- Apr 14, 2021
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Ah, a fellow hobbyist developer. Nice. I'd love to talk about all the challenges and lessons I learned while making my games.
I have mixed feelings about Daz3d. I mean I and a lot of people are using it, so it's not like it's so bad that I wouldn't touch it, but certainly when you compare it to other similar softwares, it leaves a lot to be desired. But certainly it also has an edge in some areas, which is why I'm using it over other similar softwares. Overall, its main advantage is in that it's designed primarily for rendering characters in an environment, so its interface is all about them. There's almost nothing redundant, unlike Blender, which has tools for almost everything. But for something so specific, you'd think it should excel in all the areas it covers. But no, in terms of rendering, it has massive memory leak problems. It can't use both RAM and VRAM to fit in a scene. Its playback is so laggy that it's impossible to preview animations accurately. Posing is so counterintuitive in Daz that I don't know what they base it off. FK/IK is, as far as I know, the posing system used everywhere, but the one in Daz is neither fully FK nor IK. And all these are in contrast to Blender which has none of these problems.
Its PBR preview engine called Filament is also terrible compared to Blender's Eeevee. You can't really use it to preview things because they look too different from Iray. Its speed in rendering volumetrics is so slow that it's basically unusable. It doesn't have a particle system so things like rain or fire look absolutely terrible. One good thing about it is its physics simulation, which uses GPU rather than CPU unlike Blender.
I think Daz3d doesn't really know where it should be. On one end, you have biased rendering engines like in Unreal Engine or Unity, that is supposed to handle 60 frames per second or even higher, and so you can always use volumetrics, particle systems, cloth simulation, gravity all the time. You also don't have to worry about extreme lighting that leads to high render time, because the denoiser takes care of it. There's a denoiser in Daz, but I don't know why it's much worse than the others. There is also a biased rendering engine in Daz called Iray Interactive, but in my experience, it isn't faster than the unbiased version. On the other end, you have unbiased rendering engines like Iray Photoreal, which is what everybody is using but, even then, it's still not as good as Blender's Cycles, in terms of memory, denoising, and volumetrics. But Iray is developed by Nvidia, so I guess I can't blame Daz3d for that. But I know they didn't implement all the features of Iray such as motion blur. And having seen Nvidia's denoising demo, I can't help but to feel the denoiser in Daz3d is worse even though it's supposed to be the same one.
But having said all that, Daz3d is easy to use. I just think it can be much better if the developers understand what a lot of people use it for
. It has everything it needs to make single renders, but not so much for visual novels, because making visual novels is like drawing comics. I'm not spending weeks to make a single render or artwork. I need to make renders in such a way that it's fast and continuous. It really needs a particle system. Having to manually move the rain in this update was a nightmare.
