Daz How to really use Daz3D?

[rainthart]

Hello!

I recently started working on a VN using Renpy and Daz3D. But a pretty big problem I ran into was with Daz3D, I feel very overwhelmed. Not really sure how to do some things or how to use assets or what assets to use. For example, I'm not sure how to render a picture with no noise (there is a lot of noise), I'm also not sure what assets to use for genitalia and such or how to really use them. The same goes for what works with what and what models to use, G3 or G8? So to keep it short, I'm lost.

I'm sure this is different for everybody, but is there some form of "general" way of doing it?

I've tried to find some good guides/tutorials but so far haven't found much. Is there any sort of guide that could, well, guide me and teach me how to use everything and how?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

The first thing you should learn is how to light a scene as most of noise comes from baldy lighted scene. Sadly there is no general rule, everyone got their own routine. First thing I do when I load a Daz environment is to zero all lights (this plug-in is very helpful), and craft the one I need form my scene.

There is only 3 types of lightening :

-Spotlights (group that includes spot light, distant light, linear point light, point light) : all of these are controlled via the light panel. You can give them a geometric aspect (point, rectangle, disc, sphere..), a size, a spread angle and various other things.

-Emissives : surfaces and geometries (plane, disc, sphere..) that emit light : they are controlled via the surface tab in the emission section, you have to give them a color to emit to enable them. You can create geometries via Create>New primitives.

-HDRI/Dome/Sun-Sky : Global lightening, like sun, light spread all over the scene. You control it via the render setting tab under environnement.

G8 is the last iteration of Daz model type, since most assets are done today for g8 model, I'll go for it. For genital you have generally 3 choices : Default Daz genitalia that comes with any PRO bundle, New gens for V8 and golden palace.

Tutorials are good (some are terribly bad), but nothing beat practice imo.

 

[rainthart]

The first thing you should learn is how to light a scene as most of noise comes from baldy lighted scene. Sadly there is no general rule, everyone got their own routine. First thing I do when I load a Daz environment is to zero all lights (this plug-in is very helpful), and craft the one I need form my scene.

There is only 3 types of lightening :

-Spotlights (group that includes spot light, distant light, linear point light, point light) : all of these are controlled via the light panel. You can give them a geometric aspect (point, rectangle, disc, sphere..), a size, a spread angle and various other things.

-Emissives : surfaces and geometries (plane, disc, sphere..) that emit light : they are controlled via the surface tab in the emission section, you have to give them a color to emit to enable them. You can create geometries via Create>New primitives.

-HDRI/Dome/Sun-Sky : Global lightening, like sun, light spread all over the scene. You control it via the render setting tab under environnement.

G8 is the last iteration of Daz model type, since most assets are done today for g8 model, I'll go for it. For genital you have generally 3 choices : Default Daz genitalia that comes with any PRO bundle, New gens for V8 and golden palace.

Tutorials are good (some are terribly bad), but nothing beat practice imo.

Alright, thank you so much! Will try to really get the lighting down.

 

[Rich]

To add to what no__name said:

Noise in the picture comes from the fact that Daz Studio takes many passes thru the image to try to figure out how each pixel is lit, and tries different light paths each time around. As DS takes more and more passes, the values of the pixels gradually converge.

Pixels that are directly lit (by a spotlight or an HDRI) will converge much more quickly, because they have direct paths to light sources. If something's not directly lit, the only way light gets there is by bouncing off something else. That means more processing, and more possible light paths to have to evaluate. Slow convergence.

Emissive surfaces (and Ghost Lights, which are a special case) make DS work much harder than spotlights or HDRI's. The latter DS "understands." As a result, DS will deliberately trace paths from your objects to the lights it knows about. Emissive surfaces, on the other hand, DS has to kind of "find by accident" - when it casts random rays saying "is there any light from this direction", it can stumble into the emissive surface and use the info, but it's never going to be as efficient at it as it is with things it "knows" are lights.

So, you'll get the most rapid convergence if your scenes are well lit (i.e. no real big shadowy regions), and if you minimize the use of emissive surfaces. That doesn't mean that ghost lights are bad - they can be VERY useful sometimes to get light into areas that would otherwise be difficult, but they're not a panacea.

Note that if making your scene converge well means it's too bright, one option is to adjust the exposure under the Tone Mapping section of the Render Settings. This can artificially darken a well-lit scene. Useful if you have to do a night scene, for example - you want it to look dark, but you don't want to have DS take forever to converge.

Finally, if you don't have an NVidia GPU, you're always going to be dying. iRay is tuned for hardware. Yes, DS can render using just software, but it's slooooooooooow.

 

[rainthart]

To add to what no__name said:

Noise in the picture comes from the fact that Daz Studio takes many passes thru the image to try to figure out how each pixel is lit, and tries different light paths each time around. As DS takes more and more passes, the values of the pixels gradually converge.

