question about poser v daz3d renders
tradivoro
Posts: 74
HI, I'm not trying to get create any arguments, just a simple question for those experienced in both programs. I was over at the renderosity galleries, and I was just looking at works done in poser and works done in daz3d. I was mostly looking at portraits and people. Now, subject matter aside, what I noticed was that most of the poser renders weren't that good whereas most of the daz3d renders were pretty decent and some excellent.
So, my question is, is this result because it's a lot easier to get a decent render out of Daz3d, and it's harder to get something decent out of poser?? Just wondering.
The reason I ask is because I have experience with both programs from the past. Right now Poser is on sale at a decent price. What I like about poser is that it comes wiht all this content. Now I'm not thinking of using this for high fashion renders or exotic renders. More real people renders that look nice (the render that is). Daz3d is free, and I remember uisng in the past and it was easy to use and I got some pretty good results out of it. The problem is navigating the store to find some real people product. The search parameters of the store are not that good. And it appears that all the vendors are into selling "exotics" (for lack of a better term). So, it's this lack of normal material that keeps me leaning towards poser. But not if it's going to be a pain in the neck to get a good render.
Anyway, if anybody can share their experience or wisdom, I would appreciate it, thanks.
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Comments
I can only speak from what I know. I used Poser for nearly 20 years (up to Poser Pro 2014). I DO NOT have the latest version with Superfly, so I cannot attest to its ease of use. However, I did indeed find it easier to get a much better image out of DS and Iray. Simple as that. I also like the figures better by a factor of about a billion ;). You do have to pay for content, yes, but DS also comes with quite a bit of content too. There are also a bunch of freebies around the net to get you started until you can build up a library of stuff. I will never bash Poser. There are things I really miss about it and I won't lie. LOL. The morph brush and dynamic cloth being the two big things, but all in all, DS is a good solid program.
Laurie
I'm also a very long time Poser user who recently moved to DS. Maybe because Cycles in Poser is still quite new, there is a lack of Superfly shaders at the moment. And considering that PBR produces the "best" images (runs for cover), this might be a factor.
Hi, Like Allenart, I was a poser user for 20+ years from poser2 up to poser pro 2014
I may have a possible explaination for the apparent disparity in quality
one may see between poser and Daz studio renders today.
For years poser has had a node based material system
for its "Firefly" render engine.
The system was at least partially developed By an Engineer type community GURU called "bagginsbill".
This rendering shader system was poorly documented however
"bagginsbill" and a small minority of other community
Wizards seem happy to be active in the forums at rosity & RDNA
providing guidance( and often admonishment) to the hapless poser masses on how to literally "Do the Math !!!"
to get a decent render out of firefly
as they kept all of this knowledge in their heads.
(Think of "Gandalf" and the other Ishtari order in tolkens lord of the rings lore)
To make a long story short
Genesis arrived and Daz stopped supporting poser with new figures after
V4/M4.
and the world high quality of poser content quickly devolved into the anachronistic Vicky 4 fetish wear, wasteland (IMHO) that is it today.
Gandalf .....sorry!! "bagginsbill" and many of the other GURU's withdrew or signifigantly reduced their active participation in the community .
Thus you have many old and new users
who post to galleries, images that look like something from
poser4 of 1997.
Not because poser is not capable of creating great renders it defininately is capable.
The problem is an obvious lack of knowledgable users of the rendering system and this includes the new cycles based "Superfly" engine.
Wow, that explains a lot actually.
Kinda shows how important documentation is for software...
It's trure to say, and sad, that most of the old guard have left the poser community, or more precisely, abandoned the Renderosity and RDNA Poser forums. But as for "fetish wear", DAZ more than makes up for that area of the market.
It's not about the documentation, Poser has all the documentation (and even books written about it), It's turning all that information into useful shaders, etc.
It's about very clever people sometimes 'ignoring the manual' to solve problems as they arise and generously sharing their solutions, that sort of knowledge.
(I would say DAZ have historically missed out the documentation part and relied on the knowledge part.)
Precisely , however documentation and books will do very little for a user base consisting of users dependant on click ,load & render presets.
