Can we please not have blurred promo images

Hera

Looking at the promos for these products
https://www.daz3d.com/stylish-bedroom

and

https://www.daz3d.com/ts-law-office

and the promo pics are all kind of blurry and look like layered with some artistic photoshop filter. Which makes it hard to judge the quality of the items. Are the polygons enough for a 1500 * 1500 pic render? Are the textures up to par? Do the lights lit up the room? Et cetera. I'm pretty sure the works are up to standard, but I don't want to buy something that might not be, with the hassle of returning it. So, please, it's fun to play with photoshop filters, I know, but show us at least a couple of raw, undoctored renders so that we might see the real result we'll be getting at home.

 

Linwelly

looks like they had the noise filter or post denoise active, but yeah I would prefer them without that as well

Daventaki

I completely agree!

ANGELREAPER1972

I've noticed a few products renders have noise in them

lilweep

ANGELREAPER1972 said:

I've noticed a few products renders have noise in them

noise is fine. blurry artistic filters are not.

Sevrin

Noise and denoising blur might both be due to haste in rendering promos in order to meet deadlines.

The Blurst of Times

For purposes of selling a product, I'd want it to look good as a seller, so I would use all the post-work I could to make it look good. Artistic, even. Isn't that why we are here? For art? Not just to crank out some bland render?

On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the flaws in a product as a buyer. So, the warts and the pimples, the artificial levels of detail that a render can bring out. You'd want the seller to point out the ugly flaws in their own product, but that's against their interest.

It's two competing interests for sure.

Sevrin

The Blurst of Times said:

For purposes of selling a product, I'd want it to look good as a seller, so I would use all the post-work I could to make it look good. Artistic, even. Isn't that why we are here? For art? Not just to crank out some bland render?

On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the flaws in a product as a buyer. So, the warts and the pimples, the artificial levels of detail that a render can bring out. You'd want the seller to point out the ugly flaws in their own product, but that's against their interest.

It's two competing interests for sure.

Daz allows postwork gimmickry in the main promo, but not in the popups, beyond compositing, sharpening and colour correction.  A lot of store page stuff has been slipping through the cracks lately, though.

• Main promo illustrations can be rendered in whatever software package an artist prefers, even software not directly sold or supported by DAZ. These illustrations can also be altered in Photoshop (or another image editing package) to add special effects, fix issues with rendered items not directly included with the product being illustrated, such as render artifacts, and other scene elements shown that are not part of the product being advertised, and so forth.
• Note: Allowing artists to use whatever software they like to render their product’s main promo illustration, and to make post-production clean-up for non-included items shown in the illustration, ensures that this illustration will give the best first impression possible to potential customers.
• Pop-up illustrations should be rendered in a software package sold or supported by DAZ directly or via importer. Currently this means DAZ Studio or Poser, but the list of supported software will grow as additional importers are developed in the future. Pop-up illustrations should not include any post-production touch up beyond simple color correction, sharpening, and/or combining of multiple render passes.

barbult

Submit a help request to point out the issue to Daz. You can add a link to this thread to your help request to indicate that other customers are also expressing similar concerns. We've often been told that Daz employees don't monitor the forums, so they likely won't see this complaint unless you tell them directly, and that means help request.

Sorel

I too am annoyed with all the promos using the denoiser cause then I have to take a leap and assume the textures will be decent.  Denoising should only be used if you have some stubborn grain while most the rest of the image has cleared. This is true even of octane, I need at least 2000+ samples for decent enough detail to be retained when applying the denoiser (I usually do 5000+).

Havos

These are all Daz Originals, so I assume that means DAZ did the promos themselves. You would imagine they would have a few decent boxes to render with so there would be no need to use the denoiser.

Leana

Havos said:

These are all Daz Originals, so I assume that means DAZ did the promos themselves. 

Not necessarily.

For one thing, Daz Originals doesn't mean Daz created the product, it means they own it. Most Daz originals are products created by PAs that Daz bought outright, not something created in house, so the promo pics may have been made by the original creator. 

Also, quite a few promo pics from Daz originals are created by promo artists hired by Daz.

Cybersox

The thing is, DAZ product images have ALWAYS been a bit misleading in this respect, as DAZ has always favored lots of pretty scenes using full environments that show off how it might look when used rather than what it looks like straight out of the box.  That sounds like a good idea at first, but what happens all too often is that there is the implication that there is something in a product that isn't actually included... think of all of the female outfits sold here that consist of just a skirt and a blouse yet are only shown fully kitted out with shoes, jewellery and other accessories, and all the sets and evironments that are shown in combination with other set pieces and backdrops that aren't included.  And, at the other extreme, do I need to go into how often we have to buy characters without being able to see a proper back and profile view first, let alone the actual full skin texture?   

