Some of my renders

[amk19]

/EDIT:
Removed my OP, will use this thread to post renders from time to time to track my progress, hopefully ending with my own game and/or more advanced tools like Blender, ZBrush etc.
I can already see how bad my first renders were by now But hey, it's about learning and progressing right?

Images from my OP - 19.06.2017


09.05.2020


31.05.2020


07.10.2020



10.10.2020


30.10.2020

​

 

[ConfusedBeard]

They look really great, the quality is very good imho.
I'm currently doing some testing with Genesis 3.

 

[revan335]

Beautiful renders.

 

[amk19]

Thank you for your positive feedback guys, means a lot to me.
@ConfusedBeard
I am not a Daz professional but just let me know if I can help with something.

 

[mmmonsterkill]

Hi guys,

I recently discovered these nice games and visual novels and almost played all of them

I was working with Daz for some weeks in the past and was surprised about how many of these games actually use Daz and Daz models for the renders.
This brought back some memories and I brought back my drive with all the Daz stuff on it and played around.

I like the idea of creating my own game but I think that won't work. Unfortunately, I am always obsessed with details which would take me months to go from version to version

I like making my renders as realistic as possible.
For this, I choose only the best models/skins, apply skin shaders, fiber eyebrows/eyelashes, body/facial hair, light, realistic cameras with depth of field.

Enough chit chat, I hope you like them.

These new Genesis 8 models are amazing. I really love the shape of the feet. It's hard to not love them with a little foot fetish^^

Cheers

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those look great, iv been thinking about getting daz to play around a bit. how hard is it and do you have any tips?

 

[Krull]

They look amazing , good job.

 

[amk19]

those look great, iv been thinking about getting daz to play around a bit. how hard is it and do you have any tips?

Hey, thank you for your feedback. I wasted a lot of time learning Daz, so I will tell you some things which are very important to know imo. It's like, I wished I knew these things right from the beginning.
First of all, you should get familiar with lighting. I assume that you are going to use Iray. Play around with spot lights, place them into the scene, rearrange them, check out the renders. You can play around with commercial Iray light presets which you can get on some of these sites...
Experiment with surfaces. Check out how the figures are built down to the very last bone.
Play around with the sliders in the surfaces tab, place other materials on figures, and make them glass sculptures for example. In this way you will learn a lot about the mechanisms behind this.
One essential thing is the camera. Always use camera in the scene, not only the perspective view. And ALWAYS turn off the camera headlight. Don't even think about turning it on. It's useless and will completely mess up with your renders. The camera is what gives you the "realistic" look. You can also undo movements of the camera which is very handy.
If you want depth of field, you better learn the basics of photography.
I use a focal lenght of 200mm for portraits, which professional photographers also do.
In Parameters->Camera panel, turn on depth of field, then turn on "Near DOF Plane Visibility" and use the "Focal Distance" slider to set the position of the plane. The plane decides the transition between sharp and blurry.
It is not realistic to have the whole scene razor-sharp. The brain will notice and tell that there is something wrong. So use DOF.

Check out Render Settings->Environment. This is one of the most important things. Understand what a dome is, learn the difference between "dome" and "dome and scene" or "scene only" in the "Environment Mode" panel.
TIP: If you are using dome lighting only in the future, use CTRL-L to turn on the helping lights. Otherwise you will see pitch black in the preview window if there are no light sources.

Get some skin shaders like anagenessis and apply them to your figures surface. It will look a thousand percent better just by doing this.

And now a topic which is very important to me: Details.
Try to add as much detail as possible to your figures. Use fiber eyebrows and not the flat brushstrokes which come with the facial texture. For example, these will not create shadows on the face. In real world, eyebrows will throw shadows.
Use the brow remover tool to erase the drawn eyebrows and use oh my brows to apply the fiber. It will look much better.
You can also use fiber eyelashes. It is not a big change compared to the eyebrows but the brain will still notice.
Then, use facial hair like "peach fuzz" this is very important. There is always tiny blond/white hair on human faces.

One of the things I missed at the beggining was the model looking right into the camera.
In case you didn't know, select one eye with the selection tool and go to the "Parameters" tab. There you choose the first entry, the one with the bone. On the right find "Point at" and select your camera. Repeat with the other eye.

Another thing are sliders. Sometimes you have the sliders going from -100 to +100 for example. You pushed it to the maximum in one direction but you need more. Then click on the gear icon that comes on the upper right on every slider and choose "Parameter settings". Uncheck "Use limits" and you are ready to go over 9000.

Now, that's it for now. If you have further questions on a certain topic then let me know. I will try to help.

