poly count of models are high. Requires lots of CPU RAM and GPU

When you learn daz3d interface and got your assets, making your scene probably not much than one day. On other hand in blender or any kind of 3d system. It takes lot lot more than that not because of the program interface is hard problem is you don't have enough assets the make scene.

So at bottom line. Problem is getting game assets. in Daz3d you got tons and tons of it others has limited set of assets. In blender you have to have find or create all of your game asset and put to together.

Which I'm trying to. I'm after Unity3D game (due to lack of funds for decent rig for Daz3D). It was hard and time consuming and results are not good as daz.

 

[thecardinal]

There's a decent swimming pool asset that shouldn't be that taxing on a computer.

You must be registered to see the links

There are ways to set the time of day and plenty of poses for characters to create that scene.

Playing around with Daz is the best way to learn, and once you really get the hang of it, you can create good images in 20 min to 1 hour.

All you need is the environment (pool and a house) characters, and poses. A good place to start would be to download the bundles in the content sharing section of the forums. The Pro Bundles have 3 characters, 4 outfits, and 2-3 pose and expression sets.

 

[Egglock]

How do I use (insert your preferred program) to create a scene like what I described above?

This depends, the software you mention all serve different purposes. Do you have time to learn? Or do you want to get something quickly out the door?

1. Blender - is a 3D modeling software, it's purpose is to create objects. It's not limited to that, it can also import other files to create your scene and has rendering capabilities. The great thing about this is, you can do all your changes within the software and see it reflected in your scene. The downside is the navigation within the viewport isn't your typical WASD, left click to select type controls, and relies heavily on shortcut keys. Though it doesn't have a dedicated asset library like Daz does, you can still import from other sources. This is by no means a quick and easy way to get things going, you'll have to take the time to learn the software.

2. Daz3D - all-in-one package software. It has a dedicated asset directory, you can "drag and drop" into your scene and start building what you want. I'm unsure if it allows the users to modify the objects within it's viewport (correct me if i'm wrong here Daz users). This is more so if you lack the skills to make your own models.

No comment on Honey Select.

Either way, my best advice is, give the software a spin, and see what feels more comfortable for your needs.

 

[HopesGaming]

I think you should rather take a look at games which use the different software and then decided which one you like and would want in your game. In my game I use daz3d. I actually was using something else at first but did not like how it ended up.

Daz3d - It's not as complicated as you may think. Of course, a learning process is needed. But that is true for anything in life.
Example, you want to make a scene with a female. The best way is to search the Daz shop to find a figure you like and think would be good for your game. Then you can customize it a bit to not make it look like all the others.
Now you need to pose it. Luckily, there exist tons and tons of ready-made poses out there. And you can tweak the female expressions as you wish. Now you need a background. It can either be an hdri, which is dof or nodof 360 background which provides realistic lightning. Now press render. And you have your female with a pose in an outside background.

If you want inside scenes, you need to download some premade scenes with can also be bought from daz3d.
In there you usually should set up your own lightning. Here it'll be good to learn about how real life photographs do it and stuff like the 3 point lighting.

I don't know what specs you have but if you are a coder I assume you have somewhat of a decent spec.
I got a 1070 with ryzen 1600. For outside scenes with mainly hdri it can take 30-60 mins. For inside with not much going on 60-120 mins. With several characters and more complex scenes, it can take a while. (There exist techniques where they make several renders and then add them together in photoshop).

Now imagine if you going to have 200 images and we assume all of those take 1 hour. That is 200 hours of pc work. Which in many cases hog the pc ressource depending on how powerful it is. (Sometimes I can barely write while rendering, but I think that is due to my low ram which is 16gb)

 

[Porcus Dev]

...Which in many cases hog the pc ressource depending on how powerful it is. (Sometimes I can barely write while rendering, but I think that is due to my low ram which is 16gb)

Have you unchecked the CPU option in the advanced rendering paramaters?

With the CPU option activated your PC will be saturated and you will hardly be able to do anything else, but if you only activate the GPU option you can write or edit with photoshop while you render (and you will not lose rendering power).

 

[HopesGaming]

Have you unchecked the CPU option in the advanced rendering paramaters?

With the CPU option activated your PC will be saturated and you will hardly be able to do anything else, but if you only activate the GPU option you can write or edit with photoshop while you render (and you will not lose rendering power).

Yeah, that is off. I think it may be a ram issue, to be honest.

 

[Porcus Dev]

Yeah, that is off. I think it may be a ram issue, to be honest.

