Noobie Question... Why?
LinkRS
Posts: 168
Howdy Folks,
I have been using DAZ Studio, and Carrara for years now. I have transitioned to mainly DAZ Studio, since support for Carrara (Genesis 3 and 8) has dried up. I was wondering WHY somebody would want to transfer stuff from Studio to Blender? I feel like I am missing something here... I use Studio (and Carrara) mainly for setting up scenes and rending pictures (not animations). Thanks!
Rich S.
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Everybody has their own reasons. For me, the price hike between the GTX 1080ti ($700) and RTX 2080ti ($1300) was the motivating factor. If Nvidia is going to play that game, I'll figure out a way to render with AMD.
But since I'm in Blender, I might as well use the physics simulations (smoke, rigid body, soft body, cloth, liquid, wind, etc).
You could probably best answer this question for yourself by browsing a couple of pages on blendernation.com and if nothing convinces you, then the answer for you may well be "no reason". But chances are, a few things there will blow your mind before you get to, say, the third page.
Number one for me is animation tools. Yes Daz has them but they are horrible to use, very limited and in the latest public builds are too broken and bug ridden to use for decent character animation, plus E-Cycles renders a lot faster than iRay and with Redshift 3.0 coming to Blender that is looking like an incredible real time render engine from what I've seen. Daz is still the best in my opinion for still images simply for the ease of use, at least for what I use it for, but anything else in the 3D space like custom morphs, animations, simulations, it falls very short compared to Blender and other similar programs. I think Daz will open their market to a much wider audience once they start making content for other programs or get their bridges to the same quality level of the Diffeomorphic importer at least.
I find Iray a resource hog, almost forcing me to invest in expensive cards.
I render in Blender far faster, with my Threadripper outperforming my 980ti; in Studio, the 980ti is about 35-40% faster.
I have access to plenty of tools for free that are either not available in studio, or come with a cost.
Now, Studio has lots of great tools, but ultimately, it's studio's reliance on Iray that have driven me away from it.
So, I can use lots of great assets available for Studio, in Blender; the work varies, but I find it worthwhile - others experiences will vary.
well if you just have to load a scene with some figures then pose them and render then you can stick to daz studio
for everything else there's blender
I'm not into Blender,
but.
I've installed Daz2Blender,
and...downloading and installing blender 2.83.3
and viewing YT tutorials for noobs like me in Blender.
that's it!
Thanks Everyone, for shareing your thoughts :-). I hope is Ok, if I impose on y'alls good graces one more time :-). I run DAZ Studio on both my Windows desktop (with an nVIdia 1070 Ti card) and used to run it on my Mac laptop, but it only has an AMD card in it. So I normally only work on DAZ with my desktop these days. I had heard that Blender can use AMD GPUs to speed up renders, but it seem that OpenCL is only supported on Windows, which makes it not useable for me, yet again :-(. However, ATI has something they call ProRender, which seems to work with Macs and Blender. Does anyone here run Blender on a Mac, with ProRender? Thanks!
Rich S.
I export things to Blender for the same reason I originally started using Carrara: ability to replicate things, quick modeling tools for adding little touches to scenes, better control of materials, physics, better rendering. Studio has since caught up with a lot of this with Iray (Iray mostly matches Cycles in quality if you know what you're are doing with the settings, but I still prefer both Carrara's shader system and Cycle's node-based system for the amount of control it gives me) and various add-ons so I use DS much more than I used to, but I still like the ability to quickly sculpt or model something extra that I feel the scene is missing right in the scene without having to switch to another program, and find particles much quicker and easier to use than the Studio version of replicators.
So far, I only really been using blender to make new things. I usually render in DS Iray, but I think that is going to change in the future. Ecycles cycle render is very badass. And I have yet to get blender to start getting all laggy and such like DS veiwport gets with larger scenes. Once I finish this large project, I plan on taking some more in depth blender classes. Probably end up starting with the materials, then move onto the cool stuff like simulations.
Rich, I don't run ProRender, but I can render on CPU on my MacBook Pro almost as fast as I can in Iray on my Windows box with at Titan XP. Daz embracing Blender is likely to be the lifeline that keeps me on the Mac even as they make the AMD transition.
I've already stated in this thread that my windows render experience is much better with Blender, but it's always good to know that others experience the same.
There are several reasons for me:
- much faster rendering
- a really flexible shader system
- convenient node structure for working with materials
- fully functional particles
- sculpting
- compositing
I have an old, underpowered Linux box that can now GPU render using Blender that Iray cannot touch. The included clip was done on this box. Sure, it took nearly 30 hours to render at full HD and 24 fps, but this is a straight Diffeomorphic transfer and I haven't reduced any of the materials yet. This old box is just an Intel Q6600 with 4 GB RAM and an Nvidia 960 GTX with 4GB RAM running Mint 20. If this was Windows, Iray wouldn't let me even try. On my iMac, I could let it run for days and it wouldn't finish. Since Reality and LuxRender are no longer viable, these bridges let me get out of the Iray/Windows jail.
I'm a long time Cinema 4D user with Vray and former Carrara and Bryce user as well. I do not render animations.
If you want to create you own huge scenes, you need a software that provides the right tools for creation, like mesh editors a great dynamics system and a lot more.
Recently I switched from Cinema 4D to Blender, as it is constantly improving with vast steps and the Open Source code allows anyone to make add ons and further enrich Blender with more features.
One feature that I missed so far is the content for Blender regarding figures. The Daz bridges close this gap now, although there is still room for further improvement.
Now I can use Daz content in Blender, all content I already created in Cinema 4D and native Blender content as well. There are tons of tutorials available for Blender, as well as extensions.
Blender is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and works with Intel, AMD and Nvidia alike. Some studios already added Blender to their pipeline and Microsoft recently decided to support the Blender foundation.
Blender as is cannot be sold, as it is Open Source, so it is free to use and well supported. If I look at the number of people that are working on Blender compared to Daz, I expect a further massive increase in features for the future.
Daz Studio is a great piece of software and Daz did a great job on their content system, but the focus of Daz has been selling content so far. So, why not providing content for other applications, like Blender, Maya, 3dsMax and Cinema 4D as well. I think that this is a great move.
I like the look and versatility of Cycles better than I do Iray currently. Eventually, Eevee will improve. I'm still learning, especially with nodes, but the bridges have given me the kick in the butt I need to dig in and learn Blender. :) I can do cloth sims, hair, fire, water, painting, modeling and sculpting right in the software, which opens up many more opportunities with my scenes.