I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the wrong section so let me know if so, but I've had interest in creating a visual novel for nearly a year now but always been pushed away by the fact I'm unable to do quality renders at a reasonable time due to poor PC specs. My question is, how open would people be to doing my renders for me? I would create all the scenes if they would like and I'm willing to pay if the pricing is reasonable, I just would love to make a visual novel and thought I may as well ask here before I give up hope on this idea. Thank you for taking your time to read this!
Need help with daz3d (may be wrong section to post this)
- Thread starter CaveStudios
- Start date
- Jun 17, 2017
- 5,676
- 28,632
On the 'low end pc' thing. If you are already considering paying other people to do renders, you should be able to set aside a budget instead for a decent Nvidia graphics card.
The nice thing about desktop PCs is that you can usually upgrade the graphics card. And Daz Iray gets by far the biggest benefit from a decent graphics card - say a GTX 10xx series card with at least 6 GB of VRAM.
The CPU and number of CPU cores is less important, although I think you'd want at least four cores. Also 16 GB of system memory as a comfortable minimum is recommended, and memory is usually pretty easy to upgrade if you do your research beforehand (i.e. check to see which memory your system can use).
Hard drives are also rather easy to upgrade, when you need more hard drive space. On a desktop system, you can usually just add a second hard drive, alongside your current one.
So if your older system has upgrade options, yeah it's worth looking into.
If you have a laptop, your upgrade paths are a bit more limited, but at least you can usually upgrade the ram and hard drive if needed. Plus you can always go the USB external hard drive route without much fuss. Laptops generally aren't recommended for rendering, but a number of people render on laptops anyways... just be mindful of the heat involved.
There are also render farms, that can render your images for you. Others here can comment on how practical those are for 'erotic' renders.
BUT, if you are determined to hire an artist instead to assist you with your project, well a few other games use the 'team' approach. It all comes down to revenue sharing/payment, and whether you can find an artist that 'fits' the style you want that is willing to work on someone else's project instead of their own.
The nice thing about desktop PCs is that you can usually upgrade the graphics card. And Daz Iray gets by far the biggest benefit from a decent graphics card - say a GTX 10xx series card with at least 6 GB of VRAM.
The CPU and number of CPU cores is less important, although I think you'd want at least four cores. Also 16 GB of system memory as a comfortable minimum is recommended, and memory is usually pretty easy to upgrade if you do your research beforehand (i.e. check to see which memory your system can use).
Hard drives are also rather easy to upgrade, when you need more hard drive space. On a desktop system, you can usually just add a second hard drive, alongside your current one.
So if your older system has upgrade options, yeah it's worth looking into.
If you have a laptop, your upgrade paths are a bit more limited, but at least you can usually upgrade the ram and hard drive if needed. Plus you can always go the USB external hard drive route without much fuss. Laptops generally aren't recommended for rendering, but a number of people render on laptops anyways... just be mindful of the heat involved.
There are also render farms, that can render your images for you. Others here can comment on how practical those are for 'erotic' renders.
BUT, if you are determined to hire an artist instead to assist you with your project, well a few other games use the 'team' approach. It all comes down to revenue sharing/payment, and whether you can find an artist that 'fits' the style you want that is willing to work on someone else's project instead of their own.
Thank you for your responses, I personally feel that my best option will be the 'team' approach as upgrading PC parts isn't something I will be able to fit into my budget anytime soon. Do you know how I should go about finding someone to join me on this? I really have no issue giving them a large % of profits as I'm not really doing it for the money.
- May 3, 2018
- 1,403
- 997
It looks like things are turning into the PC Masterace subreddit, so let me say something different. This may not be the answer you are looking for, but I'll put in a good word about Blender.
If you don't know, Blender is a free program for making and rendering content (mostly 3D). you can create just about anything, simulate anything, and make renders and animations, such as last week this was a test render I was making.
(I only take credit for creating the girl, the room was free and created by this guy
If you don't have the budget for a more powerful computer, then you may not have the budget for Daz3D. Daz3D may be free, but getting the characters, backgrounds, etc. needs to be paid for.
On the other hand, there is Blender, which can give you more power (arguably?), doing so at a much lower cost (I do only free stuff), and I think more important to you ~
You can use SheepIt to ask a network of other computers to render stuff for you! For free!
But there are some pretty important limitations
SheepIt asks for everything to be Safe for Work or ask for you to put together a private NSFW team to render your NSFW stuff for you.
Why? well sheepit is a community effort, I have to turn on my own personal computer, open up sheepit, and tell my computer to start rendering. Sheepit lets you use other peoples computer's to do the rendering for you but that also means other people such as myself must set up their computers to render for you. We get nothing out of it, other than to grow the Blender community. I gain nothing but a higher power bill. The issue with NSFW is that the way sheep it works is you get to see a preview of the project and some of these computers hosting sheepit are in a professional environment or are being hosted by people who may not approve of nsfw content showing up. Hence, the need to make a private team.
Now, blender is not perfect. It has some major hiccups.
1 it is harder to learn (because it was created for artists who understands the program and you can control everything, more detailed settings than what Daz3D has, it is very raw dog). Blender does more than render and animate, the character seen above was made in blender, rigged, and I made a custom material shader for the skin and metal parts.
2 its ecosystem is very unprofessional, meaning you can find one of the biggest community of asset sharers on the planet, but a lot of the free stuff is made by new and unskilled users, not often made (or at least shared for free) by professionals.
You can get lots of great free stuff, from SFW BlendSwap (and many other 3D model sharing sites, some sites you can pay for professional stuff, such as at Turbosquid which is both sfw and nsfw) or NSFW SmutBase. Optionally you can try your hand at making your own stuff, November will mark the end of my second year of using blender since I started, and I'd say I can now make custom animated characters at the level of quality I wanted to at the start, it's just a matter of practice and time if I wanted to make this a career.