It's strange... I have 16GB RAM with 1060 6GB and an old i5 and I can work with other thing while rendering, and before I have worked with 8GB of RAM.

 

[HopesGaming]

It's strange... I have 16GB RAM with 1060 6GB and an old i5 and I can work with other thing while rendering, and before I have worked with 8GB of RAM.

Hmm, interesting. Maybe some underlying problems somewhere. Need to look more into it.
Also, it's mostly when I do heavy renders like dinner scenes with 5 persons which makes it hard to write. Other times it's just small lags.

 

[Porcus Dev]

Hmm, interesting. Maybe some underlying problems somewhere. Need to look more into it.
Also, it's mostly when I do heavy renders like dinner scenes with 5 persons which makes it hard to write. Other times it's just small lags.

Oh, well... perhaps 5 characters with some scenaries exceeds your VRAM and then the render is done with the CPU, which would explain your problem... Have you checked this?

 

[HopesGaming]

Oh, well... perhaps 5 characters with some scenaries exceeds your VRAM and then the render is done with the CPU, which would explain your problem... Have you checked this?

Could be. Need to check it with my next renders. Thanks for the help Anyways I think we have gone off the trail with this thread a bit!
Sorry, L7Bear for the offtopic talk.

 

[Porcus Dev]

Anyways I think we have gone off the trail with this thread a bit!
Sorry, L7Bear for the offtopic talk.

Yes, sorry people for the off-topic

Only one last thing. You can check if your VGA is working on a render with GPU-Z program.

 

[OhWee]

Daz Studio does come with some 'starter assets', and there are a small number of free items in their shop that you can download immediately to help start building your assets library, and start learning and experimenting with the program.

Hexagon is now free too. Blender is certainly the more capable program, but Hexagon is a nice tool to use to create and modify stuff for Daz, and it has a direct 'bridge' to/from Daz Studio.

The nice thing about Daz Studio is that you can find a fair amount of content for free, including environments/sets, as long as you don't mind registering at a couple of sites - they mainly just want an email to send the reg activation to, althoughDaz3D wants a bit more info than that for their reg codes.

The two biggies for Daz freebies are:

You must be registered to see the links

You must be registered to see the links

Another good place to check is:
dazfreebies.miraheze.org/

And of course the Daz3D forum, where there's a Freebies section.

There are a number of other freebie sites as well.

Plus, if you aren't averse to doing the bucaneer thing, there are a few things in the Assets section of this forum... but that's a personal choice depending on how you feel about such things.

Note that you should check the usage rights for any freebies that you may download from various sites (besides Daz3D), if you are concerned about such things/are planning to use them commercially.

 

[L7Bear]

These are all great responses (even the tangent on DAZ3D optimization gave me something to think about)

It is beginning to sound like I should approach a visual novel the other way around - see what assets are available and then write a story around the images I can create.

As for my situation - I currently have no income but lots of free time. So I would rather *spend* hours than dollars.
I have two systems that I built a couple years ago with high-end graphics in mind (videogames, video processing, haar image identification, etc.) so rendering time shouldn't be a problem.

re: RAM discussion
I've never ran a process (at home) that used 16GB RAM unless it had a serious memory leak or similar bug. Almost everything will hit a CPU or GPU bottleneck before using even 8GB RAM. However, there is a bug in some video editing programs that will throw a memory leak in RAM if the system didn't have enough hard drive space for Virtual Memory. A common error is to leave the default settings (Windows = system allocated on the C: drive) rather than allocating a fixed amount (as a general rule "1.5x physical RAM, up to a maximum of 8GB." Beyond 8GB VRAM you are probably just wasting drive storage.) on your fastest drive (usually still the C: drive for Windows users, but some of us prefer to have a separate SSD for specific high-priority applications.) This issue & solution are similar on Linux, just the names are changed. Mac doesn't let the user allocate a fixed amount of VRAM, and always uses the drive the OS was installed on, so the only solution there is to make sure there is always plenty of unused space on the OS drive (note: Mac uses more VRAM during boot than during normal use, so it is possible to fill up a drive so completely that the system won't boot up anymore.)
I have run processes in a professional environment that used hundreds of GB of RAM, but those servers had very different specs from anything found in a personal computer... and even when we had exclusive access to 1TB RAM on a server we usually found that optimal performance was around 2GB RAM per thread. I don't have enough experience with 3D rendering to say for certain, but it seems strange for physical RAM to be the bottleneck.

