Daz How long it takes for you guys to setup a scene?

[immortalkid69]

I feel that even setting up a simple scene in a hall with three characters seems time consuming, like moving them around, adjusting lights, adjusting their poses and adjusting their clothes after importing the said characters. So just wanted to know if everyone goes through the same thing or am I doing things the hard way?

 

[F1_V10]

I'd say it depends on how OCD' istic you are in general, and about the scene and the characters in them.

For example, if you're setting a scene of 2 or more least favorite side characters(with no input in moving the story) leaving a certain place. Since they are side chars, all you need is the player to identify who they are, i.e, a decent shot of their faces is enough. And then make sure that the backdrop they are placed in help the player recognize the place and maybe an exit 'signboard' to signify the leaving.

But if these were important chars to MC, the scene is descriptive revelation of a memory whose details are valuable to a plot point(say for eg. investigation). Then things like their expressions, details like their nail colors become significant.

And as I said before, how much of a perfectionist you are also matters. I setup scenes in ~10mins, maybe less to get a decent render and setup scenes for 45+mins and yet be disappointed with the outcome.

 

[immortalkid69]

I'd say it depends on how OCD' istic you are in general, and about the scene and the characters in them.

For example, if you're setting a scene of 2 or more least favorite side characters(with no input in moving the story) leaving a certain place. Since they are side chars, all you need is the player to identify who they are, i.e, a decent shot of their faces is enough. And then make sure that the backdrop they are placed in help the player recognize the place and maybe an exit 'signboard' to signify the leaving.

But if these were important chars to MC, the scene is descriptive revelation of a memory whose details are valuable to a plot point(say for eg. investigation). Then things like their expressions, details like their nail colors become significant.

And as I said before, how much of a perfectionist you are also matters. I setup scenes in ~10mins, maybe less to get a decent render and setup scenes for 45+mins and yet be disappointed with the outcome.

Ah I see. I am quite a newbie so I guess I am only catching up.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

This is very true.
Setup isn't really long but....
once you render you may not be satisfied with the contrast. So you play around with the lights.
Do i use spotlights, primitives or the ghost light?
And it depends of course on the scene.
Plus, when you add the figure it may changes all together.

There are also the details that may not matter to players but to you. Light through the cracks of a door. Lights through a window.
In a sense i am sometimes in a loop where i already thought this looks good but days later scrap it and redo it. Perhaps the curse.

Bottomline is, it can take some time before you are satisfied. It matter what you are aiming for.

 

[grohotor]

it takes a very long for me. Definitely a lot more than actual rendering and thats taking into account the multiple renderings i have to do because i notice some poking or similar issues. Hide everything that isn't critical to the aspect you are working on and pose the models at a low subd so everything moves nice and fast. this is the biggest time killer.

 

[MissFortune]

The only answer is, 'it depends'. This is why having a higher-end GPU is nice for Daz, and you can work in Iray Preview quite seamlessly which can save you time fixing your errors. That said, it's hard to say if you're doing things the hard way without seeing you work, but a general rule of thumb is: what you can't see doesn't matter. Save what you can't see for when you can see it.

There's two ways about going at a scene. You load up a base, delete everything in it, add your own assets, put new shaders on things, light the environment, pose the figure(s), light the figures, let it bake a bit in Iray Preview, and then render. Something like that can take me up to 45 minutes, sometimes an hour if it's being difficult. For example: This render has basically new everything but the couch. Shaders, TV, kitchen, bed, walls, floor, etc.:



Whereas sometimes a scene/render simply demands something simpler. Sometimes you just need to light it, throw a new texture on the flow, and pose. This one took me 10 minutes if I exclude the posing, most of which went to setting up the lighting:

 

[immortalkid69]

i see. thanks for the response guys

 

[GNVE]

It also depends on what you want to do with your renders. Are you into making Glam renders like what you see a lot of in the Daz Art topic or do you want to make games. If you make one off art pieces it makes sense to spend hours on single renders while if you want to make a game you will need to speed up (or be like me and just take years for even the smallest VN).

