Animation on daz studio and time to render

in The Commons
Hello,
I love Daz studio and I use is since two years to made picture for a visual novel.
I want to propose a short animation, I know to create an animation on daz studio, my ask is about the render.
It's so long under daz studio, with 20 frames/secondes, it's 40 * 30 min to generate a short video.
Can I win time if I transfert my daz studio work on Cinema 4D ou Octane render or Iclone ?
I never use this software and before to learn them, I prefer to ask you.
Where I need to go for the best time for daz studio animation ?
Best regards.
Eric.
I have a Core I7, 1070gtx, and 32go ram.
Comments
You can save much time by prerendering backgrounds and making HDRIs incorporating the backgrounds and lighting. You can spend the bulk of the time rendering your animated characters. Dreamlight has animation packages where that's done for example. https://www.daz3d.com/50-hdris--movie-maker-iray--metropolis-overcast
There's a YouTube video also showing the HDRI prework that's possible with DS and Photoshop.
Also, reducing the size of textures can improve render times https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
Thanks for your reply and your link youtube.
I try without background, I agree it's better but it's so limited.
I succeful export a simple animation on cinema 4D, the render is very fast bust the scene is so poor and cinema 4D it's not simple to begin.
I go to try Iclone now, it's maybe a solution.
It's not so limited to use pre-rendered backgrounds. You can do much if you plan ahead which Dreamlight has done.
Sadly the Daz characters don't export completely/easily to other programs. You will lose JCMs and there are some other problems. Genesis 3 and 8 work best in Daz Studio which uses the advancements of the Genesis figures. iClone forces you to use their rigging and morphs. Some people like and others don't.
You can render using Octane within DS via a free plugin.
The movie Maker is quite good. Here's a short animation I did. Hard to tell the buildings are not really there.
Very nice tutorial. I used to be subbed to Thundorn's channel. Wonder if YT undid that.
I'm always amazed at how fast it renders and with some planning like Dreamlight/Val does you could probably do a lot more with the background moving and more quick cuts.
@gordig "You can render using Octane within DS via a free plugin."
Do you know if "Octane render" is a good solution ?
How many is the ratio of gain ? 2x much faster than Daz Studio (for a typical scene) ? I didn't found information about this.
I never use it.
Thanks for you share your experience.
Kevin, I will test your solution too. How many time for create your video render on daz studio ? "Testing Movie Maker Iray - Metropolis Day"
I don't know about the other, but I rendered this at 20 seconds per frame with a 2080ti.
I’ve never used it either. I downloaded the free plugin, only to discover that unlike Iray, which you can render on CPU, Octane will not work without an Nvidia GPU, which I don’t currently have. I can’t speak to the difference in render times, but whatever potential gains will be at least partially offset by the fact that you’ll need to reconfigure your surfaces to work within Octane. Is Octane the right solution for you? I don’t know, but it’s free, so there’s no harm in trying it out. It’s also just a matter of time before someone pops in to tell you that you should render in Blender, so be aware that that is an option, but neither that nor Octane will have the simplicity of rendering in DS Iray.
If you decide to try Iclone as an alternative engine for rendering Daz assets make sure you try the full pipeline version of Iclone& 3DX and CC3 pipeline.
A much cheaper alternative is to use the free Diffeomorphic plugin that imports Daz figures ,poses& animations into Blender which has a realtime game engine that gives you performance like this:
No limited FAKE backdrops, 360 degree camera movement
@wolf359
This inspired me to actually use the plugin as I had bought it and had been sitting on it for weeks. I was not looking forward to having to learn another plugin with a terrible interface but man, it could not have been easier. I has been struggling for days with lighting an early morning scene with the stars still out, but with the plugin, I had it just how I imagined it in less than 60 seconds.
Thanks brother, sometimes you just need a little nudge from someone ahead of you, even if they didn't intend to nudge you :)
Edit: Spelling.
There is so much third party development underway for Blender that I could not resist splurging on some of the Paid Add-ons in addition to many free ones and the fact that we will never pay for Blender itself makes investing money on the more high end paid add-ons quite painless.
Along with the Physcial starlight plugin I also grabbed the Hardops and (Amazing!!) Boxcutter modeling plugins. and am busy building the assets and developing Characters for my planned webseries Based in the universe of popular "HALO" video game franchise.
also sometimes 3Delight can be the better option
there have been scenes I can render faster and nicer with 3Delight than I can with iray, it depends entirely what is in it and what look you are going for.
Physically based rendering is all nice but with 3Delight you can use tricks such as ground etc recieving shadows only, lights not casting shadows, objects not casting shadows such as backdrops and cycloramas.
I find my prefered software Carrara's engine often cleaner and faster than my Octane plugin too for the same reasons.
Octane at least also allows nonPBR don't cast shafow tricks with object layer options.
In the free DAZ studio plugin too.
I think PBR can be overrated, its animated art otherwise one would use real people and sets.
Not much I can add to this thread thats not already been said . But you know what they say? " when all is said and done, more will be said than done."
Anyway I sure have enjoyed the animations posted thanks guys keep up the good work
And after seeing Galactus Rising, I'm waiting for your HALO project to drop an episode.
