Honest question, and I don't know if this was answered a hundred pages ago, but how long does it take for the various fan-art creators here to make 1 of these images? I know nothing about creating/shaping an existing 3D model so is it a matter of minutes or hours?
A lot of it depends on the technology you are using, and the complexity of your scene, especially in terms of lighting. If you look at a lot of my older work until just about a couple months ago, all my scenes involved only people models and a few props, no environment or background included, with only the camera headlamp lighting the scene. These took a few hours because I was using a very old computer that overheated easily and had very little RAM. Since I started using my new computer, I can render much more complex renders and only take 1-2 hours to complete them. So it varies a lot with what your computer is optimized to do, how many GPUs you have, and many other factors.
That's just in terms of rendering, which the computer does. If you want to talk about the actual process you have to put in to shape a character and create a scene you like, that's a very different story. Daz is much more intuitive than a lot of other technology, so you can create decent renders even as a beginner, but it will still take hours, if not days, when you first start out. Especially shaping your character and making it look how you want takes a very long time. In addition, posing the scene can be very meticulous, even with pose-packs. However, once you've made the character once, you can reuse it in all your scenes, so that cuts down the time a lot. Still, if you want to create work that you'll be really proud of, it is a heavy time commitment. Frankly, if you look at my work, I was fine sharing work that ended up being a bit sloppy, especially when I couldn't render super fast, so I put a far smaller time commitment in than most people, but if you want to produce high quality work, you need to put in a lot of effort