 

[Porcus Dev]

These are all great responses (even the tangent on DAZ3D optimization gave me something to think about)

It is beginning to sound like I should approach a visual novel the other way around - see what assets are available and then write a story around the images I can create.

As for my situation - I currently have no income but lots of free time. So I would rather *spend* hours than dollars.
I have two systems that I built a couple years ago with high-end graphics in mind (videogames, video processing, haar image identification, etc.) so rendering time shouldn't be a problem.

re: RAM discussion
I've never ran a process (at home) that used 16GB RAM unless it had a serious memory leak or similar bug. Almost everything will hit a CPU or GPU bottleneck before using even 8GB RAM. However, there is a bug in some video editing programs that will throw a memory leak in RAM if the system didn't have enough hard drive space for Virtual Memory. A common error is to leave the default settings (Windows = system allocated on the C: drive) rather than allocating a fixed amount (as a general rule "1.5x physical RAM, up to a maximum of 8GB." Beyond 8GB VRAM you are probably just wasting drive storage.) on your fastest drive (usually still the C: drive for Windows users, but some of us prefer to have a separate SSD for specific high-priority applications.) This issue & solution are similar on Linux, just the names are changed. Mac doesn't let the user allocate a fixed amount of VRAM, and always uses the drive the OS was installed on, so the only solution there is to make sure there is always plenty of unused space on the OS drive (note: Mac uses more VRAM during boot than during normal use, so it is possible to fill up a drive so completely that the system won't boot up anymore.)
I have run processes in a professional environment that used hundreds of GB of RAM, but those servers had very different specs from anything found in a personal computer... and even when we had exclusive access to 1TB RAM on a server we usually found that optimal performance was around 2GB RAM per thread. I don't have enough experience with 3D rendering to say for certain, but it seems strange for physical RAM to be the bottleneck.

If you finally choose DAZ I can explain my experience with RAM, VGA VRAM and renders...

I started using DAZ with 8GB of RAM and it worked well with "normal" renders like 2 or 3 characters and a scenary, but when tried to do renders with more than 3 characters and some specific scenary sometimes Windows notify me that there aren't enought RAM for DAZ, and even if Windows did not complain, this large renders exceeded my VGA VRAM

When I expanded PC to 16GB of RAM I think it would be more than enough, but having more RAM DAZ also used more, but never again received another Windows notification about RAM... So, a problem solved

With this in mind, I recommend you to use at least 16GB and if you can 32GB of RAM.


But most important think is VGA VRAM, if renders exceeds this VRAM then DAZ use CPU for this render, and this is not good, time for this render will be much more.
(There are solutions for this like render scene in parts or use texture optimizers)

With all this I recommend:
Processor: A decent one, but I think it's not the most important thing (I use old i5-3350P)
RAM: 16GB minimum
VGA: Nvidia, of couse, and with the maximum VRAM that you can afort. 1080Ti is very good option with 11GB of VRAM or at least 1070Ti with 8GB (I use 1060 with 6GB, but I'm waiting to change it).
(About VGA I think new models are coming out soon so stay tunned. It can also be a good time to buy old models at a good price).

I finally, sorry for the mistakes I may have made in English

 

[OhWee]

Just concurring with what mgomez0077 said. 16 GB of System memory would be the minimum I'd recommend (I started with that amount when I jumped onto the Daz bandwagon), 32 GB is good, anything over 32GB is generally overkill.

Get a large HDD, or better yet a large SSD along with a large HDD. Daz tends to suck up HDD space as you accumulate products. 1 TB wasn't enough for me once I invested seriously into Daz assets, although a 512 GB drive was enough to get me started at least. I have 4 TB of storage now (!), that should last me a while...

And yeah, try to find an Nvidia card with at least 8 GB of VRAM if you are planning to use Iray (most vendors on Daz are supporting Iray at this point). 11 GB or more is better. Keep in mind that new Nvidia cards may be dropping over the next 90 days, so there might be some sweet deals on the 10xx series cards once the newer cards hit the market.

And yeah, I did the 'CPU Only' Iray render thing for a bit actually. It can be done, but renders are painfully slow... there's 3Delight as well, which is generally CPU only with Daz. 3Delight has a different rendering methodology and 'look'.

 

[SrRK]

Just wanted to say thanks for this thread (and of course the thoughtful responses). It really helped me a lot, and I'm going to be trying to take up animating in addition to also learning programming. Hopefully I'll be able to solo-create games. Wish me luck, lol.