And no.. this is said not to disparage such users as even the so called "Pro" apps
have huge online repositories of shader presets for their specific render engines to get new users started :
http://www.vraymaterials.co.uk/products/vray-materials/
http://www.rockthe3d.com/download-101-free-mental-ray-shaders-maya/
http://www.blendernation.com/2015/09/29/150-free-cycles-shaders/
http://www.maxwellrender.com/materials/homepage/listing/0/1/
http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/asset/materials/
In the case of poser Firefly when a non techie user needed a realistc tarnished copper or brass shader ,and it was not included in the sparse set of presets installed with poser, he needed the help of the resident GURUto show him which formula he need to parse in some bloody math node to create the shader
without even addressing the matter of how the material should be lit
or the tone mapping & gamma settings
The problem with this paradigm is that when the resident Wizard
suddenly becomes unavailable in the forum for whatever reason,
( tempermental hissy fit, regretable encounter with poorly refrigerated shrimp salad etc),
Well this leaves many users with nothing to even get started with a custom shader except some Dry, Nerdy Mcnerd techno babble in some book or those insufferable , self validating,geek fest forum threads in the "Node Cult" over at RDNA.
...and nVidia are not starting from scratch with Iray, they bought Mental Ray in 2007. Which gives Iray a big headstart with an established Material system and a library of materials.
Indeed to me it matters not wether the main software publisher provides the presets
...or the community of users does so
as is the case with most of the links I posted above.
In the case poser fire fly's material and rendering system
It never got the kinds of preset repositories that other node based engines have,
making its expert usage too dependant on too few individual community guru's
As to the OP's orignal Question
The likely reason so many DAZ studio users are producing better renders overall with Iray is because of the DAZ merchants providing figure content with Iray shaders already applied
and Environmental Lighting presets for Iray
ready to render without users having to do any math or even deal with nodes.
This was never the case with firefly
And I have yet to see any Poser 11 cycles based "Superfly"
renders that even come close to what one typicaly finds in Blender Cycles galleries.
Thanks very much to everyone, particularly allenart and wolf359. Thanks for that explanation, I kept asking myself, why does the Poser stuff still look like 2004 so many times? In any event, I think I found a comparative solution to my problem. I found Poser10 for $40, which I can use to practice rendering and get it to do whatever it can, and I'm getting dazstudio and some morphs and body types, so I can see what both look like. That way if I don't like how one or the other is rendering, I'm only out $40 bucks for either. But I'm confident I'll get good results out of both. I'm a big manual reader and video instruction watcher. When I was heavily into 3D, years ago, we had to spend sometimes a day and a half doing a render on Bryce and Vue d'Esprit (those are the programs I learned 3d on). The reason I mention that is because, if I have to spend 2 hours ona render now, it's not that big a deal to me, cause my head is still back there. :) It's so much easier now where the video card does a lot of the heavy lifting. Thanks again for explaining the Poser rendering engine and how the knowledge was not widespread,
Daz is offering documentation now? When did this hapen?
Daz's active forums acts as the best documentation in my opinion. Ask a question and somebody will answer, better than trolling through a thick manual that doesn't specifically help a specific task you need help with. Also just Youtube Daz 101. They also have a lot of supporting channels from vendors and users. They also have a wiki page that is constantly being updated.
I didn't mean DAZ in particular - more like a general idea that "good" documentation is need.
Sort of like "You use X dial to achieve Y results - but it can affect A, B, C and D, depending on your need as well." - and gives you the logic and philosophy behind it.
I've seen a lot of answers stating "Do this, then do that, then do this - it now works." and the frsutration when you STILL have no clue what "function X" does - you just know it has to be dialed on for some reason.
I guess maybe SmithMicro is busy integrating the new AMD / ATI PRR Shader Renderer into Poser but the rendering of still is the biggest visible difference. The tech used in the latest DAZ 3D models isn't even properly and correctly supported by DAZ and its official plugin makers in it's own software yet so I don't think Poser has lost much ground on that basis.
Poser has plenty of documentation. It's Daz Studio that lacks it, and believe me, it bothers me. I mean, I'd willingly PAY for a Daz Studio manual. What it came down to (for me) was that Daz Studio was just easier to get what I wanted out of it. That's really it. LOL No smudge on Poser, no smudge against SM. A lot of my friends are Poser users and they love it, and there are reasons why they stick with it. I'm not going to badmouth it or them. It's just that DS was easier for ME and inspired me to start doing images again when I hadn't for years and years.
Laurie
Well, there's the wiki, and there was a book once...