However if you do want to make a game you can make use of the merge scene into existing scene to speed up the workflow. Have the scenes (including base lighting and characters in separate files and then load the characters into the scene you need. Just make sure to remove the tonemapper and environment options from your characters before saving as this will change up render settings of the scene. (It used to work great but Daz fucked it up to hack in Filament half-baked apparently. Yes, I am salty about this.) For the environments I have day and night variants and for the characters I save each clothing option separately.

For posing I usually start with premade poses which usually saves a lot of time even if they need a lot of adjustments.

 

[MidnightArrow]

I feel that even setting up a simple scene in a hall with three characters seems time consuming, like moving them around, adjusting lights, adjusting their poses and adjusting their clothes after importing the said characters. So just wanted to know if everyone goes through the same thing or am I doing things the hard way?

Ever since I ditched Daz Studio for being shit and moved production to Blender, doing all of that takes me very little time and is pretty effortless. It does take longer to export characters from Daz Studio and set them up properly, but if they will be reused in multiple scenes you only have to do it once and you end up saving time in the long run. And if it's just a single scene I'll still do the posing in Blender and load the pose preset in Daz, just so I don't need to deal with Daz Studio's shit.

In Blender, not only does the program have hotkeys for aligning the view to an orthographic axis, it has hotkeys for aligning the view to an object's local axis. So if your character is walking at an angle you can hit Shift and Numpad3 to give yourself a side view. Daz Studio doesn't have anything like that afaics, just the drop-down box for global orthographic view. Which implies they expect you to create all your poses with the character at world center, in isolation, rather than posing the character as part of an actual scene. Between that and the lack of proper IK, I don't think Daz Studio is really capable of anything more than loading a random pose preset against a pretty backdrop.

 

[The Rogue Trader]

The only answer is, 'it depends'. This is why having a higher-end GPU is nice for Daz, and you can work in Iray Preview quite seamlessly which can save you time fixing your errors.

This. Most definitely this.
If I'm on my home computer and I make a mistake with an expression or I'm not satisfied with the lighting, it may easily take 1-2 hours before I'll be able to see it. This obviously adds a thick layer of randomness to my already non-existent productivity.

Personally, the setup of a scene might take anywhere from few minutes for a simple wall with 2-3 furniture items to several days for a complex room full of plot-relevant clutter (that I've to hunt around various asset sites... I still have nightmares about finding a free muffin model for Daz: that one took two years).

For poses, I usually stand in front of a mirror and roleplay the situation. Then I spend tens of minutes browsing through my premade pose libraries looking for a starting pose that even remotely resembles what I saw in the mirror. Separates usually save the day.

I have more or less the opposite approach as GNVE says: if I'm making a one-shot render, I start cutting corners (quite literally), but if the scene is supposed to be part of a story I want to tell, my OCD kicks in and I want every detail to be right.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

Ever since I ditched Daz Studio for being shit and moved production to Blender, doing all of that takes me very little time and is pretty effortless. It does take longer to export characters from Daz Studio and set them up properly, but if they will be reused in multiple scenes you only have to do it once and you end up saving time in the long run. And if it's just a single scene I'll still do the posing in Blender and load the pose preset in Daz, just so I don't need to deal with Daz Studio's shit.

In Blender, not only does the program have hotkeys for aligning the view to an orthographic axis, it has hotkeys for aligning the view to an object's local axis. So if your character is walking at an angle you can hit Shift and Numpad3 to give yourself a side view. Daz Studio doesn't have anything like that afaics, just the drop-down box for global orthographic view. Which implies they expect you to create all your poses with the character at world center, in isolation, rather than posing the character as part of an actual scene. Between that and the lack of proper IK, I don't think Daz Studio is really capable of anything more than loading a random pose preset against a pretty backdrop.

I am not sure if you can compare DAZ with Blender. They are, in a sense, different software that are catered to different people.

To me, DAZ works fine for the most part.
As for poses. Poses need to have adjustments. I never seen a pose that would fit as i want it.
Just the feet alone never looks good.
But as a creator that is your job, to make things look good.

