DAZ Studio Real Time Rendering

ebergerly

One of the nice things, IMO, about the Iray preview in Studio is that it gives you a reasonable view on what the final render will look like. Of course, the actual render is gonna take minutes or hours. But there is another way to get what I consider real time renders by just moving some sliders, and I thought I'd post a brief description to raise awareness for those who don't want to constantly do long re-renders on their GPU. 

What I'm talking about is doing a single Iray render, and then modifying that render in real time to get vastly different results. Below are 4 images that are the result of a single, 7 minute Iray render, and those variations were done in real time just by moving a few sliders. 

The first image is the base image, and it includes some overhead/ceiling emissive lights, some emissive table lamps, and an environmental HDRI coming in the window behind the camera. 

The second image shows the result of me moving a slider to turn off the HDRI lighting, another slider to change the hue of the table lamps to a more purplish color, and another slider to give some glow to the overhead lights. 

The third image shows the result of moving a couple of sliders to turn off the HDRI lighting and the ceiling emissives. 

And the fourth image is changing the hue of the table lamps as well as cranking up their intensity, and doing a bit of denoising by drag 'n dropping a single node. 

All of these were done by setting up render canvases (also known as render passes) in D|S for each of the light sources, and drag 'n dropping those canvases into the amazing Blender compositor, where I have a pre-set configuration that allows me to adjust each of the passes. And this is just a tiny fraction of what you can accomplish. And none of it requires high end, expensive hardware or doing time consuming re-rendering. And it actually gives you a realtime result as if you had done a completely new render. 

Hope this helps someone.  

marble

ebergerly said:

One of the nice things, IMO, about the Iray preview in Studio is that it gives you a reasonable view on what the final render will look like. Of course, the actual render is gonna take minutes or hours. But there is another way to get what I consider real time renders by just moving some sliders, and I thought I'd post a brief description to raise awareness for those who don't want to constantly do long re-renders on their GPU. 

What I'm talking about is doing a single Iray render, and then modifying that render in real time to get vastly different results. Below are 4 images that are the result of a single, 7 minute Iray render, and those variations were done in real time just by moving a few sliders. 

The first image is the base image, and it includes some overhead/ceiling emissive lights, some emissive table lamps, and an environmental HDRI coming in the window behind the camera. 

The second image shows the result of me moving a slider to turn off the HDRI lighting, another slider to change the hue of the table lamps to a more purplish color, and another slider to give some glow to the overhead lights. 

The third image shows the result of moving a couple of sliders to turn off the HDRI lighting and the ceiling emissives. 

And the fourth image is changing the hue of the table lamps as well as cranking up their intensity, and doing a bit of denoising by drag 'n dropping a single node. 

All of these were done by setting up render canvases (also known as render passes) in D|S for each of the light sources, and drag 'n dropping those canvases into the amazing Blender compositor, where I have a pre-set configuration that allows me to adjust each of the passes. And this is just a tiny fraction of what you can accomplish. And none of it requires high end, expensive hardware or doing time consuming re-rendering. And it actually gives you a realtime result as if you had done a completely new render. 

Hope this helps someone.  

I'm new to compositing and I have been trying it within DaVinci Resolve 17 (free version). I have no idea how that compares with Blender but what I have been doing is different to your examples. I have been animating a figure (aniblocks in DAZ Studio) against a green background and compositing with a still of a room behind. That works very well and is easy. I am now interested in seeing how it compares with Blender. Also, I have never tried render passes in IRay so that's another thing I need to learn how to do. 

DomiekGames

marble said:

ebergerly said:

One of the nice things, IMO, about the Iray preview in Studio is that it gives you a reasonable view on what the final render will look like. Of course, the actual render is gonna take minutes or hours. But there is another way to get what I consider real time renders by just moving some sliders, and I thought I'd post a brief description to raise awareness for those who don't want to constantly do long re-renders on their GPU. 

What I'm talking about is doing a single Iray render, and then modifying that render in real time to get vastly different results. Below are 4 images that are the result of a single, 7 minute Iray render, and those variations were done in real time just by moving a few sliders. 

The first image is the base image, and it includes some overhead/ceiling emissive lights, some emissive table lamps, and an environmental HDRI coming in the window behind the camera. 

The second image shows the result of me moving a slider to turn off the HDRI lighting, another slider to change the hue of the table lamps to a more purplish color, and another slider to give some glow to the overhead lights. 

The third image shows the result of moving a couple of sliders to turn off the HDRI lighting and the ceiling emissives. 

And the fourth image is changing the hue of the table lamps as well as cranking up their intensity, and doing a bit of denoising by drag 'n dropping a single node. 

All of these were done by setting up render canvases (also known as render passes) in D|S for each of the light sources, and drag 'n dropping those canvases into the amazing Blender compositor, where I have a pre-set configuration that allows me to adjust each of the passes. And this is just a tiny fraction of what you can accomplish. And none of it requires high end, expensive hardware or doing time consuming re-rendering. And it actually gives you a realtime result as if you had done a completely new render. 

Hope this helps someone.  

I'm new to compositing and I have been trying it within DaVinci Resolve 17 (free version). I have no idea how that compares with Blender but what I have been doing is different to your examples. I have been animating a figure (aniblocks in DAZ Studio) against a green background and compositing with a still of a room behind. That works very well and is easy. I am now interested in seeing how it compares with Blender. Also, I have never tried render passes in IRay so that's another thing I need to learn how to do. 

Blender compositor is okay but incredibly slow. There's supposedly work being done this year to address performance. You're absolutely doing the right thing by using Davinci, what an incredible software.

ebergerly

Do you guys actually composite DAZ Studio canvases/EXR files in Davinci/Fusion? I've used Davinci Resolve for years for all my 2D video editing, but never thought it could be used for serious 3D compositing. Does Resolve/Fusion even allow you to work with alpha channels and depth passes and channels and stuff? I've always used Nuke for that, but now I'm kinda moving over to Blender for working with canvases. Though yeah, it can be slow on occasion depending on what what nodes you're using (maybe 5-10 seconds wait when you make a change, worst case). 

marble

ebergerly said:

Do you guys actually composite DAZ Studio canvases/EXR files in Davinci/Fusion? I've used Davinci Resolve for years for all my 2D video editing, but never thought it could be used for serious 3D compositing. Does Resolve/Fusion even allow you to work with alpha channels and depth passes and channels and stuff? I've always used Nuke for that, but now I'm kinda moving over to Blender for working with canvases. Though yeah, it can be slow on occasion depending on what what nodes you're using (maybe 5-10 seconds wait when you make a change, worst case). 

You lost me a bit there in the jargon. It's all 2D to me when I get to the stage of compositing. I render a sequentially numbered series of images in DAZ Studio which  DaVinci sees as a single media file which I can edit (I can easily make a compound clip from the image sequence if I like).  I don't know about alpha - I used the green screen method for compositing my clips.

So my animated figure is against a green backdrop and I composite with a still image of room in the background. Easy-peasy following this tutorial.

marble

BTW, I have been using DaVinci for a few months but I am very limited in what I use it for. So I have never ventured into the Fusion tab ... that looks a bit scary to me but then so do Blender nodes.