How do I render in parts and put everything together in a single file?

Magic Dragon 3D

Hello everyone, I have a question about how to render parts of a scene in Daz Studio, and then merge everything into a single image file. Unfortunately, my RTX 3060 12GB is already getting out of date for renders, since 12GB VRAM is no longer enough and since I can't upgrade my GPU at the moment due to lack of money, I've been thinking about doing the famous render in parts, which is rendering for example a G8F model, then the scene, and then everything else into an separated alpha channel image file (typically PNG) and merging it all together in a photo editing software like Photoshop. Could anyone tell me how can I render in parts within Daz? The last time I tried, I couldn't get a transparent PNG file and the HDRI lighting looked weird. Is there an easier way to do this?

Richard Haseltine

A PNG or Tiff file will hav a mask or transparency in areas that don't have models or backdrops, so you need to render the items in isolation. If you want them for shadows/reflections you could stript them of their textures (which are usually the man memory hog) and just set the base colour to an approximation. You can use Canvasses to generate maks in a single render even if you have the flat-colour versions of other items loaded.

Magic Dragon 3D

Richard Haseltine said:

A PNG or Tiff file will hav a mask or transparency in areas that don't have models or backdrops, so you need to render the items in isolation. If you want them for shadows/reflections you could stript them of their textures (which are usually the man memory hog) and just set the base colour to an approximation. You can use Canvasses to generate maks in a single render even if you have the flat-colour versions of other items loaded.

Ok, let me see if I understand: I render what I need separately, so I hide the objects in the scene that are not going to be rendered at the moment, right? If I group the items that I don't want to render at the moment and hide them from my scene, leaving only a G8F model for example, Daz will only render that character, right? I usually use the "Draw Dome" in the environment tab, will the HDRI background be rendered as well? 

UncannyValet

There are videos on youtube on how to use Canvases and masks. It might be advisable to review those if you want to use canvases.  If you dont want to use canvases, and instead you want to just render to PNG.  I would suggest a pretty simple approach as an alternative that doesnt require much planning/forethought, and is easy to composite back together in Photoshop or other free alternatives. 

That is, you can render in passes.  If doing this it is crucial that you maintain most of the major shadow casting and light bouncing props/characters in each pass so there is consistency across all your different passes.

An example of this workflow might be:

1. Do a basic pass of your whole scene with all major light emitting, reflecting, and shadow casting objects visible.  You can turn SubD off for this, and you can hide elements that dont contribute to the overall scene lighting/shadows.

2. Use spot render to new window (option in Tool Settings for Spot Render tool), and do sequential render passes of small areas of your scene, this time with all the objects in that area visible, with SubD on

3. Composite all the parts together in photo editor.  In Photoshop, if you are fully zoomed out of your canvas, you can just drag/drop the the spot render pngs into the canvas and all the renders will snap into their respective place.

 

 

Magic Dragon 3D

UncannyValet said:

There are videos on youtube on how to use Canvases and masks. It might be advisable to review those if you want to use canvases.  If you dont want to use canvases, and instead you want to just render to PNG.  I would suggest a pretty simple approach as an alternative that doesnt require much planning/forethought, and is easy to composite back together in Photoshop or other free alternatives. 

That is, you can render in passes.  If doing this it is crucial that you maintain most of the major shadow casting and light bouncing props/characters in each pass so there is consistency across all your different passes.

An example of this workflow might be:

1. Do a basic pass of your whole scene with all major light emitting, reflecting, and shadow casting objects visible.  You can turn SubD off for this, and you can hide elements that dont contribute to the overall scene lighting/shadows.

2. Use spot render to new window (option in Tool Settings for Spot Render tool), and do sequential render passes of small areas of your scene, this time with all the objects in that area visible, with SubD on

3. Composite all the parts together in photo editor.  In Photoshop, if you are fully zoomed out of your canvas, you can just drag/drop the the spot render pngs into the canvas and all the renders will snap into their respective place.

 

 

Cool, it's good to know that there are tutorial videos explaining this better. Is there a big difference between rendering per canvas or rendering separately with PNG files? Which procedure is more complicated?

pwiecek

You can look into Billboards to reduce the assets in a scene. The Now Crowd products are the newest available from DAZ3d, but you can make your own rudamentary ones.