Pixels that are directly lit (by a spotlight or an HDRI) will converge much more quickly, because they have direct paths to light sources. If something's not directly lit, the only way light gets there is by bouncing off something else. That means more processing, and more possible light paths to have to evaluate. Slow convergence.

Emissive surfaces (and Ghost Lights, which are a special case) make DS work much harder than spotlights or HDRI's. The latter DS "understands." As a result, DS will deliberately trace paths from your objects to the lights it knows about. Emissive surfaces, on the other hand, DS has to kind of "find by accident" - when it casts random rays saying "is there any light from this direction", it can stumble into the emissive surface and use the info, but it's never going to be as efficient at it as it is with things it "knows" are lights.

So, you'll get the most rapid convergence if your scenes are well lit (i.e. no real big shadowy regions), and if you minimize the use of emissive surfaces. That doesn't mean that ghost lights are bad - they can be VERY useful sometimes to get light into areas that would otherwise be difficult, but they're not a panacea.

Note that if making your scene converge well means it's too bright, one option is to adjust the exposure under the Tone Mapping section of the Render Settings. This can artificially darken a well-lit scene. Useful if you have to do a night scene, for example - you want it to look dark, but you don't want to have DS take forever to converge.

Finally, if you don't have an NVidia GPU, you're always going to be dying. iRay is tuned for hardware. Yes, DS can render using just software, but it's slooooooooooow.

Okay, didn't really understand a whole lot but I'm sure I can learn in time! Didn't fully understand what caused the noise in rendered pictures, how do you not have as much noise? Is it by "simply" adding lights to the scene?

Also what is a way to fix clipping? I have a dress on a person but I can't get the hands to look right and not clip thru it. Is there any good way of fixing it?

I do have a nvidia GPU, luckily!

Thanks!

 

[Rich]

Okay, didn't really understand a whole lot but I'm sure I can learn in time! Didn't fully understand what caused the noise in rendered pictures, how do you not have as much noise? Is it by "simply" adding lights to the scene?

You will have less noise if you:

• Add light to the areas that are particularly noisy
• Allow the scene to render longer. You can alter when iRay will decide the scene is "done" with the settings in Progressive Rendering
• On the newest versions of Daz Studio, there is a "denoiser" that can be set to kick in after a certain number of iterations. Note that this does better with some kinds of surfaces than others. (I don't use it, but I'm told that it's better with non-skin objects.)

Also what is a way to fix clipping? I have a dress on a person but I can't get the hands to look right and not clip thru it. Is there any good way of fixing it?

If the figure's body is poking through its clothing here and there, you can add either a Smoothing Modifier or a Push Modifier to the clothing. If it's things like "I'm having trouble positioning the hands so that they don't poke through something that should be solid, then no - there's no real good way to deal with that other than "doctor, it hurts when I do that" "so, don't do that."

 

[Noegrets]

You will have less noise if you:

• Add light to the areas that are particularly noisy
• Allow the scene to render longer. You can alter when iRay will decide the scene is "done" with the settings in Progressive Rendering
• On the newest versions of Daz Studio, there is a "denoiser" that can be set to kick in after a certain number of iterations. Note that this does better with some kinds of surfaces than others. (I don't use it, but I'm told that it's better with non-skin objects.)

If the figure's body is poking through its clothing here and there, you can add either a Smoothing Modifier or a Push Modifier to the clothing. If it's things like "I'm having trouble positioning the hands so that they don't poke through something that should be solid, then no - there's no real good way to deal with that other than "doctor, it hurts when I do that" "so, don't do that."

I find the easiest way to deal with clipping is to get used to using the posing sliders, or 'pining' prior to using the Universal tool. The universal tool can get some body parts around fast, but for me almost always result in clipping when used in isolation, especially with two or more characters touching in a scene. I often don't even notice until I have done a quick 30 iteration render, then I cancel the render, go back and fix the clipping and then re-render (800-2200 iterations).

 

[Rich]

That's a reasonable approach, Noegrets. Of course, we each have our own "workflow", so to speak. Sometimes, I'll do posing almost completely with sliders. Other times, I'll pin parts of the body, and then drag hands or feet or whatever into "almost the right position," and then fine-tune from there. Depends on the pose.

The main thing (IMHO) is to be aware that clipping/poke-through is an issue. Given that, you'll obviously know where "poke thru" is likely to be occurring in your scene, so after you get the "pretty close" pose, then you can go back and fiddle in those spots. This is where the Perspective View can be really useful. You can leave the camera where it's going to be, and use the Perspective view to look at potential areas of poke-thru from a variety of different angles to make sure that things are "close enough that they won't look like they're separated" in the render, but still not quite poking thru. But doing a good job on this does take a good bit of fine dial-twiddling toward the end, at least in my experience.