Just starting to learn to use daz, render I just made

[lamont Sanford]

yeah it has it's own texture. The picture was just a quick goof I put together so the flaws in it arent really a bother.

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/grac ... ?item=4753

[Ehlanna]

yeah it has it's own texture. The picture was just a quick goof I put together so the flaws in it arent really a bother.

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/grac ... ?item=4753

It's quite an early product, but still should be ok ... very strange indeed!

[TheBrain]

As you say, the only difference you'll get between 32- and 64-bit versions is addressable memory. More memory equating to more complex geometry in the scene, which means more figures, props, etc.
Depending on what you need/want the final image for you can get some pretty decent results from the native DAZ Studio render engine (3Delight) with just using the standard, in-built lights - distant lights, spot lights, etc. What Uber Environment does is provide a means of generating the ambient light you get in real life with light being bounced around off all surfaces. You can also use a HDRI (actually , technically, I think it's just a LDRI) which will act as a light source. What Reality does is act as a clever interface between DAZ Studio and the open source unbiased render engine LuxRender. What that means is that Reality will take your DAZ scene, have a damned good stab at material conversion (you can manually tweak) before passing all that on to LuxRender. Where LuxRender scores is the fact that it is unbiased, which means it treats lights like lights. Sounds obvious but - that means no need to try and get ambient lighting to match real life, LuxRender does that because light is treated like light, it will generate ambience automatically. If it is there in the scene it will cause shadows or cast shadows - because in real life light will always cause shadows to be cast (in DAZ you can turn that off on a light-by-light basis), and if you have something in the scene it will cast shadows because that is what things do when hit by light! The downside of all this are the re-thinking of your lighting policy/style, a need to tweak materials in Reality, time - Reality renders can be lengthy. Upsides are the fact you can pause and resume your renders as and when you like, plus you can network your renders for more speed.
In my view, Reality/LuxRender are another tool in the box, to be used at the appropriate time. Not all my renders are done via Reality (in fact not many are!) as I can still produce output I am happy with using the 'vanilla' tools build in to DAZ Studio.

Ah, I didn't know there even was an interface to LuxRender. But that totally explains the long rendering time. Plus it doesn't really change anything about what I said, it still means less complex lighting results in lower render times (which I might add would go for pretty much any renderer). While I can see the appeal of physically based rendering, I think that if you spend some more time familiarizing yourself with the tools daz offers you (including the shader builder/mixer), you can get very decent results. And yes, those are "tricks" compared to what is more or less "real" in LuxRender, but then you can look at realtime games like Crysis which are full of such tricks and yet look better than many raytraced renders.

An example of one such a trick I use a lot is ambient light (in this case even without ambient occlusion, basically it just adds light to every point in the scene). I threw together a simple ambient light in the shader builder, which I use to get rid of 'hard' shadows, which in my opinion gives a render a more natural look. And it basically does nothing to my rendering time. Here's an example:
100% directional light (with 10% soft shadow, which kinda messes up the shadow on the ground): http://uppix.net/b/8/a/1f4a222fcb3cc9b2b2050d4f5b127.png
70% directional light, 30% ambient light: http://uppix.net/0/d/1/fad11ca9904fb186e51a38f3f87e0.png
I'll also render it with my ambient light which does include AO, but I'm guessing that'll take a little while because of the hair :P.

Edit: Here it is: http://uppix.net/d/8/9/e60daaa82cc88ed6 ... 6bc029.png (20 minutes on 3 cores, not even as bad as I imagined it would be )

[lamont Sanford]

familiarizing yourself with the tools daz offers you (including the shader builder/mixer

I have been toying with the settings on reality 2.0 and tried it with use open cl checked and wow what a difference in speed, it only takes a fraction of the time.
As for the shader mixer there in lies a problem. I downloaded daz a long time ago and never really used it until recently, in that time the evaluation period of shader mixer has expired. in daz if you try to register it now it just sends you to the products pages as it seems daz is more interested in pushing daz 4. so unless someone has a seriel number they are willing to share for it I cant use it

[TheBrain]

familiarizing yourself with the tools daz offers you (including the shader builder/mixer