Blender surely has options that DAZ will probably never have. But for most, the learning curve on Blender is pretty high. Before you can get a scene setup, you really have to know Blender where with DAZ you can smash things together and see if it looks ok.
The really hardcore ones build their own assets which should be easy in Blender with the knowledge you learned.

I remember that days when i played a little with Cinema 4D on my Amiga way back. Of course there wasn't anything remotely as beautiful as it is today.
So far, i am actually really grateful that DAZ exists because it's fairly easy to use once you know what to look for.

As opensource as Blender is, i value that software high. It came a long way. Perhaps it will be getting easier one day so that even i can understand it.

Are there any adult games that purely use Blender anyway?

 

[coffeeaddicted]

This. Most definitely this.
If I'm on my home computer and I make a mistake with an expression or I'm not satisfied with the lighting, it may easily take 1-2 hours before I'll be able to see it. This obviously adds a thick layer of randomness to my already non-existent productivity.

Personally, the setup of a scene might take anywhere from few minutes for a simple wall with 2-3 furniture items to several days for a complex room full of plot-relevant clutter (that I've to hunt around various asset sites... I still have nightmares about finding a free muffin model for Daz: that one took two years).

For poses, I usually stand in front of a mirror and roleplay the situation. Then I spend tens of minutes browsing through my premade pose libraries looking for a starting pose that even remotely resembles what I saw in the mirror. Separates usually save the day.

I have more or less the opposite approach as GNVE says: if I'm making a one-shot render, I start cutting corners (quite literally), but if the scene is supposed to be part of a story I want to tell, my OCD kicks in and I want every detail to be right.

Yes, that's the .

To be honest, i think i sometimes fall victim of the "i can do it way better" approach. To me, it's mostly lightning. Is it too harsh or to soft?
Why does it taking so long? Maybe some more lights. Doh..

I think it doesn't need to be perfect. As long as you as the creator is fine with the result, it should be ok. Though, saturation and contrast are my biggest concern when i am setting up a scene. Besides forgetting mistakes that happen.

But i totally agree with what you said.

 

[MidnightArrow]

I am not sure if you can compare DAZ with Blender. They are, in a sense, different software that are catered to different people.

To me, DAZ works fine for the most part.
As for poses. Poses need to have adjustments. I never seen a pose that would fit as i want it.
Just the feet alone never looks good.
But as a creator that is your job, to make things look good.

Blender surely has options that DAZ will probably never have. But for most, the learning curve on Blender is pretty high. Before you can get a scene setup, you really have to know Blender where with DAZ you can smash things together and see if it looks ok.
The really hardcore ones build their own assets which should be easy in Blender with the knowledge you learned.

I remember that days when i played a little with Cinema 4D on my Amiga way back. Of course there wasn't anything remotely as beautiful as it is today.
So far, i am actually really grateful that DAZ exists because it's fairly easy to use once you know what to look for.

As opensource as Blender is, i value that software high. It came a long way. Perhaps it will be getting easier one day so that even i can understand it.

Are there any adult games that purely use Blender anyway?

There's merit to the argument that Daz Studio isn't meant to do everything Blender can, but it falls apart since Blender also does everything Daz Studio can do, and much better.

I finished a shower scene in Blender, with over a dozen poses, in a single afternoon with no premade poses whatsoever. With IK the hands and feet don't wobble around when you move the torso like Daz Studio's pins, so it's easy to finish scenes quickly and maintain the position of the limbs across multiple poses.

Daz sells Urban Sprawl 3, a huge city asset, which you can barely use. Fly mode sucks, camera panning sucks, prop placement sucks, focusing on selected objects sucks. Beyond using it out of the box, it's impossible to work with. You spend most of your time panning and dollying the slowass viewport around since focusing on an object often zooms you way the fuck out due to its buggy code and it's impossible to get back. This program is not meant to handle anything larger than a single room. Forget about a whole city block.

The first release of my own game uses Blender exclusively. Granted it's not a great example because it's been seven months since, but (besides not having a lot of time to work on it) that was mainly due to problems with the materials, not the posing or viewport. Daz skin textures are made weird due to Daz's weird, fake subsurface scattering technique, but I fixed those now, so the work is going much more smoothly (when I have time, which isn't often). My new skin shader looks great, and I don't mind sharing if somebody wants to copy it.

