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I started playing with DAZ about a year ago. It was my first 3D program experience. I played, but never attempted to do much or even learn much in DAZ. I stopped using DAZ in the spring when I reinstalled Windows, but before that I had discovered one thing I knew for sure would be difficult for me to figure out. That's lighting. If I put a light someplace I could end up with a real mess. more lights more mess. So I'd not add any lights, and basically go with a really boring looking scene. Then at that point a began to lose interest. When I do return to DAZ, at some point, I might work on learning other more basic things and ignore lighting. In fact I think the tech side of learning to to get my computer to render a bit faster might be more useful than anything.
Maybe the most difficult thing for me right now is just getting started again. 😉
I'm interested in knowing what other people find hard to do, or found hard to learn to do at some point.
I am *supposed* to be working on my Visual Novel. The hardest thing for me is actually working on renders for the VN. Instead, I find myself just making pretty art, or ugly art, or so-so art.
I think I suffer from Squirrel Syndrome. I will open Daz...
oh wait... shiny, shiny...
what was I saying?
Tucker, try loading light presets and parenting them to the camera. A lot of lighting presets load to look great from the default camera location, but when you move the camera, you're ditching that great lighting setup. But if you parent the lights to the camera, they'll move along with you whenever you move the camera.
the hardest thing for me is to buy new computer to rendering faster and to shortcut learning process time as now i need more than half hour each time i change something just to see iray image preview for simple image and almost a day for see the result image.
i'm not an artist i just using daz coz i like to learn and to make my brain keep working not for commercial so buying new computer is not my priority@den You can download presets that will reduce the render times by reducing the quality. Render studio IRay is a good one, it has a draught setting for your rendering that will cut down render times (at the cost of final quality) but once the scene is how you want it, you can double click on one of the other settings. Also click on your Daz studio render tab and reduce the resolution till you are ready for the final render. Lower resolution will reduce render times in pretty much every case.
https://zonegfx.com/render-studio-iray/ link for render studio.
Instead of trying to see the IRay preview in the main window, use the Aux Viewport one ( top right tab by default and if you don't see it, go to 'window-> panes-> aux viewport'). Note, with the later versions of Daz studio, if you hit render whilst you have the aux viewport showing the IRay preview, it will not cost you any more time. That is to say the time the computer used to load the IRay preview will go towards the full render. HTH - The more difficult and time consuming renders are indoor scenes with multiple figures, and hair especially can greatly increase render times. As can reflection, and refractions (water, glass etc)
@eelgoo you do surprise me. Not having seen any of your renders I can only surmise that you mean lighting is a problem for you when you are doing some professional looking image. Lighting in IRay is meant to be easy, or at least easier than when using 3DL. Same for other unbiased render engines AND you gave me good simple but sound advice regarding my blender Render. ( Fancy using 'outdoor lighting' for what was sposed to be an indoor scene ) :/As for me, the hardest thing with Daz studio is trying to understand those %^&*ing render settings. Half the time I see a number and don't know if it means seconds, minutes, samples per second and so on.
Yeah, for sure I usually know exactly what lighting I want in any given situation.
Actually getting it is another issue entirely.What really does irritate me is the lack of adequate lighting in some indoor sets.
For me that smacks of laziness on the vendors part.
I need some basic lighting in there so I can at least I can see how I would like the final lighting to be.:0/
@baf-mcnab
😉 I used to be Assistant Stage Manager at a Theatre, & I used to specialise in the Audio Visual areas.
🙂
For indoors I start with a simple plane as an emitter above the scene, but the thing that irritates me with indoor scenes is the times that the vendor doesn't even set up the materials 'properly' for IRay. When every surface has the same glossy settings and that 'default' setting is way too high. Then render times really will suffer and you need the patience of Job just to set them up 'properly'.
I say lighting in IRay "should be easy" because, as you know, it is based on real world physics. For newbies the easiest thing is to load up an HDRI for outdoors and rely on the headlamp for indoors. More experienced users of course will start adding lights here and there to bring an item to the viewers eye more, and so on. But mats for me is where its at, sort those out so nothing in the scene is unrealistically shiny/glossy and the rest is fairly simple.
Last night I was trying to render a woman in a shed (don't ask) and for the life of me I couldn't understand why the spot I was using for a moon light wasn't lighting her. Then I realised that there were two shelves below the window that were blocking the light - Doh, noob mistake 🙂
Lighting for sure. I still use 3DL (3Delight) and most times I simply use a light set up that I got from another 3DL user on here. Sometimes I'll get a little adventurous and add additional lighting to the scene along with the 4 point light setup. Generally, my renders take less than 10 minutes each, however... I am extremely impatient so anything over 5 minutes tends to mean I've screwed up somewhere in my shader setup (another annoying area). While I've learned acceptable skin shading through years of trial and error, I often times forget to tweak ALL of the skin shaders.
Lastly, I find making poses from scratch extremely tedious and generally no fun at all. So more times than not I will start with a pose preset and then tweak from there. Sometimes when I'm feeling a little more lazy than usual I'll opt for using unaltered pose presets in my scenes and renders.
Oh boy, the list would be too long to fit here for me. Ha ha ha.
But since i'm a beginner and i don't use/understand more than 60% of what everything Daz can do and all it's setting, i'm sure there are things i don't know yet that are probably too hard for me to understand.
For me, Lighting is also the things i just don't understand. I even tried at one time really to understand how it work. Reading some tutorial and all. Trying all those "spotlight" gizmo in Daz and using some premade lighting ressource. Nothing work for me. It's like a complete gibberish language to me.
So for now, i'm doing just like what McNab said above. Playing with the default lighting in Iray for outdoor render and playing with the headlamp camera lighting for the inside. It's really basic, but for the hobby/non-professional render i do, it's more than enough for me. I only do render for fun and to do some picture of my fantasy character in my fanfic. Nothing more. ^_^
i guess there would also making animation. I tried a little to read/understand how it is possible to do that in Daz and i completly hit a wall there. Turned back, and ran away as far and as fast as i could. Nuh-uhn! Not for me!
Maybe one day, i'll try to give it a go again, but not right now.One thing though i would like to be able to do but just can't do right now, is how to use "Mesure Metric" and make it work.
I tried downloading it once. Never been able to understand how to make it work. (Where to click, how to get numbers from characters in a scene, ect...
By playing with a primitive object (cube), i understood how to learn a characters height in Daz, but i really wish i could know what are the different size of characters i have.
( Hips, waist, bust, legs lenght, arms lenght, torso lenght, ect..ect..ect...)That's why i would have hope to learn how Mesure Metric work, but i never been able to find any place to would teach me step by step how to make that add-on work and what to do afterward to get mesure from characters.
I only want to get the mesure. I know that add-on can also "make/morph" a character with some imput number in it, but that's not something i want to do.Rank:
What really does irritate me is the lack of adequate lighting in some indoor sets.
You can always remove the roof if you want to flood the scene with light 😉
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