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Inpressive graphics in the video
But I went from poser to DAZ, and I still have to look things up. YEt another program to master...
Think a good cartoon will be challenge enough for now.I couldn't agree more about Daz assets being resource-heavy. I'm in the middle of exporting a house environment from Daz to Blender and retexturing it and all the furniture etc. Almost every single item has multiple 4096x4096 texture maps. Even small items like the label on a bottle of wine is a 4096x4096 10mb Jpeg! Just resizing the images maps to 2048x2048 dropped RAM usage for a cycles render by 40% and changing the wood and brick shaders from image maps to procedurals dropped it another 20%.
With figures, just turning down SubD to 1 or 2, turning on Simplify and setting max texture sizes to 2048 without doing any other fiddling means I can easily fit eight or nine figures in a scene without killing my 8gb 1070. I'm lucky if I can get three in a Daz render before Iray drops back to CPU rendering. I've not rendered in Daz for at least six months. The only thing I use it for now is for posing and dressing figures, I do everything else in Blender.
I do love DAZ as a source of assets, but it would be the last place I'd look if doing an animation. Even the number of verts. I used to marvel at how much heavier even tiny items like wine bottles were compared to game mesh. It's like every single item was made for EXTREME closeups or something. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is when speed and memory are an issue.
Even the way mats are attached. Someone was complaining about Linday hair the other day. I happened to be using it recently, and looking at it, it's actually not that heavy, but there were about 30 material zones for it, and each was a new instance of the same 6 or 7 materials containing 2 images. Ended up spending an hour reconfiguring the materials so I didn't have 30 separate instances of normals and 30 instances of alphas attached to one item in a file. I would have no idea how to go about doing that in DAZ or even if that's what DAZ does to it, but I have a feeling they do. My entire scene with multiple people, clothes, hair, objects, environment ended up being half what they said one person and hair took up memory wise.
What method are you using to get stuff into Blender? The bridge has been a disaster for me ever since 8.1 came out. Thought about trying my luck with the diffeomorphic one. I often have to resort to exporting obj in the most dire of circumstances.
Really I know very very little about using DAZ. I can get them made, dressed, and posed, and then it's off to Blender. Materials, presets, lighting? No idea. I usually end up redoing all the node trees myself when I get to the more familiar program. One of these days, I'll get around to learning more about it, but there's so much to learn it's hard to keep up.
What method are you using to get stuff into Blender? The bridge has been a disaster for me ever since 8.1 came out. Thought about trying my luck with the diffeomorphic one. I often have to resort to exporting obj in the most dire of circumstances.
I'm using the Diffeo add-on. The only thing it seems to have issues with (and it's entirely likely this a 'me' problem) is with strand-based dforce hair. Some import fine, some don't take the dforce'd data with them and some are somewhere in between with weird frizzy polylines. It's easily fixed by turning hair tessellations down to 0 in Daz then exporting as a .obj. Converting strand, tube and card style hairs to Blender particle hair works well, but settings need tweaking for each individual hair style and it can take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes for Blender to do the conversion.
Materials convert quite well; I don't usually have to mess around with character skin mats for example, but some hard-surface mats come in overly glossy. The add-on also allows you to merge identical materials on import, which is super-helpful for keeping memory requirements in the sane range.
You can also import morphs and poses, but I don't really use either inside Blender so can't comment on how well they work.
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