if i take my asset to blender to rending will it have a good improve or its just about the set we use make pic rending better?
which rending is better?
- Thread starter QQ
- Start date
- May 3, 2018
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So there are several things that help a render.
What makes a render good? Well quality of the art (shaders, character design, clothes design, poses, even lighting is really important), quality of the render, and how fast it renders.
I know I port over to blender for my renders because I can make better shaders, I can render both faster and a higher quality than what I can get with daz, and I like the animation system much better. Plus it allows me to better sculpt and reshape the character to my needs. I recommend exporting as 2011 binary FBX format.
However, I can get away with this because 1 I have a good idea on how to set up a scene, making custom material shaders for the skin, understanding the importance of posing and lighting, and the right render settings. With daz all of this is taken care for you, you can still make adjustments, but it is more of a plug and play experience while blender takes set up.
For skin shaders, the new Blender 2.8 uses the principle shader instead of the strange mesh of shaders before, but for some reason, it sets metallic all the way on, and it has issues setting up the eye shaders. I also find that a roughness of 0.6 is good for daz like images, or even less rough (though this is still rather shiny) 0.7 for a more matte disney like character, and I use 0.65 for a natural but still noticable sheen look to skin. (I also do tricks with procedural skin texturing that would be hard to explain)
for lighting check this out
As for render settings, cycle seems to beat out Daz's iRay, in both quality and less time, but I believe people are able to use something like octane engine for daz if they want a better engine, iRay is moving to be the industry standard, but it is designed for real time, not top quality. And cycle isn't better out of the box. I find I have to set light path bounces to max out at 4, light filtering to 0.01, direct light filtering disabled aka 0.0, and indirect to max 5.0 for indoor scenes or 1.0 for outdoor scens to reduce noise and brightess, I also don't use the standard path tracing, which is fast, but branch path tracing which is slower but produces better lighting and shadows, I have it branch 3 times, or 2 if I want fast or 4 if I want movie quality. I never go more than 4 otherwise it takes a good day for some renders, but 3 I can do in 30 minutes, and 2 in like 5 minutes, basically you raise the render time by the power of branches, so it easily gets stupid big. bringing light bounces down from 12 (pixar/disney quality for rooms light by ambiant light, which is stupid high for most cases) to 4 (the balance point, lower than this and transparent things start to have a hard time allowing light through them, the turn black). I set the AA count to 40 for a quick test, 100 for a better quality test, and 150 to 200 for final product (assuming you are using the denoiser for all of these to help make the image final product ready). With normal path tracing, if you want a faster but less accurate render, I find 60, 150, and 300 match the test-preview-final quality settings, however, I also find that these numbers are not fixed, but depend on how many light sources you have in your room, the more light sources (usually lots) the more you have to increse the samples to allow more opportunities to hit a light source.
1 issue with porting to blender is that you don't get all the corrective shape morphs. you can port them out if you want, but you have to automate them yourself which considering I think there is almost 12 hundred, its a lot of freaking work. Anotehr issue is, for nsfw character with privates, daz handles it kinda weird. So when adding genitals, the mesh gets modified, as well as having 1 or 2 other mesh that are suppose to wrap ontop of the privates to allow for texture transitioning. This does not work well in blender, so I often have to unify the mesh, there are quite a few hoops to jump through, but one of these days I need to make a guide on how to do this.
You can also sculpt your characters in blender, and port them back to daz, but there are a few tricks and gotcha's, so again, i'll have to write a dedicated guide on how to do that.
as for shaders, I do have one Skin shader I shared online, but I need to overhaul it with my more modern version that is simpler and runs faster, but has less features.
but in general yes, I think if you had two people, one competent with daz, another with blender, the blender render would beat out the daz render, but it also depends on preference, if you want something that doesn't look like it was made with daz, either more or less realistic, then blender I think wins.
Please note: I am one of the more heavier Blender user on these forums so I may be a bit biased.
What makes a render good? Well quality of the art (shaders, character design, clothes design, poses, even lighting is really important), quality of the render, and how fast it renders.
I know I port over to blender for my renders because I can make better shaders, I can render both faster and a higher quality than what I can get with daz, and I like the animation system much better. Plus it allows me to better sculpt and reshape the character to my needs. I recommend exporting as 2011 binary FBX format.
