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Shortcut for newbies to get best results

PauloCoePauloCoe Posts: 34
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hello everyone,

I do a lot of photoshop montages and now would love to add some 3d models. So I read a lot about daz3d and all it's addons. Before spending money on things I don't need I would like to ask you if this is the right approach.

My goal: get "realistic" renders of people to use in my photoshop montage

Approach: buying the right presets/adons so that I don't need to become a daz3d expert :)

Things on my list:

If I would have all this, I just would need to use the model, adding the skin, poses, expression, hair, activate the BL Master, loading an HDRI image to the environment and could push "rendering". Right?

I read also about UBER Environement but I don't really know where this comes into it. I wouldn't need this right?

Anything else I would need, take care of to even improve the quality of the rendering? Will this give "realistic" renders? 

Thanks a lot for your help. My goal is really to find the tools/models so that it's very easy to get realistic results. And I will take it from there to photoshop, cause that's where I feel at home :)
 

Comments

  • fastbike1fastbike1 Posts: 4,078

    This is no different than having a garage full of woodworking tools. If you don't know how to use them, it won't matter to the end result. 

    "Realistic" results is a can of worms. None of us know what that means to you. Look at the Daz Galleries. You will find a wide range of results.

    IBL Master is not really applicable or necessary for what you want. Finally, did you get good at Photoshop by just buying the software and some plugins/brushes?

  • PauloCoePauloCoe Posts: 34

    Thanks for your reply. I know what you mean, but to use the photoshop example.

    If I think back, when we were working with Photoshop C2 (or earlier) it took hours to really cut out a woman with long hair in a background with lots of details. In the latest version of photoshop (I think since CS5) you get decent results by using the built-in tools. So the developer made all the tools much smarter, sometimes it does feel like magic cause things are so easy to use these days. Think on the apps that do face-swapping, then years ago this was quite a task on photoshop. Today a ten-year-old can do it by simply put some buttons. So even though I am new to daz3d and 3d, in general, I think similar things happened here. The tools got "smarter" and it takes less effort to get good results out of the box. 

    What do I mean with realistic? Well, close to the real world. Real people. 

  • thebiggydiggythebiggydiggy Posts: 26

    >What do I mean with realistic? Well, close to the real world. Real people. 

    Preset poses and expressions are generally sub-par quality. Either they are not made for the figure you are using (unless you use default Gen 8 Female which has a whole host of other non-realism problems), or whoever made them didn't do a particularly good job. Go ahead and buy one, try applying a smile, turn the character 90 degrees and check the lips squishing against the teeth as they would in a real smile. I guarantee they don't and your character will tumble head first into the uncanny valley.

    Don't buy HDRIs. There are countless supremely high-quality unclipped HDRIs available all over the internet for free.

    That hair (as all hair in Daz) will use haircards. Likely ones generated with fibermesh. They will not approach realism unless an inordinate amount of effort and resources are thrown at the render and post-processing.

    BL Master will make your life harder for zero benefit to realism.

    You don't seem to be looking for tools so much as a miracle, unless your definition of realism differs from mine.

  • Dim ReaperDim Reaper Posts: 687
    edited August 2018

    What you need really depends on what type of pictures you want to create.  Full figure images vs portrait style images need different approaches.  For portraits, the skin of the model, the expression and the position of the eyes is more important.  For full figure renders, the posing of the body is more important as anything even slightly out of place is obvious, even though people may not know why.  For both the lighting plays a big role.

    I think that what Fastbike was getting at in terms of "Realism" is that in 3D art there are a lot of opinions on what is "realistic".  If you look at various 3D human faces, you can see that there is a style to each one and a face can be "realistic" without being a "normal human" shape.  It can also be argued that the characters in animated films such as Beowulf, Toy Story 3, Brave, Shrek 3 and so on are "realistic."  So you may need to look at different styles of work to give you an idea of what to aim for, and then develop your own style.

    My advice would be: Don't spend too much at the beginning.  You can get some very good portrait results by creating a primitive (Create > Primitive > Plane) and using it as a backdrop, then place your figure in front of it.  Set the camera focal length to between 85-100.  Rotate the figure slightly to one side along the Y-axis (so that the figure isn't staring full on to the camera).  Set the default render settings and render.  The default iray lighting setup in Daz Studio is actually pretty good.  Obviously you can get better results with more complex lighting setups, but it's a good (and cheap) place to start experimenting.Here is the first portrait that I did in Daz Studio using the default render settings and lights that I just described above:

    It's not going to fool anyone into thinking this is a photograph of a real person, but for a default setup it's a reasonable result.

    That said, I would recommend getting one of these lighting sets:
    https://www.daz3d.com/render-studio-iray

    https://www.daz3d.com/li-incandescent--portrait-lighting-for-iray

    https://www.daz3d.com/boss-pro-light-set-for-portraits-promos

    As they all make it fairly easy to get good results (different lighting and cameras), and the first two come with easy to use changeable render settings.

     

    I'd also recommend looking at the galleries here at Daz3D and at Rendo.  When you see an image that is close to what you are wanting to achieve, take a look at the products that were used.  Right now the "Top Recent Images" section of the galleries here has some realistic renders, but you can see very different interpretations of "realism" there.

    I also think that the most important thing is to have fun, enjoy the learning curve and definitely keep copies of all of your work - it is great to look back at your first renders and then compare them to your latest ones and see just how much you have improved over time.

     

    EDIT:  You might find this thread useful: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/74245/most-realistic-looking-hair-in-the-store-for-iray

    Post edited by Dim Reaper on
  • PauloCoePauloCoe Posts: 34

    Thanks thebiggydiggy. But why this?

    thebiggydiggy said:

    BL Master will make your life harder for zero benefit to realism.

    Thanks Dim Reaper. Thanks for your inputs. They were especially helpful. I like your portrait and I hope you don't mind, but I downloaed your image and did some quick photoshop work on it, just to see for myself, if I could ad some more realisme to it for myself. 

  • Dim ReaperDim Reaper Posts: 687
    lyocell_93ef211f43 said:
     

    Thanks Dim Reaper. Thanks for your inputs. They were especially helpful. I like your portrait and I hope you don't mind, but I downloaed your image and did some quick photoshop work on it, just to see for myself, if I could ad some more realisme to it for myself. 

     

    No problem. Hope you manage to get the "look" that you want from Daz Studio.

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