Helpful tools and plugins.
Toonen1988
Posts: 13
Hello everyone, I'm kinda new to Daz3d. Yes, I have a older account but I never really used Daz3d. Now since I have a new computer, I started to use daz3d.
My plan is to make my own characters and photorealistic renders. I already bought the Genesis 9 Essential bundle, which contains the Genesis 9 starter essential, body shape, head shapes and expressions.
I also have on my wishlist Iray volume kit, Iray ghost light props, Iray stand kit and scene optimizer. What kind of tools and plugins can you recommend me more, and why? What plugins or tools make for example Daz3d easier to use, what can I use to optimize render time, for example Scene Optimizer without losing quality.
What can you recommend me more with lighting? Lighting is one of the most important aspect of a render. I would also like to work more with Ray tracing. I hope Daz3d will use path tracing in the future, so rasterization lighting is not needed anymore, which creates a way more realistic feeling.
What can you recommend me more? What is helpful or can help creating photorealistic renders?
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Comments
I consider Zev0's 200 Plus essential for anyone who wants to dial in their own characters, and they have a number of other userful products for addional shaping and control. Boss Pro Lights is a highly-recommended lighting set.
There are so many great tools available which will make life easier or your workflow faster (just as useful as speeding up the actual render) so here are some of my recommendations.
Although this tool won't speed up renders it will allow you to squeeze more out of your VRAM by turning duplicate items into instances. If you're more interested in portrait rendering this won't be of much use to you but if you plan on doing more complex interior or exterior scenes with a lot of props I would consider this essential, even if you have a card with a large amount of VRAM:
https://www.daz3d.com/instancify
This *will* speed up renders of complex scenes if used correctly but there is a (shallow) learning curve to getting the best from it. It culls objects that are off-camera but care in the setup is needed to ensure you don't delete items which, although not visible in the final render, do have an effect on the lighting.
https://www.daz3d.com/camera-view-optimizer
This tool doesn't appear to have had much exposure (pun not intended) and it essentially allows you, you guessed it, to adjust the brightness of individual items or groups of items. It's superb for setting up interior scenes where often the character lighting is too dark. Adding spotlights and ghost lights can cause unwanted effects and splashes on the scenery but this allows you to adjust the ISO or shutter speed et.al so the lighting looks natural on your character and then dial down the now over-exposed set/props to where they were initially leaving the character(s) untouched. It's superb and whilst it doesn't save time on the renders per se it saves me a huge amount of time vs. fiddling about with interior lighting or compositing:
https://www.daz3d.com/brightness-manager
For character lighting these products are excellent. It's HDRI lighting which is fast but might mean you have to composite renders in Photoshop or equivalent, depending on what kind of renders you want to produce:
https://www.daz3d.com/hdri-photoshoot - stylised and moody lighting. Looks superb, two sets available although the second is a bit more niche.
https://www.daz3d.com/luxreal-hdri-lights-pack - natural portrait lighting. This is the first of three sets and all produce great results.
SV Luminosity Lighting Sets - Very similar to the Luxreal sets and are my go-to light sets for character creation. No links I'm afraid because they're at the other store but they're easy to find.
You don't *need* to buy any lighting because you can create it all yourself with the lighting available within Studio but I do think at least one decent set of HDRI lights is worth having and they do take a not insignificant time to create and test yourself.
Fit Control - https://www.daz3d.com/fit-control-for-genesis-9-bundle - adds an enormous amount of versatility and value to any clothing items you have. Especially useful for those cheap, previous generation outfits you've picked up in a sale and shrink wrap themselves to G9 when autofitted. Cannot recommend this enough.
Mesh Grabber - https://www.daz3d.com/mesh-grabber-bundle-win - what can't it do? The limit is your imagination with this one. From simple tasks like indenting furniture for your seated poses or beds for sleeping, to damaging vehicles or curling hair, curing poke-through in clothing, creating landscapes and terrains. There's also a Mac version if you have turned to the Dark Side.
