What's one utility that's made your life much much easier?
Testing6790
Posts: 1,091
Hi all,
Recently I've found that I'm getting frusturated with the minutae of creating a good scene. The endless tweaking of hand posing, the constant re-rendering to clean up clipping. Getting the lighting just so. For a single render, this would be fine, but the majority of my rendering is a story board, which I eventually add text to and make them into little stories.
After spending 3 hours on 2 renders, I get a little tired of it. Another issue is that as I do all these things my skill is improving, so I do trickier things, which takes more time. The results are starting to look great, but the timestamp is also hurting more and more.
I want something to make my process faster, but I don't know what I need. So, what are some things that you have that make your life infinitely easier? I don't mean hand, pose, and light presets. I have those in spades.
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Comments
Spot render
Using spot render to test small sections of a render b4 committing to a full render really helps.
Also using spot render (to a new window) to fix minor things I dont like after the final render is done.
Rawn
Yeah I recently started using spot render pretty liberally for the touchy areas. Mostly visible geometry collisions. Nothing is worse than a 10 minute render finishing only to see that you forgot that the figure's feet are poking through the floor.
o.O a 10 minute render? hell..I have spot renders that take longer than that LOL
10 hour renders are the ones you hate to see errors like that ;)
Rawn
Yeah, I don't do the mega-high-quality renders. 10 minutes is actually high for me. I make story boards for personal use, I can't imagine how long it would take me if each render was 10 hours...
Greetings,
Oh gods, spot render to a separate window. That changed my rendering life. (I really wish I could spot-render-to-file. That doesn't seem to work...)
Now I can feel relatively confident that if I left a characters fingers intersecting, or screwed up a facial expres.sion* (because those NEVER render like they look in preview) I can fix it without re-rendering the entire scene.
Beyond that, honestly, a relentless addiction to postwork has been my greatest tool. The willingness to 'fix it in post' makes things a lot easier. I can color-balance stuff the way I want, so I can just worry that my characters are lit appropriately for the scene, not that it calls out the colors perfectly.
Another massively useful tool is the Align tab. Putting things next to each other (using align stack), or moving things to other things (using align centers) to then adjust has helped a lot. I'll often use my perspective camera to move to a specific spot, then drop a point light using the current location, then do a align centers to move a character to that location, then fine tune their placement. (This is a nav trick for bigger sets.)
edit: Mind you I also do 8+ hour renders, but usually after I've done a few dozen 'draft quality' WIP renders. It's still very possible to screw up the 8+ hour render, like the time that I changed Gamma to 0.1 instead of Shading Rate. :red:
-- Morgan
* - Apparently 'expression' followed by an open parenthesis is a bad word and gets [removed]...?
Transfer Utility - It is the utility I use most often for all sorts of transfer jobs and it does a very good job at that. It beats AutoFit by a very large margin. Couldn't imagine working without it. Close second place for me is GenX 2.
I've had great success with Autofit, what does the Transfer Utility do better? Is it difficult to use?
I've had great success with Autofit, what does the Transfer Utility do better? Is it difficult to use?
Transfer utility uses essentially the same technology as Auto-fit but it caters to a more advanced user. You have more options and the ability to do more with transfer utility, but the added features make it less intuitive than AutoFit.
...Spot render is indeed very useful, however it still can be slow (especially on close ups where transmaps or hightly detailed surfaces are involved). For many test renders, I frequently go to the progressive render as it displays the whole scene at once and "cleans up" enough in short order so I can see any flaws like pokethrough, unwanted shadows on characters' faces, feet sunk in the ground/floor, or characters "floating" above it. However, this is not a utility so much as it is just a render setting.
As to utilities, my favourite is rapidly becoming the Polygon Group Editor. It allows me to make minor alterations to meshes and create new surface zones for texturing all without having to take the mesh into a modelling application. I've even used it to set up and assign surfaces on untextured .objs which I would then save for later use. It does take a bit of patience especially on more complex items, however having no practical UV mapping tool at the time (until I an get my feet under me more with Blender) it is a nice alternative.
Reality and LuxRender was the combo that drove this application wide open for me especially trying to get lighting and realism that I was not getting with 3Delight or was too complicated for me to get since others seem to get it quite naturally, but the one tool I can't live without is Blender.
When I work in 3Delight the tool that is indispensable to me is the UberEnviornment lighting which I use in conjunction with a 3 point lighting system. Paolo at Preta3d.com (who is also the creator of Reality) has a set of lights for DS here that are customized.
http://preta3d.com/dazstudio-improved-lighting/
...for lighting, my tool of choice has become AoA's advanced lighting system. It has basically replaced UE for my purposes save for creating mesh lights with UberArea lights.
I prefer the shorter render times (easier on system resources) and better control over the lighting environment than I have with UE. My background is in theatrical lighting rather than photography and like the original Daz lights, the Advanced Lights handle more like what I am used to using. I can create nearly any type of lighting quality I want from the "classic" LDP2 look (still my favourite) to almost photoreal.
Never really got a good grip on all this HDRI stuff either.