Havos

Leana said:

Havos said:

These are all Daz Originals, so I assume that means DAZ did the promos themselves. 

Not necessarily.

For one thing, Daz Originals doesn't mean Daz created the product, it means they own it. Most Daz originals are products created by PAs that Daz bought outright, not something created in house, so the promo pics may have been made by the original creator. 

Also, quite a few promo pics from Daz originals are created by promo artists hired by Daz.

I realise PA also make DOs, but I recall a long time ago some PA saying that they did not do the promos for the products they sold to DAZ.

Silent Winter

^Having sold a product to Daz as a PA, I can say that they at least sometimes use the promos as done by the PAs (main promo and pose promos for https://www.daz3d.com/spystuff-props-and-poses-for-genesis-8 by ThoseThings, prop promos by me). They're of course free to do their own (if they want a different style or something) but sometimes time is of the essence too. PA's need to do some promos in order to show Daz before it gets accepted into QA so they'd only redo the work on them if they felt it necessary.

Taoz

Cybersox said:

The thing is, DAZ product images have ALWAYS been a bit misleading in this respect, as DAZ has always favored lots of pretty scenes using full environments that show off how it might look when used rather than what it looks like straight out of the box.  That sounds like a good idea at first, but what happens all too often is that there is the implication that there is something in a product that isn't actually included... think of all of the female outfits sold here that consist of just a skirt and a blouse yet are only shown fully kitted out with shoes, jewellery and other accessories, and all the sets and evironments that are shown in combination with other set pieces and backdrops that aren't included.  And, at the other extreme, do I need to go into how often we have to buy characters without being able to see a proper back and profile view first, let alone the actual full skin texture?   

+1   

 

FirstBastion

Promos should NOT be post worked. And they should indicate which renderer was used in the promos.

All my promos are WYSIWYG. lights cameras,settings all included. What you see is what yiou get when rendered. 

Promos should never be blurry.

jardine

if i'm looking at an effect-heavy promo, i always just figure that the artist in question isn't happy with the way their materials look.  so i probably won't be, either.

i've seen some this year that were so impressionistic that it was hard to tell where the scene light stopped and the objects' edges started. 

 

Faveral

DAZ has specifications for promos. We have to make promos as attractive as possible, including depth of field (blurry) if needed but we also have to include sharp clay renders so custumers know what they are getting

barbult

Faveral said:

DAZ has specifications for promos. We have to make promos as attractive as possible, including depth of field (blurry) if needed but we also have to include sharp clay renders so custumers know what they are getting

A clay render tells a customer nothing about the textures. 

Sorel

Faveral said:

DAZ has specifications for promos. We have to make promos as attractive as possible, including depth of field (blurry) if needed but we also have to include sharp clay renders so custumers know what they are getting

For the set the op was talking about in particular, this is obviously denoiser and not depth of field.  If I was a new user and didn't know anything about iray or denoisers, should I assume this is what the textures would look like?

modu8studio

Hello,

Thanks for sharing info about my product - Stylish Bedroom. And  I'm sorry for your disappointment with the blurry effect. In PSD I have used some color balance, brightness/contrast and there is a copy of render layer with gaussian blur with opacity 30%. I apologize for the dissatisfaction with this fact. In my next releases, there will be no "blur" effect anymore. 

I don't use the denoise option. For me personally is the big downsize of promo images. Like Sorel said..hard to say what is what there. So my renders will never look like TS sample.

My next product is on the review list - I hope it's sharp enough ;) Please let me know what you think about it.

 

 

Sevrin

modu8studio said:

Hello,

Thanks for sharing info about my product - Stylish Bedroom. And  I'm sorry for your disappointment with the blurry effect. In PSD I have used some color balance, brightness/contrast and there is a copy of render layer with gaussian blur with opacity 30%. I apologize for the dissatisfaction with this fact. In my next releases, there will be no "blur" effect anymore. 

I don't use the denoise option. For me personally is the big downsize of promo images. Like Sorel said..hard to say what is what there. So my renders will never look like TS sample.

My next product is on the review list - I hope it's sharp enough ;) Please let me know what you think about it.

 

 

These look much better.

Sevrin

Sorel said:

Faveral said:

DAZ has specifications for promos. We have to make promos as attractive as possible, including depth of field (blurry) if needed but we also have to include sharp clay renders so custumers know what they are getting

For the set the op was talking about in particular, this is obviously denoiser and not depth of field.  If I was a new user and didn't know anything about iray or denoisers, should I assume this is what the textures would look like?

There was a similar issue with his Russian Bedroom.  The promos looked bad, but the actual product is really nice.