Lux Render and Daz
Tramp Graphics
Posts: 2,411
I've been having problems rendering with the stock 3Delight render engine built into Daz Studio 4 so I decided to download Lux Render to see if that would work better. However, when I went to try and download the Daz plug-in for it, the web site says you need to buy the Reality2 in order to do it. How then can I use Lux to render my Daz scenes without Reality2?
Comments
Acutally you can export the scene to FBX in order to import in Blender and use Luxrender from there.
The alternative is to hope that the guy behind LuxRenderDS updates it for DS4. Or export your scene to DS3 and use the LuxRenderDS plugin.
However which issues are you having with 3delight?
For the record, I'm running Daz Studio 4.0 Pro on a Mac Mini 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz RAM and a 64 MB VRAM 32-bit Intel GMA 950 graphics card.
You're getting crashes because your computer can not cope with much. I don't think Reality will help, you need to upgrade if possible.
DS specs
http://www.daz3d.com/products/daz-studio/daz-studio-tech-specs
The tech specs are the same for DS 4 and DS 4.5, they have not changed, just the version number has been altered to show the latest version of DS.
With 2GB RAM your going to have a very tough time trying to render in LuxRender with any other application having to stay open.
DS3 is still an option, you would need to export your scene from DS4 as an OBJ and reimport back into DS3. Your models would be static at that point. Since you can't export other elements of the scene from DS4 to DS3 such as cameras and lights you would need recreate them in DS3, from there you could use the DSLuxRender plugin.
However if you do decide you want to use Reality, which IMHO is a amazing product you have the option of exporting the data out of DS so you can render without DS running and you also have the option of making a less memory intensive file to render. I don't have DSLuxRender installed any longer, I can't recall if DSLuxRender will do anything like that and I can't check right now 'cus I'm at work on a Mac and DSLuxRender was PC only and last I heard the developer has not said anything about a DS4 version in the works.
If you are running out of RAM trying to render in 3Delight you can try this approach
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=109277&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
You should know right away, there is a process window that comes up shows you the progress very much like the window that appears in DS drawing line by line. If the process seems like it's stuck you should lower you bucket size, this will render smaller areas quicker and overall you will only loose a few seconds of render time.
Best way to test is do a very small scene. A camera, a textured figure, a light without shadows enabled.
LuxRender is still a viable option as well. You can't export OBJ or any format natively out of DS4.x, you need a bridge of some kind (Reality being your only option). but as others said before you have the option to export OBJ or Collada to Blender (you have to configure it, it's not automatically there) or OBJ to DS3 with the DSLuxRender plugin.
If you do decide to go Blender it can be a very tough program to wrap your head around. Being that it's free there is a tremendous amount of resources for it, some very professional and some very well meaning but...
these are ones are excellent
http://vimeo.com/channels/blendervideotutorials/videos