Now have fun with your renders and let's see the differences between the renders you made before and after applying my tips

Cheers

 

[DreamSlayer]

Well done, and great mini-know how. Thank you so much.

 

[Bubblegum Raptor]

Nice work!

 

[OhWee]

Nice!

R.E. the other shoe, i.e. game development, you could always shoot for something simple to use your renders for. RenPy is designed for storytelling, so you could make an 'interactive comic' or just a web comic, rather than bothering with fancy game mechanics.

Not everything has to be a game with a bunch of decision gates. Once you get comfortable with telling/visualizing a story, you can always jump on the 'game bandwagon' later. These days, though, a fair number of the new 'so called' game projects are really just stories with maybe a small handful of dialogue/storyline forks. Nothing wrong with this, but if you were to do something like this, just call it a story and not a game and you should be good.

Also, if you decide to develop a story, do it at your own speed. Don't put pressure on yourself with deadlines, etc. it'll get done when it gets done, and share renders occasionally for the 'moral support', with the caveat that there's no timeline for completion, making it clear that it's a WIP, something that you are working on at your own speed, and that it gets done when it gets done. Don't start a patreon if you don't want the stress...

An example of someone tackling a project on their own timeline is Brad's Erotic Week. We are coming up on a year since the last update, but he's made it clear that he's a way off from his next update, and isn't actively soliciting Patreon donations in the meantime. This way, his patrons aren't constantly hounding him for the next update, although he does have a 'fan club' that keeps encouraging him. Absolutely nothing wrong with this as he's been fairly clear with his supporters r.e. how he's coming along.

Food for thought.

One thing at a time though. You are off to a quite excellent start with your renders there! Definitely decent erotic 3D comic material if nothing else! You have a talent for this, so definitely keep playing around with Daz Studio!

 

[amk19]

@OhWee Thank you for your kind words. I will look into game/story making in the future because there was always something that I missed in all the games. Sometimes it was the graphics and then the story etc. But for now I don't really have much time with a 8-6 job and the marriage which is planned soon. For now I will keep playing all the games and build up experience in story-telling. Maybe I will look into this deeper in the future.

 

[TechCarmin]

Spent about 2 days messing around with daz. What i learned from it was if you don't have a Nvidia card then there is no point even touching that program

 

[amk19]

Spent about 2 days messing around with daz. What i learned from it was if you don't have a Nvidia card then there is no point even touching that program

Yes, if you want to render with iRay. You can also use 3delight which comes with lower graphics quality or just look for a very different renderer like Luxrender. But I don't know if Luxrender needs CUDA/Nvidia.

 

[OhWee]

The Daz Community has embraced Iray. There are a number of people in the Daz ranks that are also supporting 3Delight, but not to the level that Iray is being supported.

3Delight can generate very high quality renders as well (on par with Iray), but it takes some work to get the textures, lighting, etc. where it needs to be. So there's a bit of a learning curve, and indeed there is one for Iray as well. But yeah the Iray GPU rendering thing on Nvidia cuda cores has pretty much made Iray the render engine of choice.

You CAN do Iray renders using CPU only (in fact that's what I do right now), but it's a LOT slower.

 

[watdapakisdis]

Yes, if you want to render with iRay. You can also use 3delight which comes with lower graphics quality or just look for a very different renderer like Luxrender. But I don't know if Luxrender needs CUDA/Nvidia.

Luxrender works best with AMD cards since Nvidia has terrible OpenCL support.

 

[abbott]

Hey.

I got a fairly amateur question here, rendering and coding wise.
I have no prior experience with this, but I do write and have a couple scripts for a few stories.
I believe renders would enhance the experience of it all, as it's easier to convey ideas both visually and theoretically.

So, from what I'm reading here, I'm getting the impression that this is some rather heavy business, concerning the hardware aspect of it all. Should I just not bother with it until I get some decent hardware or are there other, less strenuous options or avenues I could explore in the meantime?

Thanks in advance.

 

[muttdoggy]

Yeah to get the renders done quickly and to get a good basis, don't hold back when getting the Motherboard. You should have at least a quad core , a minimum of 4 gigs ram, and at least 1gb vram video card. Daz's "requirements" are slightly less than what i quoted but the issue is the render engines like 3delight, luxrender, etc will add a bit to the requirements. For example, to use the IRay render engine, you need 64-bit OS running an NVIDIA video card with 4gb vram and cuda compute capability 2.0.
OFC there's workarounds but it's VERY VERY SLOW. I tried a basic IRay of a sphere and it wasn't anything fancy. I had a 2.4 dual core Intel, 4 gigs DDR2 ram, and a GT 630 2 gb. It took me just over an hour to do it. I built a 3.1 dual core AMD with 4 gigs DDR3 ram, and the same GT 630. It saved me 10 minutes for the same render. The issue with IRay?? It was the Nvidia GT 630. OFC it works but it was SLOW. So IRay's not kidding about the requirements.
My recommendation??? At least a hyperthreaded quad or a very fast quad, 8 gigs DDR3 ram, and a 4gb gddr5 video card as a minimum. If you're doing IRay, look for the most cuda cores in an Nvidia gpu that you can get for the money.
EDITED.. Pascal cards (new generation of Nvidia cards) are still not optimized for IRay renders.

