Is it worth migrating assets from DAZ to Blender just for rendering?
tcassat
Posts: 74
I tested Blender for the first time and the render times I got with Cycles seemed much faster than iray, but I don't know if it's because of the assets I used.
The question is the title of the topic. If my intention is just to use exactly the same functions as I have in DAZ Studio, i.e. to pose characters in 3D environments obtained from the DAZ Store and render them, is there a significant advantage in doing this in Blender rather than DAZ Studio?
Thanks!
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Comments
For stills & portraits?
No advantage
Blender has a simplify tool that is similar to the scene optimizer in daz studio. Cycles has a better denoiser and supports AMD and Intel cards, plus it provides motion blur. For animations eevee is much better than filament. Apart this, if you have a nvidia card and use the scene optimizer in daz studio, then there's no significant advantage to render still pictures.
If you have to do lightweight one off modeling for the scene direct in Blender or have to do a lot of scene jiggering and test renders of your scene before you get to something you like then exporting to Blender is worth it. Also, if you want to use Eevee to create effects not possible in iRay, then it's worth it.
But do not discount the phenomenon where you thought you just wanted to render in Blender, but once you're actually in Blender you realize that now you've got your content in an extremely powerful environment, it liberates your creativity and you think of all sorts of things you want to do now that you didn't even think of before. Houdini is the same way.
That probably depends on what you're doing. It won't be for everybody. It's worth it to me. Once I took the time to learn Blender well enough to model, I also prefer to set up and render in it.
So I've installed Diffeomorphic and I've been exporting my entire Daz library for use in Blender. For the old 3Delight items, I run RSSY's 3DL to Iray converter before export, so I'm starting out with PBR shaders for everything. I then can meddle with the materials further in Blender for individual scenes.
Lighting is in Blender much better than in Daz.
I tend to do so more and more because - what mentioned earlier - I HATE navigating large scenes in DazStudio. It's really awful. And I am already much better in doing the adjustments in Blender, for example some clothing that is not lying correctly and dForce in Daz may not work - I can use Blender's scultping to do the necessary changes. Also I can use props and scenes from elsewhere (cgtrader, turbosquid etc.) more easily. I always felt like importing 3rd party objects into daz is much more complicated as you need to adjust all the shaders all the time, even with PBR materials. Another advantage is animation if you want to go that way. I am not very experienced but what I've seen so far animation in daz also is a pain where as Blender is much more handy for that.
For getting scenes, characters and poses into Blender I use diffeomorphic. Most of the time it#s working very well
TheMysteryIsThePoint,
When switching from one toolset to another, it helps to be aware of the paradigms we carry over and, when necessary, to be nimble in adapting the old to the new. Coming from Daz, I took to Blender looking for the same features and workflows. To some degree this helped, as Daz and Blender share commonalities. But in other aspects sticking with the Daz way of doing things only hindered me.
dForce is one example that tripped me up. I thought the solution to clothing peek-throughs in Blender was to simulate the scene -- figure, clothing pose and all -- to get the clothes settled well on the figure. Just as in Daz. This turned out to be more trouble than I had bargained for! In the end, I turned to Blender's sculpting tools. For generating still images, I've found this to be the easiest way around the problem.
As to Houdini, I've dipped my toes into it from time to time. All these new concepts -- SOPs, VOPs, etc. -- with little in terms of paradigms carried over from Daz and Blender. My intiution tells me that the key lies in approaching Houdini as a programmer; that is, to view those network nodes in terms of data flow graphs that transform geometry and vectors, whatever the later represents.
So many intersting things to learn ... so little waking hours to dabble in them. Alas, such is life.
Cheers!
Very well said, @csaa
In short: I don't think it's worth the hassle.
I use DS exclusively to create scenes using existing assets and to then render stills and animations from them using nVidia cards.
While Blender has a lot more features than DS, it's also a lot less focused than DS, and to me at least has way more features than I need.
I use Motionbuilder instead of Maya for the same reason. When I do animation work, I simply don't need all that additional functionality that clutters the Maya interface.
