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Agreed.
When I'm using 3Delight and working on a shot with distance AoA's Atmospheric Cameras are wonderful.
Not to my knowledge. I basically had to figure it all by myself by studying the example scripts and the DS3 scripting documentation (thankfully the scripting hasn't changed much). And of course, you have to know a little of the Renderman standard.
The good thing is, if I could figure it out, anyone should be able to =)
I just don't have the willpower to write anything coherent on it (the SSS "treatise" took a lot of effort I still haven't recovered from), but if you decide to venture in, feel free to ask questions. There's Wancow's 3Delight thread where we've been posting various "techie" stuff, so maybe it's worth it to discuss the "scripted renderer" there: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P480/
There's an understatement. The best software in the world has little value, if you can't learn how to use it.
If you want to go with the classroom and instructor approach, your choices will be limited. After that you'll need plenty of cash, four years to spare, and you'll probably need to move.
If that's a bit rich for you, as it is for me, you may already have discovered that the forums are crucial. Books are often in short supply. Videos have limited use. Only the forum can give you the opportunity to ask questions. These programs tend to be complex. If you can't ask questions, you won't live long enough to learn to use them.
For lack of a curriculum, I've spent a year evaluating four or five programs and the learning resources that are available for each of them. I've learned that each forum has a culture of its own. Some have overbearing "topic police" for moderators. Some have a high-testosterone environment that is given to endless arguing. Others are just plain unresponsive, packed with passive observers.
IMO, anyone setting out to learn any CG program would be wise to take the available learning resources into account when choosing a program.
Not to my knowledge. I basically had to figure it all by myself by studying the example scripts and the DS3 scripting documentation (thankfully the scripting hasn't changed much). And of course, you have to know a little of the Renderman standard.
The good thing is, if I could figure it out, anyone should be able to =)
I just don't have the willpower to write anything coherent on it (the SSS "treatise" took a lot of effort I still haven't recovered from), but if you decide to venture in, feel free to ask questions. There's Wancow's 3Delight thread where we've been posting various "techie" stuff, so maybe it's worth it to discuss the "scripted renderer" there: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P480/
Thanks, that thread will come in handy. I did a few test renders that came out ok, but what i noticed right off the bat is lighting turns out much differently than standard, more contrast and it needs to be turned down a lot.
Once again I'm going to shill the wonderful free alternative that is Blender Cycles (There is an equally free exporter in the freepository). It can do GPU for most things, and also works with CPU. As long as you are comfortable learning editing materials with nodes, or willing to learn (Its not really that hard. I swear). It also has a fairly fast update cycle, and huge knowledge base.
Seriously watch a tutorial on the basics of how to use it, and try it... The most you can lose is an hour of time
(The attached is the proudest bit of a render I have ever done)
...just to get to where I can use the Blender UI as well as Daz Studio's to do more advanced tasks such as materials tweaking will take months, possibly years.
I finally am pretty good at it with Daz Studio and getting better with Carrara.
I feel Like I must be the opposite of most folks, I found Blender surprisingly intuitive. I have both Reality and Luxus, and have essentially replaced them because I can get results faster in blender (What it really comes down to is I love tweaking settings and exporting to blender you only have to export your scene once and then you tweak all the materials and lights in blender).
@kyoto have you tried these http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/blender-basics-introduction-for-beginners/ tutorials? For exporting and rendering you can skip the modelling and animation ones and they do a pretty good job of covering most stuff you need to get started.
*edit Actually, I now have a question how does one setup and tweak the materials for octane? do you get a real time response or do you have to re-export the meshes each time? If time is important that could make a serious difference.
...it's dealing with the UI that causes me endless frustration. It is totally unlike any other graphics app I've worked with. So much of it is based on keyboard shortcuts and having to memorise them making it cumbersome compared to Daz Studio, Carrara, and even other pro grade software like Modo (which I DL'd the trial version of several years ago).
Customisation, scripting, and shortcuts are advanced level operations that shouldn't be thrown at a new user the first time he or she opens the application. This is why many are turned off by the programme and move on to something else. Andrew Price basically had a good idea when he sought to "humanise" the UI so that new users wouldn't be overwhelmed by the steep learning curve it presented and thus could then focus more on learning the concepts of 3D modelling , surfacing, animation, etc rather than wrestling with such a cumbersome setup.
If you have either the DS or Poser plugin, ALL tweaks are real time, with enough screen real estate. It really depends on you system setup, I use a laptop (single screen/monitor), so typically with the DS plugin, I close the Octane Render ViewPort to make changes to the scene (posing, arrangement, etc.), simply because I need/want more screen for this type of work After making pose/placement adjustments (or adding deleting things to/from the scene), a simple click of the mouse opens the octane render view port again and I get instant feed back. For materials/shaders I always keep the render view port open, and get real time feedback. It really is a huge productivity boost over using 3Delight, and definitely much better and more efficient than exporting the scene with each minor change.
You need the plugins to have the live link to Octane, without the plugins for DS or Poser, your workflow will be very similar to using Blender/Cycles. You export your scene to .obj, and import it into Octane. Then all of your materials and lighting work can be real time