 

[amk19]

A 9xx or 10xx generation of Nvidia cards should be good. I am OK with my GTX 970 even tho it has the memory scam. I even turn off the CPU rendering in iRay and leave it completely to the GPU. This way the PC will still be usable for surfing and other basic tasks

 

[watdapakisdis]

As someone rendering with only 8GB of RAM and 4GB VRAM, i'd say the minimum for Iray rendering should be 16GB RAM and 8GB VRAM. 4GB VRAM is only enough for 2 good looking models and decent lights. Anything above that will force Daz Studio to use the CPU. I have to jump through several hoops (convert figure to props, billboards, etc.) just to have 3 or more characters in a single scene.

 

[mmmonsterkill]

Hey, thank you for your feedback. I wasted a lot of time learning Daz, so I will tell you some things which are very important to know imo. It's like, I wished I knew these things right from the beginning.
First of all, you should get familiar with lighting. I assume that you are going to use Iray. Play around with spot lights, place them into the scene, rearrange them, check out the renders. You can play around with commercial Iray light presets which you can get on some of these sites...
Experiment with surfaces. Check out how the figures are built down to the very last bone.
Play around with the sliders in the surfaces tab, place other materials on figures, and make them glass sculptures for example. In this way you will learn a lot about the mechanisms behind this.
One essential thing is the camera. Always use camera in the scene, not only the perspective view. And ALWAYS turn off the camera headlight. Don't even think about turning it on. It's useless and will completely mess up with your renders. The camera is what gives you the "realistic" look. You can also undo movements of the camera which is very handy.
If you want depth of field, you better learn the basics of photography.
I use a focal lenght of 200mm for portraits, which professional photographers also do.
In Parameters->Camera panel, turn on depth of field, then turn on "Near DOF Plane Visibility" and use the "Focal Distance" slider to set the position of the plane. The plane decides the transition between sharp and blurry.
It is not realistic to have the whole scene razor-sharp. The brain will notice and tell that there is something wrong. So use DOF.

Check out Render Settings->Environment. This is one of the most important things. Understand what a dome is, learn the difference between "dome" and "dome and scene" or "scene only" in the "Environment Mode" panel.
TIP: If you are using dome lighting only in the future, use CTRL-L to turn on the helping lights. Otherwise you will see pitch black in the preview window if there are no light sources.

Get some skin shaders like anagenessis and apply them to your figures surface. It will look a thousand percent better just by doing this.

And now a topic which is very important to me: Details.
Try to add as much detail as possible to your figures. Use fiber eyebrows and not the flat brushstrokes which come with the facial texture. For example, these will not create shadows on the face. In real world, eyebrows will throw shadows.
Use the brow remover tool to erase the drawn eyebrows and use oh my brows to apply the fiber. It will look much better.
You can also use fiber eyelashes. It is not a big change compared to the eyebrows but the brain will still notice.
Then, use facial hair like "peach fuzz" this is very important. There is always tiny blond/white hair on human faces.

One of the things I missed at the beggining was the model looking right into the camera.
In case you didn't know, select one eye with the selection tool and go to the "Parameters" tab. There you choose the first entry, the one with the bone. On the right find "Point at" and select your camera. Repeat with the other eye.

Another thing are sliders. Sometimes you have the sliders going from -100 to +100 for example. You pushed it to the maximum in one direction but you need more. Then click on the gear icon that comes on the upper right on every slider and choose "Parameter settings". Uncheck "Use limits" and you are ready to go over 9000.

Now, that's it for now. If you have further questions on a certain topic then let me know. I will try to help.

Now have fun with your renders and let's see the differences between the renders you made before and after applying my tips

Cheers

hey, i have been experimenting on and off every couple of months and then ragequitting, could you explain what rendersettings and lighting values to use, im not sure if i fucked up some kinda setting but it takes like 4 hours of rendering only to see there's not enough light, i tried intensity and luminocity(or whatever its called) but still dark af.

Spoiler: looks like this after 3 hours, thats about the time where i give up

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