Your pipline after DAZ 3D? Carrara? 3DSmax? Maya?
Fetito
Posts: 481
Hey, what do you do with your DAZ Studio stuff after you rigged everything? Do you export it to Carrara, 3Ds Max, Maya to render it with an external program?
I am curious an excited about the 3D world. *drooling on keyboard*
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
iClone
Wendy, what do you use iClone for? Rendering? Game mechanics?
easy answer, click on my sigline........................... you have been warned
(though I only use premade Daz content from studio, if I model and rig something it is via Carrara)
I render in DAZ Studio.
@wendy♥catz: your videos are really psycodellic :P
I Render in Daz Studo using 3Delight with or without UberEnviornment, otherwise render in LuxRender via Reality or export to Blender to render in Cycles. PovRay and Octane are also available as export rendering options for Daz Studio, as is a standalone 3Delight but with their restricted license policy.
I use plain old 3delight in DAZ Studio. I'm not trolling your thread, I just wanted to explain why you may get that answer from a few people.
I don't have the machine time to render in Luxus or Octane or the money to farm out renders online, and it's apparently quite difficult to get skin shaders to look their best in those engines (judging by others' renders and their results on skin vs. metal, glass and water). I finish a product about every two weeks, and every product has to have a minimum of one render at 2000x2600 and four at 1000x1300, and that's not counting small test renders that themselves take time. I have a maximum of two days to commit to the average product's renders if I'm going to make a living (less on a face morph set, more on a big multi-product pack; the Mermaid sets took two weeks, but they were a special case). That's just the hard facts.
If I were going to export, I would probably try Blender first, since I'm familiar with some aspects of its interface from my modeling use of it. Max and/or Maya are "Someday, maybe never" propositions, not just because of the cost of their pro licenses (My renders are commercial promos for my meshing/rigging/texturing projects, so "student versions" no longer exist for me) but because of Autodesk's "tentacles of doom" approach to DRM. I would go to Modo before either of them because of its history of being used with DS.
None of these will happen soon, because the idea of redoing 100 material setups per render is daunting enough all by itself. It's very seldom that the minimalist "lady in a dress on a plain background" or "primitive objects on a table" renders I see as advertisements for engines would serve for my promos.
@StratDragon: Reality for Daz is difficult to configure? Does it automatically setup all the lights?
Can't say I got a pipeline after Daz Studio really.
My rendering is done in 3Delight and LuxRender (using Luxus) at the moment. I am working on getting into Carrara, but that will take a while still. High profile 3D apps ... nah, it's pure hobby for me and Maya & co. are just too expensive products for my taste and for what I do. I might buy 3D Coat additionally, but that is about it I suppose. I tried Blender and never could get accustomed to the user interface.
I finish inside DAZ Studio far more than I once did.
I'm not particularly interested in photorealistic renders most of the time, which is fortunate, because I'm also not particularly skilled enough to get them :-) If I can get the "weighty 3D toon" look I like thanks to such tools as UberEnvironment and some of the excellent HDRI packages on this site, I'll often leave it at that.
I don't use magnets, etc. to fix poke through in clothes. Thankfully, it's less of an issue than it used to be with genesis and autofit. However, if I don't like the fit (or more usually, the weight) of clothes, I'll move parts of the fully-posed scene into modo 701, use modo's sculpting to brush the polys into place, and then thicken them slightly and move them back into DAZ to replace the original items. DAZ Studio has a built-in "modo" conversion scale, and it works like a champ as long as you don't use "item mode" in modo to shift an entire object in world space. If you brush buried polygons on a skin-tight outfit in modo just enough to bring them to the surface of a figure, you can generally expect them to look exactly right when the item is re-imported into DAZ.
IF I can't get the lighting I want in DAZ, I'll move a fully posed scene into modo for keeps. There, I turn all materials double-sided and mass-select all "diffuse" textures and set their alphas to 1/2.2 (or, 0.4546) to normalize gamma across the apps. I may also replace some or all surface texture in the scenes with modo textures. I'll also dial down bump maps.
I find modo's lighting system much easier and more flexible than DAZ Studio system for a lot of things, but again, I'm generally not aimed at photorealism at my current level. I could also stand (as SickleYield alluded) to get much, much better with skins; they tend to suffer the most from my workflow. (Metals, glass, stone and wood, by contrast, tend to come out looking much more believable.)
I'll occasionally finish with a little postwork in Photoshop CS5 but nothing special.
I'll fiddle with Lux every once in awhile, but I'm just not thrilled enough with it to spend time going up the learning curve to get really good. I find material settings in Lux to be too unpredictable. My creaky old machine can't run Octane, so that's not an option until I get new gear, hopefully early next year.
As some others have mentioned, I render in Daz Studo using 3Delight, both with or without UberEnviornment2,but also render in LuxRender via Reality (visually most appealing for realism) I also occasionally render in Vue or Carrara.
Watch some of the videos here to get an idea of how it works - http://www.youtube.com/user/PretA3D/videos
Please note that Reality is far different from the other exporter called Luxus.
There are two tuts on using Luxus here -
http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorial/luxus-and-luxrender-beginners-guide-for-daz-studio-pt-1-lights-and-materials/
http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorial/luxus-and-luxrender-beginners-guide-for-daz-studio-pt-2-render-settings/
Luxus is also integrated into the DS interface unlike Reality. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and as to which one will work best for you will depend on you.
