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After over a year of learning my way around Daz and trying to write a VN with 3D environments, these are the problems that I'm so sick of wrestling with:
1. Backgrounds. Fucking backgrounds. Let's say I can manage to find a house or apartment. I need a 360 degree background. I need the background to look like a suburban neighborhood. I can't use a stock photo because there are windows to the west, east, north, and south, not just one window where I can throw in a stock photo. So I look for HDRIs. All of the HDRIs are done in places like roads, sidewalks, parks, fields, etc. These are fine if you want to make a render of someone in a park, or in a car driving down the road. But if you want to create a render of a restaurant with the road a reasonable distance from the restaurant as you look out the window, good luck with that. If you want a rural setting, you might be able to find something with a road that looks like a driveway, but there's gonna be a road out the back door. If you want a landscape around the house, you're gonna have a scene like your house is built in the middle of a public park. I've been reduced to driving around town trying to find vacant lots to do 360 degree photos so my house environments look like they're in an actual neighborhood. And if I want to do a second story viewpoint, I'd need to go in the middle of the lot and rent a cherry bucket to give the background a second floor perspective.
2. Having to be constantly preoccupied with reducing render times. Half of the tutorials are about this. Even though I have a GPU that can slay any triple A title at 1440, I have to hide everything that isn't seen by the lens and use a culling camera. I have to save the scene, shut it down, kill Daz in task manager, reload, then render to make it 20 minutes rather than an hour and a half. I need to take three 360 degree photos at three different exposure levels for an HDRI, and then combine them in PS or Gimp, making sure I have a specific angle and omit the chair the character interacts with. It's so fucking tedious and it takes away from creativity.
3. The lack of actual house environments. There's nice houses you can get in Blender, interior and exterior included. Very rare with Daz. You can't find something with both an interior and exterior. If you find a so-called house, you get the kitchen, dining room, and living room. No bedroom that goes with the set. Forget about a bathroom. There are very few comprehensive houses that are made to fit together. Avril House is the only one I've found that achieves that, and there's no exterior.
4. Animation. Fuggetaboutit with Daz. It's dogshit, unless you like your hands and feet to constantly wiggle even though they're "pinned", not to mention all the other issues.
Daz is fantastic for character creation and clothes, hair, etc. That's it. This whole endeavor, from program to program, pipeline to pipeline, is in the stone age. The only way forward is a PhD in Blender I suppose.
Your post is a roundabout way of saying, "use blender" for just about everything. Like you wrote, DS is good for single scenes and character enhancement (and then exporting the characters into blender).
There are a lot of bits here. Some ideas...
- For rendering faster, make sure you have an actual GPU. I use an older NVIDIA RTX 2070 GPU, and it seems to rock the renders just fine. If you only have Intel or some non-RTX brand, you'll end up relying on your CPU, which means it will take foooooorrrrreeeeeevvvveeeerrrr....
- For backgrounds, HDRIs are nice indeed, since they solve lighting to some extent as well. There are lots of decent HDRIs online, you just have to know where to look to get good ones (like all the free ones here: https://polyhaven.com/hdris ) You can also make your own HDRIs with a smartphone and the right app (like this one for the iPhone: https://hdreye.app/ ) PS: A long enough selfie stick and a ladder short enough to handle can get you what you need for that second-floor look - second stories are only 3-4 meters up off the ground; a 2-meter ladder and a 1 meter selfie-stick can do all of the elevation for you.
- Usually, I don't worry about matching interiors and exteriors, as long as I can get the doors and windows to line up. To do that, I kitbash the interiors using room kits (there are quite a few to be had on the site) so the doors and windows line up with whatever exterior I chose. I have buckets if iray textures to match up the walls, floors, baseboards, etc. Only have to create the rooms once, and I can always re-use them, so...
- DS and Poser suck at animation. I don't do animation, so it doesn't bother me, but yeah, if you do only animation, Blender is going to be miles better.
HTH a little.
I made a LOT of those and it might be my tutorial that you find. These aren't true HDRI's. They're panoramas made with Google street view then faked in Photoshop to add light sources. I also did ones indoors from the 3D walkthroughs used by many stores.
Little tip : for optimized render times, once satisfied with my setup and test previews, I usually render directly to file with no preview window.
It's hard to even know where to start.
Just off the top of my head, the gizmo (the translate/rotate/scale tool). So many other 3d packages -- Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, ZBrush, you name it, all of them have their version of a gizmo. Most of them have had one for decades, and they all work basically fine without major issues.
Meanwhile, the DAZ take on the gizmo is one of the clunkiest, laggiest pieces of junk I've ever encountered by a large margin. I've lost track of how often I click-dragged a translation arrow just for DAZ to decide "Oh, you actually wanted to drag the hand beneath this gizmo, right? Sure, let's move that hand around while everything stutters trying to calculate the IK for this operation you totally meant to do. Then you can undo that and wait a bit for that operation to finish. And then you can try selecting the gizmo again. Have fun! Try not to blow a gasket!"
3D gizmos seems like they should be a fully solved problem, but somehow it's not, just for this one program.
Rank:This post is golden.... I'll have to digest it more when I get back from work... but this community is awesome!
Thanks guys, in advance!
Rank:Google Earth would have the same problems that I encounter with most HDRIs: they're all in the middle of a road or a park or a sidewalk. Street view doesn't let you go into a yard, and therefore it doesn't allow for a convincing 360 degree background. One example of an HDRI that almost works is called Strutgart Suburbs on Poly Haven. It's taken from a driveway, which makes it look convincing when looking out of a living room window or any room with the windows facing the front of the house. It's far enough away from the street to look like the house is in the right place. However, the HDRI photo was taken by someone who was next to the house, so if you have a bedroom on the opposite side of the house with a window facing what should be a backyard, it looks like your house was built a foot away from the other house. So one can only take renders from certain angles.
If one is doing something like a VN that requires shots from different angles in an environment such as a house, this doesn't work. It's not about one render or only renders from a certain angle, ya know?
I wish creators would make more circular full backgrounds such as the one that comes with the Scandanavian A-Frame house, then give you a full skydome behind that. With something like that, I could use my culling camera with an interior lighting HDRI for ambient light, then add whatever lighting I deem appropriate. I wouldn't be bound by the lighting provided by an HDRI, and my culling camera can could do its job in terms of reducing render times. Another thing that would be enormously helpful while using a culling camera would be a mirror that spot renders the reflection from whatever camera angle you're using. This way, you eliminate another problem with culling cameras: the reflections in a mirror are such that you only see the HDRI rather than the opposite wall or whatever the mirror should show you in the background in a real life situation, if that makes sense.
Getting a decent outdoor HDRI that would be useful from inside a house would be really tough to do, even if you could find one commercially. The stick-and-ladder-in-a-vacant-lot method to make your own is the only way that would work, IMO.
Your best bet overall would be as you mentioned - get some 360-degree curved props with transparency masks that show houses and etc, then a skydome behind it. You could almost stitch together some simulacrum of that if you're doing a suburban thing: take photos from the windows for the front and back, then kitbash some side-of-house pics from two different houses from the sides. Assign each to a curved plane, and then put it to work.
Seems like a commercial opportunity, TBT.
Rank:I bet it would be a good commercial opportunity. I can't be the only one experiencing this problem.
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