* I don't think Cycles renders any faster than Iray.
* Positioning cameras and lights is way easier in DS than it is in Blender. I had to purchase an addon for Blender to easily lock the camera to the viewport for positioning without having to open extra panels. That is build into DS, and a default in most 3D applications as well.
* Getting DS assets to work as well or at all in Blender will require a lot of fiddling. Converting shaders, character rigging, mesh deformations, dForce simulations etc. I guess that some of that could be done in Blender as well, but that isn't time well spend as far as I'm concerned.
* EEVE renders much better than Filament, but that won't matter if you don't want to use openGL for renders.
In closing; while there are way too many issues with DS for my liking, I can appreciate its scene creation and render workflow compared to Blender.
I toyed with the idea of moving to Blender instead of DS, and ended up staying with DS for these reasons.
Just my 2 cents, since I didn't see a similar sentiment posted here. Your mileage may vary.
Cycles render at about the same speed as iRAY with default settings, with a few tweaks Cycles render much faster with same quality.
A big scene that does not fit in GPU memory can still be rendered with Cycles and performance is not bad at all, it's not like iRAY crawling around in the sand on the CPU.
As [poor] as the Blender UI is you can actually set it up so it can be used on a high resolution monitor (one of my top 3 reasons to switch to Blender), the only thing you need is the "Simple tabs" plugin (free) that fix the N panel problems with a larger font, (as long as you can learn to live with middle mouse buttons, crazy collections behavior, vertical tabs with text, no delete button working and a camera setup that is beyond crazy and the outliner where you have to do everything two times of course).
The asset manager in Blender makes it easy to navigate all your content, almost as easy as in DS.
Physics in Blender is much better, dForce is a pain to setup so it get anything done the same day.
Blender takes you away from sitting in nVidias lap to some extent also.
And we have Thomas and Alessandro of course, without them nothing of this would be possible at all (you would have to use the DAZ to Blender bridge
).
If you one day decide you want to animate anything you can actually do that in Blender.
You can no longer buy mesh grabber so if you want to change anything with your content or have nasty poke through you need to get it out of DS anyway.
@mikael-aronsson
Thanks for your feedback.
In a separate thread here, I asked if there is an equivalent to DS Iray Section Planes available for Blender, but that doesn't seem to be the case right now.
I hardly ever render anything in DS without using multiple section planes. This is invaluable to cut down on render times, especially for longer animations.
I came across a Blender addon called nView by Spencer Magnusson, which will hide outside of the camera view's scene geometry from the renderer, but this will also hide any mesh lighting hidden by this addon, and therefore most likely be changing the overall scene lighting.
Without this crucial functionality, Blender is completely useless to me.
I have several RTX 30xx cards in my render rigs, and I still need section planes that will keep the overall scene lighting intact for my renders, or my electricity bill would be even worse.
While you've made some very valid points, the current absence of section plane functionality make Blender a non-starter for a "carefully set up a scene and then render the frames as fast as possible" creator like myself.
This isn't meant as a criticism of Blender, but rather a heads-up for other DS users like myself who frequently render hundreds or even thousands of frames, and who have started to consider moving from DS to Blender.
Have you actually tried ? "I don't think Cycles renders any faster than Iray" is not that productive.
I do not understand the obsession with the section plane cutting node in iRAY, as long as you don't actually need to cut away part of an object (you can do that with booleans) you do the same with hiding objects from the camera in Cycles, but with Cycles you can also actually hide an object from the camera and still have it contibute to scene lighting and cast shadows (if you would like to), iRAY does not do that.
I have rendered G8 characters in Blender and with 2 minutes of tweaking Cycles I got it to render about 5 times faster on Cycles without any quality loss, and as I said, Cycles work on almost any kind of hardware, no one would use iRAY CPU rendering for a big scene that does not fit in VRAM, that is doable with Cycles.
But yes, there will always be some messing around to get DAZ stuff to work in Blender, it will never be a one button solution, if you are not prepared to live with that you should stay with DS/iRAY.
This there an article or tutorial on how to achieve this feat?