Purpose of Blender
csteell_c2893e4ab6
Posts: 476
What is the reason for exporting DAZ Figures to Blender? What does Blender do that DAZ Studio cannot do? Cheers
Comments
A good deal. A quick web search will give you some answers.
Within Blender, you can do modeling, texturing, UV editing, sculpting, animation, particles, and various types of physics simulations, plus its capabilites keep increasing when you add in all the addons users have programmed for Blender. It's excellent that DAZ can now work together with Blender, because you can do a lot more than with DAZ alone.
Blender is insanely powerful.
From what I understand, Blender has some good sculpting tools like Zbrush so you can create custom characters if your artistically inclined.
The most compelling reason is the render engines. Cycles and Evee they are like 3delight don't need an Nvidia gpu to work. So if you don't want to fork over thousands on a video card to do Iray you can hop into Blender and use it with some Xeon processors with lots of cores and it works really well with ecc server memory. Most workstation processors and memory are not being gobbled up by bitcoin miners so you can build a nice budget system that won't break the bank that works really well with Blender. I would suggest getting a board that has 8 memory slots and at least 10 to 12 core xeon. You can wait for deals to keep upgrading this system. Oh I would wait on upgrading to windows 11 till 2025 so all the bugs get worked out. Don't be a beta tester for Microsoft.
Blender is a complete 3DCC, Like Maya,Max,C4D
......
and with the two FREE Daz content import options,
animating Daz Characters in Blender is easier than ever.
... Everything ?
DAZ : 2 base wireframe with a nice morph system. Really neat for 3D modelers who want to work on body armors, clothes, body references, etc. without the hassle of creating a human base mesh from the scratch. DAZ has invested in a market niche and has very few real competitors to date.
Blender : a FULL 3D solution. Like Maya or eventually C4D or 3DS Max. Sculpting / Poly-modeling / unwrapping / retopology / 3D painting / animation (just behind Maya in terms of efficiency) / particle systems / open source code for a potentially unlimited amount of insane add-ons, etc. etc.
I mean... try to make even a simple animation with DAZ. After a few hours at best you should get the answer to your question ;)
Many thanks for your comments.I have Blender 2.93 but I would not know how to use it! Is there a simple tutorial I could work with after importing into Blender. I mainly do animations.Cheers
I too would like to know where I can find any good video tutorials using Blender on a Genesis 8 figure where adjustments can be made to the mesh like unique facial features and figure etc...
It's not gonna be easy to find it. The 3D community generally poopoos on using daz figures for some reason lol.
There are some good tutorials in the DAZ store, a number of them by Sickleyield.
https://www.daz3d.com/how-to-create-a-new-custom-daz-studio-character
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-content-creation-with-blender
https://www.daz3d.com/how-to-create-a-new-daz-studio-custom-creature
She also offers a number of free tutorials on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/user/SickleYield
The tutorials by @Sickleyield are for using blender to make custom daz figures, not to customize the figures for blender. They are two very different things. As for customizing the figures for blender you don't need any special skill apart being able to use blender, so any blender tutorial will do just search on google what you need. For example to make a custom morph in blender just make a shapekey and apply it as usual.
Blender Character Animation: Shape Keys - YouTube
You can also find plenty of information in the blender forum.
Blender Discussion - Daz 3D Forums
...as to rendering in Cycles with Xeons. Some of those high core count ones, even older generation, are not all that inexpensive. Finding the correct motherboard (particularly LGA 2011-3 which supports most of the 12,16, and 18 core Xeons) is not all that easy to find new and if so they command a fairly high price. Most of the more affordable ones are used/refurbished or "off brands" and often ship form overseas so there's shipping costs, and wait time.
If I went the Blender/Cycles route I would consider at the minimum, a Ryzen 9 5950X which has 16 cores/32 threads and a boost clock of 4.9 GHz along with a minimum of 64 GB system memory.
As I see it the power of cycles vs iray is its better denoiser that alone makes the rendering much faster. Then cycles is also better for animations since it supports motion blur while daz studio doesn't. Another advantage of cycles is much faster sss skin shaders for characters. The weak point of cycles is caustics that are almost inexistent. So for rendering realistic architecture iray is better, not that iray gets wonderful caustics but better than cycles anyway. As for eevee vs filament there's no match, eevee is way better as for global illumination and effects.
So at a glance cycles and eevee are better for characters and animation, while iray is better for architecture.
As for using cycles with a powerful cpu honestly I don't see the advantage over iray. I mean iray can work with the cpu too, the same as cycles.
As a person who has no GPU
(Intel UHD graphics with 16 gigs system ram)
I can render still SFEU* portraits with Iray no problem
*(single figure empty universe)
However for animation, with Denoising, Cycles wins, as I can keep my render times under a self imposed limit 60 seconds or less per frame.
Not possible with Iray on my hardware
This is a cycles animation render
The post I responded to specifically asked "where I can find any good video tutorials using Blender on a Genesis 8 figure where adjustments can be made to the mesh like unique facial features and figure etc.." The Sickleyield tutorials that I linked are well suited to that purpose.
I bookmarked this thread. As someone who has been using Blender for less than a year for cel shading, I still have a long way to go. The comments and links here are very helpful.
Apart from what others have mentioned, one benefit of Blender is that it comes with tools that are free, that otherwise one would have to pay for to get the Daz equivalent. For example, the Daz Decimator reduces the polygon count of the mesh. Blender also has that built in, once the asset is transfered over. As an add-on, Simplygon for Blender accomplishes the same ... and goes beyond. All this is to point out how rich Blender's ecosystem of tool is; also to say that I'm having lots of fun learning about them.
Cheers!
No, there isn't.
You're talking about character animation, which is inherently not a simple undertaking. Learning Blender takes a commitment, it's going to be a journey, and there is a lot of prerequisite stuff you'll have to learn first that has nothing to do with the end-results you are interested in so there's no immediate gratification, but the consolation is that you will probably love every step of it long before you reach your destination of competency.
Just start with the Donut tutorial and do it end-to-end. Then go back and do it again and again until the concepts are indelible and the shortcuts are muscle-memory.
I continue to believe that the single best thing a Daz Studio user can do to improve his experience in Daz Studio itself is to learn Blender.
The reasons?
I'm sure they vary.
My reasons, however.
I use Studio, render with and the associated pre-requisites (posing for instance).
I use blender because it does a lot more.
I use studio because what it does is enought for the particular scene I have in mind.
Two tools, I use the most appropriate - and quite often to very often: both.
Yep that final comment was intended in a context. Where it's already stated that cycles is faster for animation due to the better denoiser and shaders. The iray denoiser doesn't work with the cpu so it's practically impossible to use iray for animation with the cpu, unless you denoise in post. I mean that technically, without the denoiser and with similar shaders, so speaking of rough rendering power alone, cycles and iray are comparable with the cpu.
But thank you for posting your experience, this is useful both to me and to others to better evaluate the comparison.
Blender is not NVidia only.