However, I can get away with this because 1 I have a good idea on how to set up a scene, making custom material shaders for the skin, understanding the importance of posing and lighting, and the right render settings. With daz all of this is taken care for you, you can still make adjustments, but it is more of a plug and play experience while blender takes set up.
For skin shaders, the new Blender 2.8 uses the principle shader instead of the strange mesh of shaders before, but for some reason, it sets metallic all the way on, and it has issues setting up the eye shaders. I also find that a roughness of 0.6 is good for daz like images, or even less rough (though this is still rather shiny) 0.7 for a more matte disney like character, and I use 0.65 for a natural but still noticable sheen look to skin. (I also do tricks with procedural skin texturing that would be hard to explain)
for lighting check this out
As for render settings, cycle seems to beat out Daz's iRay, in both quality and less time, but I believe people are able to use something like octane engine for daz if they want a better engine, iRay is moving to be the industry standard, but it is designed for real time, not top quality. And cycle isn't better out of the box. I find I have to set light path bounces to max out at 4, light filtering to 0.01, direct light filtering disabled aka 0.0, and indirect to max 5.0 for indoor scenes or 1.0 for outdoor scens to reduce noise and brightess, I also don't use the standard path tracing, which is fast, but branch path tracing which is slower but produces better lighting and shadows, I have it branch 3 times, or 2 if I want fast or 4 if I want movie quality. I never go more than 4 otherwise it takes a good day for some renders, but 3 I can do in 30 minutes, and 2 in like 5 minutes, basically you raise the render time by the power of branches, so it easily gets stupid big. bringing light bounces down from 12 (pixar/disney quality for rooms light by ambiant light, which is stupid high for most cases) to 4 (the balance point, lower than this and transparent things start to have a hard time allowing light through them, the turn black). I set the AA count to 40 for a quick test, 100 for a better quality test, and 150 to 200 for final product (assuming you are using the denoiser for all of these to help make the image final product ready). With normal path tracing, if you want a faster but less accurate render, I find 60, 150, and 300 match the test-preview-final quality settings, however, I also find that these numbers are not fixed, but depend on how many light sources you have in your room, the more light sources (usually lots) the more you have to increse the samples to allow more opportunities to hit a light source.
1 issue with porting to blender is that you don't get all the corrective shape morphs. you can port them out if you want, but you have to automate them yourself which considering I think there is almost 12 hundred, its a lot of freaking work. Anotehr issue is, for nsfw character with privates, daz handles it kinda weird. So when adding genitals, the mesh gets modified, as well as having 1 or 2 other mesh that are suppose to wrap ontop of the privates to allow for texture transitioning. This does not work well in blender, so I often have to unify the mesh, there are quite a few hoops to jump through, but one of these days I need to make a guide on how to do this.
You can also sculpt your characters in blender, and port them back to daz, but there are a few tricks and gotcha's, so again, i'll have to write a dedicated guide on how to do that.
as for shaders, I do have one Skin shader I shared online, but I need to overhaul it with my more modern version that is simpler and runs faster, but has less features.
but in general yes, I think if you had two people, one competent with daz, another with blender, the blender render would beat out the daz render, but it also depends on preference, if you want something that doesn't look like it was made with daz, either more or less realistic, then blender I think wins.
Please note: I am one of the more heavier Blender user on these forums so I may be a bit biased.
The short answer is no. DAZ materials are designed for DAZ not blender. Also having been in the amateur 3d software game for years before I found DAZ, I can testify as well as Saki_Sliz nothing transfers from one to the other as easy as you would think, you nearly need a degree in rocket science to get everything to work. I use 3ds max but I also use blender for a few things without knowing a great deal about the later, but I can tell you when it comes to messing with any DAZ asset in either program they both have their pros and cons, and neither will do everything you want.
If you want to make pretty nude girls in a bedroom use DAZ. If you want to learn how to use blender forget about the pretty girl in the bedroom for a year, blender, 3dsmax, Maya are all whole learning curves themselves.
Movie software is the same, I use two to make my animations as neither do all I want.
If you want to make pretty nude girls in a bedroom use DAZ. If you want to learn how to use blender forget about the pretty girl in the bedroom for a year, blender, 3dsmax, Maya are all whole learning curves themselves.
Movie software is the same, I use two to make my animations as neither do all I want.