Going forward the only thing I plan to use Daz Studio for is dialogue sprites, because I just can't be bothered to export a whole character for somebody who will only appear as a transparent PNG over a static background. But I'll still be doing all the poses in Blender, so neither of the problems with Daz I mentioned (bad posing and bad viewport controls) will be an issue.

Edit: Though I should mention my game is an erotic game, not porn. It was just ripped and dumped on F95Zone by pirates.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

There's merit to the argument that Daz Studio isn't meant to do everything Blender can, but it falls apart since Blender also does everything Daz Studio can do, and much better.

I finished a shower scene in Blender, with over a dozen poses, in a single afternoon with no premade poses whatsoever. With IK the hands and feet don't wobble around when you move the torso like Daz Studio's pins, so it's easy to finish scenes quickly and maintain the position of the limbs across multiple poses.

Daz sells Urban Sprawl 3, a huge city asset, which you can barely use. Fly mode sucks, camera panning sucks, prop placement sucks, focusing on selected objects sucks. Beyond using it out of the box, it's impossible to work with. You spend most of your time panning and dollying the slowass viewport around since focusing on an object often zooms you way the fuck out due to its buggy code and it's impossible to get back. This program is not meant to handle anything larger than a single room. Forget about a whole city block.

The first release of my own game uses Blender exclusively. Granted it's not a great example because it's been seven months since, but (besides not having a lot of time to work on it) that was mainly due to problems with the materials, not the posing or viewport. Daz skin textures are made weird due to Daz's weird, fake subsurface scattering technique, but I fixed those now, so the work is going much more smoothly (when I have time, which isn't often). My new skin shader looks great, and I don't mind sharing if somebody wants to copy it.

Going forward the only thing I plan to use Daz Studio for is dialogue sprites, because I just can't be bothered to export a whole character for somebody who will only appear as a transparent PNG over a static background. But I'll still be doing all the poses in Blender, so neither of the problems with Daz I mentioned (bad posing and bad viewport controls) will be an issue.

Edit: Though I should mention my game is an erotic game, not porn. It was just ripped and dumped on F95Zone by pirates.

My big critic is this.

DAZ and NVidia. Should i say more?
Technically, there isn't too much difference in my mind that both gfx card can handle a fucking render engine.
But when you use DAZ you "HAVE" to have a NVidia GFX card in order to use the program.
Blender is in that regard, i think, neutral.

Loading a city block? Yeah, probably not in DAZ. I mean i am not sure if 12 GB of ram isn't enough but that would consume so much more and not even thinking of rendering it. Probably implodes the PC.

If i could, and i really would try, Blender would a choice as other options are either costing lot's more money or just don't run. My system was build for gaming which i rarely do these days.
And i am not investing in a new PC since i am not sure if 3D renders are a sidekick for me or a calling.

I got to check that game of yours.

Anyway, this didn't add anything fruitful for the OP's question but still was interesting.

ps. Sacred/Profane? Ah, got it. This is made in Blender? Interesting. I got to look into this.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

For me: Non Applicable, so I don't know how much I can contribute to this already filled post but I'll add something

I realized that I am not a fan of doing scene or environment art (ie setting up a scene). I always want something very particular, something custom, but I also have no attention span for making enviornment art... but I still want scenes, or effects. Currently I'm exploring something akin to making Visual novel backgrounds, something that is reusable and simple, just enough to convey the area and theme, ie a well lit hallway in a space station. I'm even redesigning the game type to something more text based and modifying the User interface to work around the fact that I don't want to focus on environment art that much. I am still making a whole mock up of the scenes I want in 3D, often using assets I get from the unity asset store and porting them over to work in blender, but since I'm doing asset cleanup and artistically avoiding making accurate scenes, I don't know how much of this will apply to the topic. But for more details here's what I've posted so far.

 

[MidnightArrow]

DAZ and NVidia. Should i say more?
Technically, there isn't too much difference in my mind that both gfx card can handle a fucking render engine.
But when you use DAZ you "HAVE" to have a NVidia GFX card in order to use the program.
Blender is in that regard, i think, neutral.