Interesting in that I have Reality 2.5/Luxrender (got it at a steep discount on sale), but never have used it much because of the "uber-Brycean" render times and the fact it is more easily understood from a professional photographer's/film maker's perspective rather than that of lighting designer such as myself. On top of that is all the shader tweaking that is needed to get things to look right.
I'm one of those more comfortable with pushing the boundaries of 3Delight (and now that the free standalone supports 4 instead of 2 cores is a huge improvement even in these multicore hyperthreading days).
the utilities that make my life easier.... electricity and indoor plumbing
...what makes my life easier to deal with...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VCwBzGdPM&feature=kp
I'm with Kyoto Kid- my first thought was the polygon editing tool because you can make parts of things go POOF by hiding the polygons.
AoA's Advanced lights ... totally easy to get good lighting!
I once did a render that took more than 24 hours. Turned out to be a completely black screen. I got married to the sport render tool that day :D
Another favorite of mine is the 'clear undo stack' script. Since I've been compulsively using it, saving my scenes doesn't take an hour any more.
Notepad++. I use this about every day, both for organizing lists generated by Karen's Directory Printer and for modifying .duf and .dsa files. No other free utility has a smarter find/replace with such a good interface.
I'd like to have a better list-generating utility than Karen's, but I haven't found a free one yet, and it gets the job done. The default Windows one won't do because it won't list just a folder's contents without other info (that I've found, at least). I had another free one that was even better for XP and Vista, but it was never updated to work with Windows 7 so I had to drop it.
Hexagon! :-)
Whenever I have some annoying poke throu problems with clothes, or anything simply does not bend or drape the way I want it, no problem.
Select the item - send to Hexagon - adjust the mesh as you want it - sent back to Studio - done.
No more hassle with deformers and weight maps and all that stuff. This method is as simple as it could be.
UberHair to turn off AO in scenes where I use UberEnvironment -- that saves me a ton of time.
Other than that... custom actions. These are commands that appear in the "Scripts" menu. I have one to load Genesis, one to set selected surface back to DAZ Default, a few others for various steps I find myself repeating over and over.
Outside of DS, StitchWitch. I really like the way it handles bending trim around a path. Yes, PhotoShop or Illustrator can apply a pattern to a path, but StitchWitch keeps the path editable and gives me a real-time preview, and has convenient tools to overlay the template with transparency-- just a lot of things that are very useful specifically for creating textures. I only wish it had better support for linking displacement images to diffuse images, but then again, hardly anyone who makes texture resources supplies good matched displacement images.... (private rant)
StitchWitch also makes very nice texture templates with seam guides.
Edited to add: also, Categories, specifically my own custom "favorites" categories with Scene Subsets of characters I use a lot in my manga projects, and then also I put props and scenes into these Categories-- it's like aliases to content I use a lot for particular projects. Putting something into a Category doesn't move it from its original install location, and I can include the same prop or figure in multiple Categories without installing multiple times to my system.
I wish I had better tools to automatically identify all the content I've used in a scene. I used to have a script for this, but it doesn't work with DS 4.6, and it identified data directory items, not the products themselves. Shouldn't it be possible to link those up now that we have metadata for products?
Custom actions are the best. Especially now that I use Draagonstorm's .dsa/.pz2 mat loaders for the G2's ALL the time. Spot render to new window (others have mentioned) is a lifesaver when I get that message from testing saying "you forgot to give this person a navel in Promo 2." XD
Spot render. Thumbs up. +100
I use Runtime Repair & P3DO. Freed my content COMPLETELY from runtimes. Unfortunately I still need then for Geometries, Textures & Scripts
There's a more powerful version of Runtime Repair (Different name, same publisher) that I'm looking at.
Reality plugin for DS, totally changed the way I work. I was a poser only user, staring with version 6. I had tried DS twice, but couldn't figure out the UI, so dropped it. I tried/bought so many lighting setups and tutorials trying to under the lighting system in poser and also the node based material room, which drove me nuts. Then came carrara 5 pro and things looked up, could use my poser content and the material setup made lots more sense, plus light looked much better, was easier to set up and was more realistic.
One day at a friends house I got to try Vray and Maxwell and I was hooked on unbiased rendering, but the price of admission was out of my range, especially since I had saved forever for 3DSMax and couldn't justify another purchase like that for awhile.
I knew of luxrender, but hadn't tried it and when the free community app came out for poser, I gave it a shot. But the results were not worth the time and frustration trying to set up the materials and lighting and then Reality showed up. I watched and saw how it was being received and decided to take the plunge knowing full well I would have to finally learn DS in order to use it. Years later I am glad I did as I have been really happy with the results and have come to really prefer DS because of it.
I was an early adopter for Reality for poser, but found the new UI in Reality to be confusing and felt like I was going backwards using poser again when I had become so used to some of the features DS has that poser doesn't.
Kimberly.3d's perfect little file lister?
http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?page=2&userid=437714
Edited to add: unfortunately the File Locker has exceeded it's download limit at the moment - try again tomorrow?
Kimberly.3d's perfect little file lister?
http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?page=2&userid=437714
Edited to add: unfortunately the File Locker has exceeded it's download limit at the moment - try again tomorrow?
For sure! Thank you!