If you have Nvidia cards, you can also use Octane. They sell a DS plugin at their own site - http://render.otoy.com/ - along with the main app. Demo is available.
Watch some of the videos here to get an idea of how it works - http://www.youtube.com/user/PretA3D/videos
Please note that Reality is far different from the other exporter called Luxus.
There are two tuts on using Luxus here -
http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorial/luxus-and-luxrender-beginners-guide-for-daz-studio-pt-1-lights-and-materials/
http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorial/luxus-and-luxrender-beginners-guide-for-daz-studio-pt-2-render-settings/
Luxus is also integrated into the DS interface unlike Reality. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and as to which one will work best for you will depend on you.
If you have Nvidia cards, you can also use Octane. They sell a DS plugin at their own site - http://render.otoy.com/ - along with the main app. Demo is available.
yes, as stated the lights are a bit different but if you've done photography they behave exactly as they would in a studio. or real life so if your comfortable with that idea (and the availability of info on this art on the web) it's just matter of setting up a scene like you would in a photo shot or movie. Sunlight in LuxRender on the other hand is just setting up a single light source and calling it Sun (in Reality anyway) it it works, contrast that to 3Deight which does not like to do with without lots of light sources to approximate a "sun".
As far as lights go; I'm setting up a scene for cycles after using the Blender render and I very much need to adjust every last light in the scene now so I don't know any switch between rendering engines is 1:1 conversion of lighting a scene with the same luminosity at this time. It appears that just like surfaces there is some tweaking involved.
While Luxus does integrate with Studio directly Reality does not contrasted with Reality which brings up it's own pre-render interface (At this time) the current development of Reality 3 for Studio will support direct integration because the developer has dropped support for Daz Studio 3 and it will allow him to incorporate the benefits of DS4 framework without the restrictions to DS3, Reality 3 was released for Poser a few months back and much of the development is already done.
you can follow the progress on this thread:
http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?77925-Reality-3-for-Studio-Development-journal
and you can see what the poser version of Reality 3 currently supports here
http://preta3d.com/purchase-reality-3-for-poser/
It's a matter of taste, I have had a very positive experience with both Reality and the Developer, especially on responding to questions (no matter how stupid on my part) in a highly professional manner. I have not used Luxus only seen the interface and some renderings and while I'm aware Luxus supports a handful of things that the current DAZ Studio version of Reality does not in regards to shaders and volumetrics I still feel that Reality was the best software investment I ever made and will continue to use.
Most noob question ever: Right now which render plugin is easier to use: Luxus or Reality 3?
you can look at both Luxus and Reality as not a rendering plug-in but rather a bridge to get from Daz Studio to LuxRender and in doing so both Luxus and Reality are tools to set you surface settings to LuxRender materials. Once a value of a texture is set to say "Glossy with value of 9035" it's going to behave the same way out of Luxus as it is with Reality once it hits LuxRender.
The learning curve with me an Reality was maybe an hour or so, I thought the interface was elegant and intuitive and very response. I've only seen screen shots of Luxus and it looks like it's a pane that runs while your running Studio whereas Reality was this interface I brought up just before I went to render to spot check, adjust and tweak before I sent the scene over to LuxRender. However this is Reality 2, and Reality 3 is going to be more of an integrated interface it wont be as much as a post setup process but a process within the setup.
Reality sold me, not just on the quality of the product but the willingness of the developer to listen to suggestions and really dedicate himself to what was being asked. I don't have interaction with the developer for Luxus so I don't know if that's the same caliber of service. If they have a sale on Luxus I might pick it up but not for any shortcomings of Reality. I'm not trying to be fanboy or make anyone into a fanboy but it also might help if you compare Luxus prepared renders with Reality prepared ones and see if one looks better or worse and ask yourself why.
Reality 2 owners will likely get an upgrade price when Reality 3 comes out for Studio since they got a cross grade price for Reality 3 if they wanted to use the poser version. Reality 2.5 is $29.95 over at Renderosity right now, and Luxus is $19.95. Reality is about 2 years old and I bought it when it came out and it was a massive turning point in what I could produce out of Studio in the first render. Luxus is still under a year old If I had to do it all over again I still spend the extra $10
I'm split maybe 50/50 between just rendering it right in DAZ Studio and exporting things into Bryce to render.
Depends really and I cannot speak for Reality 3 actually, as I do not own it. I got Reality 2.5 though, which is the latest version for Daz Studio at the moment still if I recall correctly.
As for getting used to, they are probably both roughly the same, but it depends also on your workflow. For example I am so used to work inside Daz Studio completely that I prefer the integration of Luxus into the Surfaces pane. I never really got comfy with the additional window of Reality popping up. Other people probably prefer it the other way round - tastes differ. One more thing I really like in Luxus is, that about everything of LuxRender can be steered in Luxus, as it allows you to directly paste the LuxRender definitions in text form into e.g. the specific surfaces. This is not really for beginners though, but allows more control.
In the end, with each of the plugins you have to learn something new at least. Materials and lights work quite different, but if you got a 'photographer mindset' and know how lights in a real photo studio work, then LuxRender offers a good entry point.