I have been toying with the settings on reality 2.0 and tried it with use open cl checked and wow what a difference in speed, it only takes a fraction of the time.
As for the shader mixer there in lies a problem. I downloaded daz a long time ago and never really used it until recently, in that time the evaluation period of shader mixer has expired. in daz if you try to register it now it just sends you to the products pages as it seems daz is more interested in pushing daz 4. so unless someone has a seriel number they are willing to share for it I cant use it

As Ehlanna mentioned before, you can still pick up DS 4 pro for free (http://www.daz3d.com/i/shop/itemdetails/?item=13176) until the 29th. As far as I know DS4 works fine with V4 if you want to stick to using that. But you can also fit a lot of stuff to Genesis with the autofit tool (also included). It also includes the shader mixer/builder, but I should stress that those are quite advanced tools that require you to be at least a little bit familiar with rendering concepts.
Of course it all comes down to the way you want to work, if you simply don't want to spend too much time thinking about how to make things look good, I'd say Reality is a decent tool (especially if you have a good GPU to speed it up with opencl, which I guess you do :P). And especially things like glass and water would be relatively easy in LuxRender compared to doing that in Daz (there's a bathtub render I tried with daz somewhere in the big sexy girls thread, which took way too much effort and rendering time...).
But on the other side, if you are bothered about rendering times, there are definitely ways to make things look good in daz as well.

[lamont Sanford]

The thing with d4 is that yeah it's free but I have a feeling that alot of the stuff I have gotten my hands on will no longer work anymore (I may be wrong) and I do not have the money to buy all the various downloads.

[TheBrain]

The thing with d4 is that yeah it's free but I have a feeling that alot of the stuff I have gotten my hands on will no longer work anymore (I may be wrong) and I do not have the money to buy all the various downloads.

Well, clothes and objects and stuff will work fine. Morphs for V4 obviously only work for V4 (which as I mentioned you can still use instead of Genesis). Other things like plugins may depend on whether they are updated, but I think if that's the case you can reset the download (or have DAZ Support reset it?) so you can download the version for DS4. I think that only if you want to switch to using genesis you'll need some additional stuff (the morph bundle is pretty much a necessity I think...).
Then again, it's free, I don't think there's an issue with having both DS3 and DS4 installed, so there's nothing to lose except maybe some of your time. And even if you decide to not use it now, you'll have it for if you want to use it in the future.

[lamont Sanford]

I downloaded daz 4 just now, got to play around with it when I get a chance.

[piirus]

Anyone have any recommendations for where to find poses or texture files to make things more realistic? I'm learning as I go.

PM me with any info. Thanks!

[Ehlanna]

There's a lot of good free stuff out there, most for Gen 4 (Michael and Victoria 4) based stuff, but an increasing amount for Genesis stuff. Have a stroll through sharecg and renderosity, amongst others.

[fleet]

most-digital-creations dot com has a LOT of free poses.
Also check the DAZ forums General Freepozitory http://forum.daz3d.com/viewforum.php?f= ... b6cc2a7ba6

I found you can use poses made for generation 3 characters (Aiko 3, Victoria 3, Micheal 3) on Generation 4 characters (M4, V4). Some minor tweaking might be required.

Sometime a poor appearing texture can be improved by changing the lighting.

[piirus]

I'm guessing that I've installed something wrong. I thought i had put M4 and V4 in but I'm not finding it.

[Ehlanna]

The figures (the .cr2 files) should be in a folder hierarchy of content/runtime/libraries/character/DAZ People - where that actually goes will depend on where you told the installer where your content folder was. I suspect that it will be in (depending on OS): documents/DAZ 3D/Studio/My Library.
To access the content from within DS4, you will need to tell it where the Poser runtime is (that will be the folder that CONTAINS the runtime folder). I can't check, but I think you need to press F2 to get up the folder options dialog (or use the Preferences menu option under ... um, FIle?)

[DiTo]

Can someone tell me what this discussion has to do with this topic? I thought it was about sexy girls.

[Greebo]

Folk are talking about using Daz 3D, Duchess, which is what the OP used to produce the render he mentioned in the topic header.