Is it worth it to render in blender?
flowprince
Posts: 15
I have been using Daz for a few years and I am very comfortable with doing everything in it except for softbody simulations and animations which made me think of blender, wondering if it could take my work to the next level. But then I am concerned about using the assets from daz in blender and if the render would look worse compared to iray. Is it possible to,
1) Export an entire scene from daz (after all the posing and set up) to blender and render as it is?
2) Will my models look as pretty as they do in daz in blender during rendering? Assuming I use diffeomorphic without any additional editing.
3) Is it easy to pose and tinker with environment settings as easy as daz?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Blender will make everything more complicated and more effort will be needed, but you can achieve much better results as with Daz, because Cycles, Lightning and the shaders are superior to DAZ. Just Light Linking allone is reason enough zo use Blender.
But it's definitely not a one click solution with Diffeo. Especially skins need some carefully handcrafted finetuning.
Handcrafting like? What else to do after importing?
Blender will make everything more complicated only until you stop expecting Blender to function like DS, assume for a moment that the Blender devs are not idiots and actually knew what they were doing, and invest the time to really learn Blender. And then everything is simpler, consistent, and more intuitive.
Blender is definitely superior to Daz Studio, but Daz assets are especially crafted for Daz, which needs a transformation to the Blender workflow and a different way of working. If you want to work with Blender, you have to learn it and find a workflow to transform Daz assets into Blender assets. Diffeo is a great tool, but it cannot cover everything, as Blender works in a different way than Daz.
I always hoped that G9 would become more Blender friendly, but it's not. So, there is still a way to go.
Daz main business seems to be selling assets, so I always hoped that they will establish a Blender market as well. At least older props and buildings are already available in Blender format.
I finetune always the skin shader. In most cases it's enough to add a group to all skin materials with a RGB curve and than adjust the skin. I think diffeo offers way to finetune the skin, but that's what I prefer to do ;)
Yeah, I also prefer Blender over DAZ. But the learning curve is super high and it's a very hard way.
But there's also some stuff what DAZ does definitly better:
- Posing is much better in DAZ (especially the viewport performance)
- Shape Keys can't adjust the armature (still unbelivable that Blender has no out of the box solution for that. Diffeo can do it with hacks)
- Blender has no HD shape key support (which leads to some issues, using HD stuff in Blender)
- Outfit of assets (cloth, hair...) is in DAZ much easier.
But in everything else is Blender supirorer ;)
For me, it is. Having eyes and mouth as a separate mesh is super usefully. Espcially if use non DAZ eyes. I can highly recommend https://blendermarket.com/products/auto-eye
I posted this in a previous thread, but I will post it here too.
I love Blender! It's really a great program to render in. I think the biggest thing about it is the learning curve, but once you know the how,where and why's, you will move away from DS for rendering. Not saying DS is bad for rendering, but Blender provides a lot more options when it comes to rendering and the results you want to achieve. The addons for Blender are awesome, and sculpting is really fun. I find it a bit funner than Zbrush, but that's just a personal choice. Once you get to understand the fuctions, nodes etc... of Blender you will see it's benefits. I can tell you,just from my personal expirence, I like rendering in Blender because of OptiX. I feel throttled in DS when it comes to rendering, not at all in Blender. Add to that, the tons of addons you can get from BlenderMarket that will really take your renders to the next level.
This was an example I gave of a render I did with the addon GlobalSkin.
A white background doesn't really fit the low key lights. I'd rather expect a dark environment with some rim light sources. Making the environment believable, even as a simple backdrop, is integral to the render quality.
While I do not disagree with what you've said, as most of the time people tend to shoot on black backgrounds wirh rim lights, I would say that my approach is not incorrect as I've shot this before(cannot post due to nudity and client permission). I'm actually a commercial and fine art photographer(my site), and this is just high key backlighting with gel'd lights. The white background(which is actually blue) is a light source, and there are blue and purple gel'd lights. I chose to reduce the power of the gel'd lights simply for my own aesthetic reasons. A great example of this is work from the photographer Jake Hicks, or even some of Lindsay Adler's work. This render was more a test of GlobalSkin's usefullness in Blender compared to DAZ skin.
I think I am clearly missing something. How is DS better than MHX, Rigify, and ARP, which all have working IK, you can switch and snap between IK and FK, have things like heel/ball rolling for walk cycles, Blender has an easy-to-use pose library with influence dials, animation layers on top of that for a non-destructive workflow that is useful even if you don't animate. Does DS have any of that? What is the basis of posing in DS being "better"?
As I see it what some people describes as "better" means it better fits their needs. For a novice knowing nothing of animation and ik rigs daz studio is certainly easier to understand, once you get your feet wet with animation and rendering you certainly need a better tool as blender or maya. That's also what the daz bridges are for.
Primary it's the viewport performance. Blender easily get's laggy when posing. Especially with geometry nodes hair. And it's pretty anoying always to disable all hair to make it fast again (hiding the hair in the viewport is not enough, also all the modifier has to be hidden). But there many other sources to make the viewport expierence bad in Blender.
I don't animate. For what I need, I get with DAZ much faster the result I need, when it comes to posing.
But no question, if you animate, Blender is proably better.
OK, I understand now. Fair enough.
Have you tried asking ChatGPT or Claude to write you an addon to do all of this with one button click? :)
As usual I agree with Padone, but I also have a slightly different philosophy. I also will use something I said in a similar post recently.
The best tool for you is the tool you are most proficient with. For me that is a typical DCC pipeline. So Blender, Maya, Max ect. I can get the results I want expect exponentially faster in Blender than I can in Daz. So for me it is worth it. For you that might not be the case. Blender is not hard. Neither are Max, or Maya. However learning a new tool set, work flow, or pipeline is time consuming, and those things heavily impact their value for you. If you already know Daz and have no reason to use something else then stick with Daz. If it's the tool for you there is nothing wrong with that. At the same time, however, it is always worth it to learn something new. So with all of that in mind I'll address your individual questions.
I'm answering these together. Short answer No. There is a lot of set up that goes into making renders look good in software that is not Daz. Daz is built form the ground up to be a kind of "One Click" solution, and it does that pretty well. Blender, Maya, Max, C4D, Houdini, or any software like them are absolutely not. There is a lot of time and effort that goes into making a render look good. How much time is dependent on your ability, knowledge with that tool, and as well how complex the scene is. Also, diffeomorphinc is a approximation of goes on in Daz it is not 1 to 1. No matter what there will be additional editing especially if you want to get the same perceived quality as you get form Daz.
If you know what your doing yes. If you don't maybe not.
Do I think it's worth it to learn Blender? Absolutely. But is it a requirement? That really depends on you an your needs. If Blender, or any other software for that matter, doesn't fulfill a need, and you don't have interest in learning other software then there's no reason for you to worry about it and you should just stick with Daz.