Scenes and Expressions

[Triaxe]

This is probably a dumb question but I've been looking for a while and I haven't found satisfying answers.

My questions are regarding the development of a visual novel with Daz3D.
As far as I'm aware, developers set up a scene and then render it.

- Do developers set up the entire space (a bedroom for example) with the character inside the room, then render everything? If so, does that mean that they re-render the entire room + character for every expression or movement change?
- What about scenes with multiple characters? I imagine rendering a space and several characters takes a while. Would a developer re-render all of the assets again because one character's mouth changed?

I'm trying to gain an understanding of the most common and best practice workflow. I'm wondering if developers simply render everything for the best result (accurate lighting, shadows etc.) or if there is more to it.

 

[MissFortune]

Do developers set up the entire space (a bedroom for example) with the character inside the room, then render everything? If so, does that mean that they re-render the entire room + character for every expression or movement change?

Generally, when I'm first setting up a scene (a room, living room, etc.), I'm going to customize it some with shaders, sometimes some new furniture and just getting the general aesthetic down. Same for colors (in which I generally follow the 60:30:10 ratio that you often see in web/app UI design. 60 is the dominant color, 30 is for accents/some furniture/props, 10 is trim/frames/etc.).

After setting up the room, you decide how you want to light it. The is probably the trickiest part of any render. There's a few different ways to Rome here. I personally tend to use a mix of Ghost Lights and spotlights to light indoors. Ghost lights I usually use on practical lights around the room/environment, think lamps or ceiling/drop lights. Make them fairly bright, but not enough to wash out everything around it, then I'll toss in some spotlights to accent/angle the lighting a bit more. Usually just a key and fill, but I'll sometimes go back to the old faithful in three-point lighting and toss in a rim light if the ghost lights don't already do it on their own. This usually goes hand in hand with having the character in the room/scene while you're doing it.

What about scenes with multiple characters? I imagine rendering a space and several characters takes a while. Would a developer re-render all of the assets again because one character's mouth changed?

If you're rendering a scene with several characters, they're either lower quality figures or you're on a 3090. Especially if the scene is unoptimized. Generally, in a scene with a lot of characters, I'll light everything. Then I'll turn all the figures off (leave the lights on.), render the background alone, and then turn the figures on one at a time and Spot Render just that character. Then do the same for the next. And then the next. If you have two characters close together, then spot-render them both.

I actually

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I made a few months ago when I was still experimenting with the idea of spot rendering in multiple characters.

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is where I got the idea to try it, though I ended up seeing

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later. A bit older but still applies, iirc.

So, if a mouth changed on a character, you'd simply spot render the character that had their expression/pose changed.

 

[Triaxe]

Thank you for the reply. That's very interesting stuff. I did not know you could do spot renders. That does seem like a very handy tool to fit in multiple characters.
I suppose I also didn't realize that Photoshop/Gimp came into play this much. Is that somewhat of a norm?

 

[MissFortune]

Thank you for the reply. That's very interesting stuff. I did not know you could do spot renders. That does seem like a very handy tool to fit in multiple characters.
I suppose I also didn't realize that Photoshop/Gimp came into play this much. Is that somewhat of a norm?

If you're doing the spot rendering approach, some kind of layer-based photo-editor is pretty necessary as you'll usually end up with a faint rectangle around the spot render when you put it over the original image. The easiest way to get rid of them is via layer masks in Photoshop (I'm not sure what GIMP's equivalent is.).

Photoshop is a norm in the workflow of most Daz artists, I'd say, or any other 3D artists for that matter. But in the sense of Daz, a somewhat featured Photo-editor (e.g GIMP) can save you a lot of time. I use Photoshop personally, but I know some devs around here use GIMP as it's free or Affinity as you can buy a permanent license. Sometimes you'll run into clipping (skin through clothes, hair through shoulder, etc.), or you want to edit the color tone, or anything of that sort, you can use an editor to fix issues/changing things without having to re-render images. Then there's the postwork (not required, but it certainly helps), downscaling, etc. It's just a nice tool to have in your arsenal.

From a different post on sort of the same topic:

As mentioned, poke-through also comes an easy fix (via Content-Aware Fill with the lasso tool or with the spot-healing brush, for anyone who cares to know):

It can be time consuming at first, but once you start understanding the tools and what they do, it'll come to you a lot quicker. Just like any other big/complex program you've learned. Even if you don't end up using it for every render, you'd still be well-off to have it in your arsenal so you don't have to re-do bad renders/re-render for small errors that could otherwise easily be fixed. But purely from an art standpoint, Photoshop/Postwork can take a render/image and totally change the mood of it, or even just accenting an already good render:

Both of the above renders (pre-postwork left, post on right) went through Camera Raw Filter, which is much quicker than going through each adjustment individually, and then had the shadows and lighting emphasized with Dodge/Burn tools. I personally downscale after I'm done (easier to edit/fix with higher resolutions) in PS and then save it to a folder to be converted later. Though, saving as a .jpg is fine as well. I might've went on a little bit too long here so:

 

[Triaxe]

Thank you for being so informative. I appreciate the in-depth answers. You've helped me out a lot with my research and gave me a lot to think about.