Ha ha, went to BlenderMarket just now and the Hardops/Boxcutter bundle was featured. Insta-buy. It seemed pretty amazing, but that one will take some time to exploit, I'm sure.
Do you use, or have an opinion on HDRI Maker? I'mbeginning to see a pattern in my production, that the hadest thing that I spend the most time fiddling with and sometimes making worse rather than better, is lighting.
@WendyLuvsCatz
Of all the wisdom you just dropped, I think this was the most profound. Because the tech is so cool, we sometimes practically fetishize it, and act as if it is the ends rather than the means.
In our D&D game, a player once messaged me the next day asking to play out a certain scene even after the saga was done so that she could get "closure", and another wanted the same thing because he admitted that he had to know what had become of a certain NPC that they had more or less betrayed and sacrificed for what they considered the common good and it as weighing on his conscience.
This, to me, is why we tell stories. And it is possible with absolutely no visuals at all. Ideas and suggestions that don't even go through your eyes to get to your brain is probably about as far from PBR as one can get. Have a compelling story and your audience's minds will willingly do all the rest.
Salut ;)
je me permet de parler en francais vu que tu semble le parler et que je ne parle pas anglais ^^
j'utilise ou j'ai utilisé blender, iclone et octane
tu sembles faire des jeux pour adultes, iclone d'une part est tres cher pour avoir tout ce qui est necessaire et en plus ne permet pas l'import complet des parties genitales
blender est gratuit et tres bien mais il faut apprendre beaucoup de choses pour avoir un resultat satisfaisant
octane est gratuit et il est pour moi la solution la plus efficace, comparativement a blender, il faudra apprendre moins de choses pour avoir de beaux rendus et il est entre 10x et 20x plus rapide que le moteur de rendu de daz
As a counterpoint to Mystery, that is utter nonsense. There are things that you can do with a photorealistic model that you couldn't do with a real person, whether legally, ethically, logistically or even physically. You're not bound by an actor's physical appearance, mannerisms, capabilities, etc. You have total control over the model, environment and how the two interact. PBR can also be cheaper and easier than using real people and sets (especially since animators get paid $dick). If you want to do NPR, that's totally fine, but don't try to invalidate PBR.
I started a reply in similar vein but deleted it without posting but the point you make about those who want photorealism for some kind of adult fantasy rendering is entirely valid. Of course, @TheMysteryIsThePoint is right in that the imagination can create incredible scenes in the mind but the whole point of this hobby for many is to see their fantasy (adult or otherwise) in a believeable external image. If a toon is believeable (and admittedly it can be when done well), that's fine but for many there is no substitute for photorealism. The worst case, IMHO, is a poor attempt at realism - either go toon or go realistic but the whole reason I welcomed IRay (and, before that, Reality/Luxrender) was because 3Delight just didn't do it for me. It just shouted "fake".
that is a corner of the animation market I prefer to remain ignorant about
I have only really loaded the male anatomical elements because a naked man if he needs to be naked looks wrong missing parts of his anatomy.
I mostly would only use that in an image render which could be PBR or olde worlde cheesecake painting as making animated stuff of that nature is definitely not my area of expertise.
I honestly didn't even know people seriously watched animated adult content when there is real adult content to be honest except as fun entertainment like a cartoon but adult themed, just shows my ignorance of the genre.
So maybe Daz is pointless, and we should just draw stick figures in the dirt with twigs?
meh I am no going to suggest anything more as I really don't belong in this thread on rendering adult content
It is probably a discussion for another thread but whenever one gets going it tends to get curtailed. I didn't mean to be seen to be having a go at you, just really pointing to a section of the user base who have different priorities.
I have a large collection of HDRI's and use the addon even for base lighting in indoor scenes with EEVEE in combination with point and area lights for strategic fills and colorful embellishments as I did with this indoor environmet test for my series.
Primitive cave people managed to comumnicate their creative visions with sticks and dirt because they had no alternative means .
Thankfully 3D character animation, in the 21st century, offers many options that are perfectly legitimate subjects of discussion in the context of a thread, where the OP sought opinions, thus it is not some silly zero sum scenario of either Daz Studio or "Sticks and Dirt"
I watch this guys remake of sponge bob animation yesterday that was made with poser, its 2d flat cartoon not photo realistic but still a cute animation rather well done very talented artist.
The beauty of animation is in the eye of the person watching it. not the software to create it. If people like what your doing does it matter what your using to get the story across to your audience?
Back in the 50's and & 60's early 70's animation was all hand drawn pencil and paper. . whew glad we don't have to do that way anymore
Using degrain filters really sped up my renders. It used to take my computer 3 to 4 minutes per frame to get rid of all the noise. With degrain filters, I can get that down to under a minute, especially if I replace the environment with a background that is a pre-rendered image of the environment or use a premade HDRI as Kevin pointed out. Another trick I found is to render using the Iray preview and save using File->Save Last Draw. This way, DAZ Studio doesn't have to reload the entire scene to render each new frame, which adds to the rendering time. I wrote an AutoIt script that automatically saves a frame after a specified number of seconds of rendering have passed. The script then automatically clicks the Step to Next Frame button to render a new frame in the preview window.