Blender render engine question from a noob
Mag_bfaa50c8df
Posts: 100
Total noob question: I mainly render in Daz 3delight for short and fast animations. Does blender render faster than Daz and would it make sense to use in my case? If so why or why not?
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Blender's eevee render engine is real time, meaning basically instant.
Yeah, some shots will take a little bit longer, but I rendered a ten minute short film in under an hour a couple months ago.
What is your workflow, if you wish to share that is?
Do you create all scenes in Daz?
I don't mind at all! At first, I did the animating in Daz and then used the diffeomorphic tool to import those animations to the characters once I transferred them over, but then I discovered Rigify like halfway through and switched to just importing the character into Blender and then doing all the animation there. The environments were pretty much all from Daz that I brought in either with the diffeomorphic tool, or if it couldn't bring it in I'd do an FBX. So for that, I did nothing in Daz other than load it and export it right away, oh and run scene optimizer, which I also ran on the characters.
The bridge I built with an asset from Quixel and material shaders from Quixel on a cube. And the background cityscape is Kitbash 3D. I'm posting the link below in case you'd like to see it, the bridge timelapse took the absolute longest because I had to render like 60 seperate characters and then layer them in after effects, and then apply the step processing technique, that shot took about a week to do from start to finish (the actual render of the people to layer was super quick, it's the 140 layers in after effects that my computer wanted to kill me for), but otherwise everything else went really quick.
I used an HDRI for the daytime exteriors, but the night time ones I just used a sun and point lights. What was great with Eevee was making bloom and volumetrics a super breeze to work with.
So yeah, I'd do all the animation and posing in Blender, sometimes I'd use a pose from Daz as a starting point, but then veered off on my own. After I did all the animations, I would run the cloth sim if needed on the girl's kimono.
But here's the short if you want to see it. From start to finish, it took me about two and a half months, but that's including spending hours watching tutorials to learn Blender and cloth phyics, and Mantaflow. Now I could probably do this in a month, maybe 3 weeks now that I've got all the kinks worked out. If you have any specific questions, I'm more than happy to try and answer or direct you somewhere that could answer it better than I can!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edbxNmgZS3o&t=159s
Thanks for sharing your workflow, very interesting.
The short is pretty good, especially considering it was done in such short timeframe.
I may have to look at Rigify. I tried to export an animation scene using diffeomorphic, but it didn't work. Parts of the environment didn't import either.
What are your thoughts about using Teleblender from Mcasual? I recently tried to export a scene from Daz and import it to Blender, but I couldn't get it to work. I made sure the addon was installed into Blender as well. I guess I'm just wondering about Teleblender because it has been around for a while but I never had much interest in Blender before Daz screwed their timeline up for animation. I'm trying to get my bearings.
I tried it with an older 2.8 build and it worked about 85%, but once I updated to 2.83, all it did was throw errors. As I'm on a Mac, I had to edit the Python script it creates by hand to get the include files corrected. It is very Windows centric and assumes file names are not case sensitive. Looking at the website, there are other utilties and I can't tell which is the newest.
Environments are hit or miss. Some of them transfer perfectly, others show up as an error. When that happens, just export from Daz as an FBX and you'll be good to go. And I personally like Rigify a lot. Don't forget to update the morphs in the diffeomorphic options so that you can have facial controls and expressions!
But when you exported the animation, how did you do it? Did you save the baked animation as a saved pose file with the timeline selected, and then in Blender imported the pose as an action under poses? You'll have to do some tweaking still with the legs and arms sometimes I've found, but all your keyframes will transfer over that way, I did half my animated short that way.
I understood up to export the FBX. After that, I'll have to study.
I did this video a few months ago. It should help a bit. I need to make an updated one probably, but I'm so swamped timewise I can't right now, but hopefully this can give you a visual reference of what I was talking about above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HnvxP05vjM
I'm trying a scene with the Sci-Fi Engine Room A (https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-engine-room-a). In Studio it is kinda dark, but I did finally figure out how to boost the lights a bit. In Blender it is was too dark and it doesn't seem to have converted the emissive light surfaces.
Watching...wait...how did you pan up on a Mac?
Shift-Two finger scroll....got it
Auto Rig Pro is very good as well, enough to come down to your personal preference. It's at Blendermarket.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint I have auto rig pro as well, the rig is wonderful, but I can never get the face to work right. It seems like there's an issue with the eyes not being able to be selected. Do you have any insight on how to make it work?
I'm sorry, the face is actually what led me back to Daz Studio to export Alembic. I'm sure you know more about the face bones than I do.
Rewatched several parts. Will try tonight. I subbed and commented. I'm "Channel Dad Bryon Lape" on YouTube.