3 Not so user-friendly (plug and play). Not only is Daz hard to learn at first, hard to find exactly what you want without having to make something custom or edit someone else's file, but with blender since it does not have a dedicated ecosystem of 3D models ready to be used, it's not easy to browse and pick what you want and to be able to play with it as soon as it has downloaded. There are some models like that, and lots of people are working to convert the massive NSFW Source FilmMaker asset collections to be Blender compatible (mostly fixing Armature rigs and bones and materials), but often than not the really good models you find online and made by professionals (both free and not free) are in file formats for other programs (such as Daz3D or Autodesk Maya being two most popular for NSFW stuff) which blender can't just import in because legal issues. However, most artists do share their files in multiple formats, but I find that I mostly stick to .fbx (source filmmaker which can be imported), or .obj (contains only the 3D mesh) but these file formats are never perfect. Either you have to set up a material (bout 5 minutes of work once you know what you are doing) or either fixing or making a skeleton for the character so you can animate them (a few hours depending on how complex you want to be, a day's work for me). It is good to also mention that there are some converting Daz3D files into blender format, but we still haven't figured out how to get the corrective deformations out of these files, but for the most part people will not notice they are missing. But then there are plenty of those who do share .blend files so...
So if you are willing to use a bit more elbow grease and try to learn blender, and team up with me on sheep it, I can automate my computer to render for you. I can't work on 3d stuff all the time because school and also working on other project but by using sheep it everything is automatic.
If you don't know, Blender is a free program for making and rendering content (mostly 3D). you can create just about anything, simulate anything, and make renders and animations, such as last week this was a test render I was making.
(I only take credit for creating the girl, the room was free and created by this guy
You must be registered to see the links
)
If you don't have the budget for a more powerful computer, then you may not have the budget for Daz3D. Daz3D may be free, but getting the characters, backgrounds, etc. needs to be paid for.
On the other hand, there is Blender, which can give you more power (arguably?), doing so at a much lower cost (I do only free stuff), and I think more important to you ~
You can use SheepIt to ask a network of other computers to render stuff for you! For free!
But there are some pretty important limitations
SheepIt asks for everything to be Safe for Work or ask for you to put together a private NSFW team to render your NSFW stuff for you.
Why? well sheepit is a community effort, I have to turn on my own personal computer, open up sheepit, and tell my computer to start rendering. Sheepit lets you use other peoples computer's to do the rendering for you but that also means other people such as myself must set up their computers to render for you. We get nothing out of it, other than to grow the Blender community. I gain nothing but a higher power bill. The issue with NSFW is that the way sheep it works is you get to see a preview of the project and some of these computers hosting sheepit are in a professional environment or are being hosted by people who may not approve of nsfw content showing up. Hence, the need to make a private team.
Now, blender is not perfect. It has some major hiccups.
1 it is harder to learn (because it was created for artists who understands the program and you can control everything, more detailed settings than what Daz3D has, it is very raw dog). Blender does more than render and animate, the character seen above was made in blender, rigged, and I made a custom material shader for the skin and metal parts.
2 its ecosystem is very unprofessional, meaning you can find one of the biggest community of asset sharers on the planet, but a lot of the free stuff is made by new and unskilled users, not often made (or at least shared for free) by professionals.
You can get lots of great free stuff, from SFW BlendSwap (and many other 3D model sharing sites, some sites you can pay for professional stuff, such as at Turbosquid which is both sfw and nsfw) or NSFW SmutBase. Optionally you can try your hand at making your own stuff, November will mark the end of my second year of using blender since I started, and I'd say I can now make custom animated characters at the level of quality I wanted to at the start, it's just a matter of practice and time if I wanted to make this a career.
3 Not so user-friendly (plug and play). Not only is Daz hard to learn at first, hard to find exactly what you want without having to make something custom or edit someone else's file, but with blender since it does not have a dedicated ecosystem of 3D models ready to be used, it's not easy to browse and pick what you want and to be able to play with it as soon as it has downloaded. There are some models like that, and lots of people are working to convert the massive NSFW Source FilmMaker asset collections to be Blender compatible (mostly fixing Armature rigs and bones and materials), but often than not the really good models you find online and made by professionals (both free and not free) are in file formats for other programs (such as Daz3D or Autodesk Maya being two most popular for NSFW stuff) which blender can't just import in because legal issues. However, most artists do share their files in multiple formats, but I find that I mostly stick to .fbx (source filmmaker which can be imported), or .obj (contains only the 3D mesh) but these file formats are never perfect. Either you have to set up a material (bout 5 minutes of work once you know what you are doing) or either fixing or making a skeleton for the character so you can animate them (a few hours depending on how complex you want to be, a day's work for me). It is good to also mention that there are some converting Daz3D files into blender format, but we still haven't figured out how to get the corrective deformations out of these files, but for the most part people will not notice they are missing. But then there are plenty of those who do share .blend files so...
So if you are willing to use a bit more elbow grease and try to learn blender, and team up with me on sheep it, I can automate my computer to render for you. I can't work on 3d stuff all the time because school and also working on other project but by using sheep it everything is automatic.
Why don't use a server in the cloud? Amazon has GPUs based servers, pay per use. Probably the same as pay for someone else, but you would have the control of the whole process.
I'm a hardware enthusiast, had to go for a machine, I assembled it piece by piece, just looking it working perfectly is already a reward.
I'm a hardware enthusiast, had to go for a machine, I assembled it piece by piece, just looking it working perfectly is already a reward.