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Still getting the hang of DAZ, but it has limitations, particularly with rendering speed and setting up poses in animation frames, can be a bit difficult sometimes.
In researching Blender, it seems that their rendering is somewhat quicker and posing easier (depending on who you ask).
Anyhow, im wondering how much quicker is the rendering, is it such a small amount of time its not worth the hassle to setup scenes in DAZ just to import to Blender to finish. If the time difference is tiny, it wouldnt be worth it.
Ultimately, im thinking of using DAZ for setting up an animations initial frame inside DAZ with daz assets, and an abundance of pre-existing poses. Then import to blender to animate the rest of the frames (where its "supposed" to be easier to pose) and then render the animation in Blender (where its "supposed" to be quicker).Is this a good approach or is the time difference negligible?
This is a matter of much controversy.
However, you can compare yourself. There is a great asset transfer tool:
Diffeomorphic
The official daz3d forum has a topic dedicated to this tool.
In my experience - Blender is better for both animation and rendering.... The only problem is experience.@bulka Excellent and informative link, thanks for that. It will definitely come in handy if i choose to go down that route. Although it doesnt address the speed issue.
I'm thinking since it will be animation frames, the render wont need to be so "pristine" since it will be in motion, and blur to the naked eye anyway. Curious if I would be able to get by with just the evee render which is much quicker, and still get good enough results.
🙂
I did not do this, but I was interested - I will give a couple of links to discussions:
Blender vs DAZ Studio IRAY rendering speed?
Render times. Daz vs Blender
Render Speed, physics comparison
and a couple of interesting links....
To the Blender users
Why use Blender to render?Render speed is limited by hardware either with Blender or DS and while $2000+ would be nice to throw at a 4090ti the rule of thumb seems to be that those with "god-like" rigs seldom actually make artworks, being more interested in FPS or just boasting to others about what they've got.
Wealth and ego seem diametrically opposed to having artistic talent... just look at the NFT bullshit.In particular, I don't think it's a problem to choose between Daz or Blender.
Although both are free, Daz lacks plugins and scripts (because of its NULL information on both the SDK -from a lot of years ago...- and its poorly documented pseudo json crap...). Blender, on the other hand, is open source: There are plenty of plugins and scripts in Python, which is a language that many people master: even Autodesk uses it. (Some are paid and others are free, for Blender I mean...)
Well known is my animosity towards Iray. With Blender, to be honest, I have never set out to render with Cycles or Eeve.
But we are in a website of...Warez?... Normally, I use Cinema 4D for renders, which is simpler than Maya, and they have more optimized render engines like Arnold, V-ray, Redshift, Octane or the slow , but excellent, Maxwell, among others.
I think it is crucial to be able to choose the render engine that best suits your workflow, hardware and results.
And, for animation, don't let anyone touch my dear MotionBuilder: Much better than Maya.
You have to be empirical: Try and discard. 🙂@frank22 Yes, better hardware will always help somewhat. But in researching this, a common theme is that anyone who upgraded to new hardware was still not satisfied. If a render before upgrading took 10 hours and after upgrading still took many hours, just slightly less time, it doesnt justify the cost in my eyes. Iray produces some beautiful renders, but its a dog when it comes to speed, and relies on NVIDIA (the same company that makes iray, so they supply the problem and the solution to make $$$, so its doubtful that problem will go away )
@abad I wouldn't choose one over the other. I would still keep DAZ for setting up the initial frame. The abundance of assets and pre-made poses make it so simple to get to create the first frame and just animate it from that point elsewhere. Ill have to look into some of the other ones you mentioned. Theres also this new one ive been looking at that looks promising (https://cascadeur.com/), I havent tried it yet though, but from reading it it seems to be able to do what im looking to do.In my opinion, it's pretty simple, the more control you have over the render settings, the more control you have over render speed and the faster it becomes. The less settings you can adjust, the less control you have over render speed.
That is true. If Iray had better settings for rendering animation frames I could be satisfied with it. But it doesnt allow for motion blurring, etc. Great for static images, but not so great for animation speed. I mean yeah the frames still look good in animation, but it doesnt NEED to, id prefer certain frames to be less quality and output quicker. Now im wondering if theres a plugin or other script that will enable to mark certain frames in an animation to use one render settings, and other frames to use a lesser render setting. Still would be extra work though to set which frames get which setting, but I suppose it could be done.
@gts6 3 weeks before... https://zonegfx.com/forums/topic/new-toy/
Cascadeur's problem (and Blender's with Diffeomorphic...) is how to get back to Daz... and for that, you need, like it or not, MotionBuilder.
Also, keep in mind that an animated .duf or a .bvh is specific to a given character. Even the old Aniblocks... Normally, you have to do it on a base Genesis. If you change to a different character, their proportions are never the same. For example, the measure of an arm, etc...@abad I wouldnt really need to get it back into DAZ from Blender (or whichever other is used). Just using DAZ for ease of use in creating the first frame (assests & poses).
I just finally tried cascadeur yesterday, and its import loses a lot in translation as far as the look (as im sure all the other options also do) but this one might need a lot more tweaking than the other ones, so ill have to play around with it some. Still not sure how to use it properly yet.
The Iray implementation in DAZ is gimped on purpose. It renders a lot slower than the commercial version(for Maya).
I also can't imagine doing any of the heavy lifting in DAZ itself. For me, it's simply a character creator. Everything gets exported over to Maya, with either Arnold or V-Ray as my renderers of choice(asset/scene-dependent).
Not much experience with blender...
@Flatshade Interesting, about different versions of iray. Now, I know there's no "supported" way through the DAZ menus to change render engines (other than the ones it comes with), but i'm wondering if theres some hack of a way to use commercial version of iray, or some other render engine completely. That would solve so many problems for so many people.
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