If you'd like to tell us what kind of renders you are planning to do it would be possible to narrow down the tools and utilities which would be more suited to your likely workflow but hopefully this will help you to get started. None are essential, by the way, but if someone took mine away I'd be a bit miffed to say the least!
My idea is creating my own characters, which I want to use in my digital novel in the future. I'm a huge Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, Cyberpunk 2077, Blade Runner, Ergo Proxy, Deus EX, Ex Machina and more sci-fi/Cyberpunk fan. I'm not only fan of the visual but also the underlying themes and subjects.
I'm also busy writing my own story, so why not also a digital novel. I also want to have photorealistic and atmospheric scene's, with good lighting. In the last few years I came to realise that lighting is the most important thing. So I'm also investing time and money in lighting.
I've build myself a new computer, a I9-14900kf with a RTX 4080. Not only for gaming but also using programs like Daz3d.
I also work between 40 to 60 hours per week. So, I can't wait a hour per render. So, I'm looking tools and plugins that can help me with this. And also other tools and plugins that will make it easier to use Daz3d. Without losing any quality in my renders.
You do have a couple of requirements pulling in opposite directions here and I think some compromise is going to be required on your part.
I love the future-noir aesthetic as well but it generally involves low lighting, rain-soaked surfaces, glow-infused neon and highly reflective surfaces. iRay is not fast when faced with this lighting environment but you want fast renders with zero loss of quality. Something's going to have to give here! The 4080 is a great card but it can't do magic tricks...
Bear in mind that render time is the sum of the time to set up the scene and then render it so there are a few things you could consider. Tools that shorten the scene creation timeline will benefit you equally as well as those that optimise the scene for rendering. Denoisers, either the built-in one or an external post-render tool such as the Intel denoiser will allow you to shorten your renders but at the cost of some quality which you have ruled out and this is probably the only real way you're going to be able to render Blade Runner-esque scenes reasonably quickly.
I'm sure you understand that there are no plugins or tools called 'Make My Render Faster' and it is a combination of culling and/or downgrading unwanted geometry and materials which will help the most. All of those tools are listed above.
Some recommendations for you and they all have a common theme - this theme is 'Photoshop'!
Rain, puddles, splashes et.al. and fog/smoke should be done post-render. Studio will happily render these but at a massive time cost. Start having a look for Photoshop brushes and packages (there are a fair few sold at the Daz store) which will be useful.
Photoshop filter packages like Luminar or ON1 which can alter the lighting and atmosphere will be incredibly useful. Many of these packages are not cheap but would allow you to render something much better lit and then turn it into rain-soaked, neon-infused darkness with a few clicks and adjustments.
If you haven't seen it already, seek out the documentary 'Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.' There is a huge amount of information in there about creating this aesthetic and, although it's obviously talking about a film environment, it holds true for renders. There is also a lot of info about the Blade Runner animated series - Black Lotus - from the artists who made it a Google search away. Whilst the characters in that series aren't rendered particularly well, the environments are.
Generally, visual novel authors render the backgrounds and overlay the characters separately. This will really speed up renders but the time required to match the lighting of the figures to the environment can cancel that time saving. A lot of VNs and 3D comics look awful, as if the creator has pasted a character onto a scene and the ambient lighting has no relationship to the lighting on the protagonists. Rendering your backgrounds as an HDRI at high-res (16k or thereabouts) will initially take a longish time but you can then reuse them for very quick renders (minutes) with characters who will receive the correct lighting. The limitation here is that your camera viewpoint is fixed at one point in space and can only rotate from that point.
You've got a good PC but it's not a commercial rendering setup. You'll have to decide which of your requirements is most important.
Quality, Speed, Complexity. Pick two. You can't have all three.
(Edited to add: I'm assuming you want to do fairly large renders - at least 2k or 4k for Retina devices, PC monitors etc. If you're thinking more along the lines of 1k renders or smaller you'll probably be able to get the speed you want. Anything larger.... no.)
That's really cool. An absolute must have for portrait photos.
Thanks Gordig for the tip.
I haven't seen this set before.
Thanks for the reactions, I will look in to it.