Blender works with all brands of GPUs, yes. And it has out-of-core rendering so you can basically double your RAM without giving up (too much) speed.

ps. Sacred/Profane? Ah, got it. This is made in Blender? Interesting. I got to look into this.

Yeah, but v0.1 uses the old auto-converted skin shaders from the Diffeomorphic exporter. I used a lot of color correction to try and hide the fact that Daz PAs are totally inconsistent in how they make their skin textures, and it kind of worked. But afterwards I got fed up with one character looking normal and the other looking like fucking Blue Man Group, so I just did my own shaders. Took some time (and I ended up pausing my Patreon and nearly quitting for two months before getting back to work) but I ended up in a good place eventually.

 

[Turning Tricks]

I can spend half a day making a "New" environment. But that is something I am trying to make that is unique and that a player won't look at and go "Oh, I saw that store in XXXX game" I find it oddly disturbing how easy it is for me to spot DAZ Store stock assets now in games... lol.

I kit bash a lot, so I might have an idea for something like a new store. So I will start by looking through what I have or what's available than I will decide on the base (like MissFortune mentions above) and I will delete or hide anything that makes it look stock. It's like a big game of LEGO to me at this point, as I mix and match and try things. I'll then change shaders and textures to make the scene even more unique.

Once I have base environment down, I will set up the cameras. I've learned that this is super important for my work flow. I lock down about 6 or 8 camera angles and I even track the X,Y,Z positions on a spread sheet, in case I screw up the DUF file later on.
This way, 2 months down the road, when you are coding the final product, and you notice that you missed a shadow or fucked up and have a chair leg half way through the MC's junk, you can just reload the base DUF and spot render the mistake in a minute, rather than having to do the whole render over. One other thing... I NEVER post process the original DAZ PNG's that are generated. They go into an archive that I keep, so when I need to repair a render, i can do a spot render, than layer that spot render on the original PNG from the archive and then I post process that new image for my final product.

Another time killer for me is I like to do custom assets to make my scenes even more unique. Thinks like product labels, T-shirt graphics, Advertising, etc. It's actually really fun to tear apart an asset, load the files into Photoshop and than make new ones for cool effects.

Lighting is, by far, the hardest aspect of scene construction to control. Because you constantly need to adjust it for different poses and applications, so the tips i mentioned above about repairing things and spot renders are harder to do if you have moved the spots around a lot. Usually, I set up the base "scene lighting"... usually picking a dome preset, if there's lots of windows or its outdoors or setting up ghost lights and emissives for an interior scene. Those stay static. For the custom spots, I'll do two sets of renders. One is the base render to lay down the shadows and background, and then I'll render the characters on a transparent background with custom spots to get them the way I like and then layer that on top of the background.

In any case... I've been finding that the hard work at the beginning is paying off later on when I need to go back and add or red-do renders. Once I have the all of the above done, I can usually reload a character sub-set, take 5-10mins to pose them and render right away.

I read another dev (I think) on here who once said something along the lines of .. you can spend hours doing "real" lighting in DAZ but is a PITA. It's so much easier to fake it with other techniques. Heavily paraphrased.

 

[TessaXYZ]

Depends on the scene. I have one enormously complicated scene I'm working on now that has about 300 renders out of it, which took me about a week to set up without a single render. And then I have other scenes that I can set up within a few hours. Just really depends on the scope of what you want the scene to do.

 

[Domiek]

As others have said, it depends.

If I'm setting up the first render and need to pose, light, cloth sim and add some sculpting touches, closer to an hour. If I've already done this and am just adjusting a pose and new camera angle for a follow-up render, maybe ten minutes.

I had tracked this one day and think it averages out to roughly 30mins per render.

If I wasn't a bumbling idiot it would probably take less time.

 

[osanaiko]

I find it oddly disturbing how easy it is for me to spot DAZ Store stock assets now in games... lol.

This. 1000% this.

If you see this fucking outfit in a game you just KNOW it is gonna be a shit asset flip