Thanks Danomator, currently working and learning to use Maya and DAZ3D on a computer built for rendering and animation. Although just a novice and starting in the 3d computer world. l have years of actual pen to paper and canvas painting skills. Don't think at this time I am looking to develop a game, but rather just want to get profficient in using the software and to develope some good 3D scenes.
I will check out suggested forum. And hope the other artist and devlopers don't mind me asking questions. Take care and thanks again.
just looking at it real quick there are quite some DAZ3D threads there. so if you got years of painting experience this is certainly a good start as to also answer balooney here
Definitely more practical than re-rendering, that's for sure. I've only done minor stuff with Gimp, so I don't have the experience to know if something like that is mostly technical or would require real artistic talent.
i would say it's a mixture of both really. i'm not proficient at all tho. my wife is the artistic one and wants to learn design as a profession. she uses a graphics tablet to draw stuff directly to the pc. i suppose it could be helpful here too to create own assets and to not soley rely on other ones already out there. if she ever want's to render anything i'll let her use my pc tho for sure as it's way more powerful than her laptop as i got a desktop with a 6c/12t cpu, 32 gib ram and a 1080 ti and tons of fast ssd storage at least and not some underpowered mobile stuffs.
my limited experience really comes from converting and creating skyrim mods in the past. but then i used different tools than you are trying to get into and the point of my efforts was entirely different as creating textures that are attached to some measly meshes in the game or converting already existing armors/clothings to fit another bodytypes sceleton is another thing than having realistic (or at least somewhat realistic) renders of people and scenes.
the process here is more complex you have to go down a rabbit hole of eye reflections, subsurface scattering to create realistic skin textures (ofc there is also modders who go there but i wasn't one of them lol) and such and then there is ofc the overall lighting/shading of a scene, etc. that should be realistic and so on and so forth. those aspects are then again rather technical and why a strong or better 2 or more strong gpus are a big plus as calculating these kinds of things is where gpus truely shine. ofc you don't bother handcoding things, the rendering programm creates those equations and the gpu solves them. after all they were designed to do nothing but these types of vector and matrix calculations really fast as rendering is really solving the same type of equations over and over again.
cpus on the other hand are stronger on the arithmetic kind of math aka addition because really that is all they can do if you ignore the instruction sets they have implemented. every other mathematical opperation is converted into an addition.
so all in all i really don't want to talk shit and pull bs from my ass here so i would say someone like SuperWriter who is actually rendering images for his VN is more proficient in answering what goes into the creation of realistic sceneries. my own experience on the matter is rather miniscule and barely scratching the surface of what can be done with the right tools in the right hands so pardon my ignorance.
