DS for rapid production?
eyet33th
Posts: 112
i have spent the past month or so learning to use DS, and i am starting to wonder if it is really the best 3d software for me. my focus is entirely on rapidly completing images by any means available. in the past i have found a workflow that centers around rendering different parts of a scene separately, then compositing them together and adding all kinds of post-production effects in PS. my goal has never been photorealism, and i'm certainly not interested in getting everything exactly the way i want it "in camera". in fact since most of my art is centered around parodies of video games, i would choose to make my renders look a little artificial even if i had the time/resources to make them photoreal.
DS really seems to be tightly focused on doing everything in camera. even when you can split off different parts, they're split off in such a way that if you want to change anything about the composition (rotate something, move something around, etc) you basically have to re-render the entire scene again.
for me the rendering is a means to an end, i want my workflow to be fast and simple, and allow for maximum flexibility. is DS the right software for me?
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Comments
To me compositing will always afford you the most flexibility to achieve what you want with the most ease. Trying to get it all in one shot is much more time consuming to me because you have to wait for the render to see the result and keep tweaking it and re-rendering till it's right. All films do compositing, so there is no reason why this would not be the approach with still images as well. JMO.
DS will never be the only piece in my workflow cuz you'll need a good image editor for the composite components.
My workflow includes ZBrush, Blender, Daz Studio, Photoshop, Substance Painter, Substance Designer and any number of other programs for other bits.
May be your best option is iClone, that has real-time pbr and a good library of assets. Also Blender with eevee may be a good option if you take your time to export and adjust materials. But the advantage of DAZ Studio is the huge library of ready to render assets. That needs iray.
To work fast with iray the best option is to use LPEs for compositing and a denoiser for fast rendering. And of course the scene optimizer to fit the scenes to the gpu.
The most recent DAZ public beta build has a very effective denoiser solution (noise degrain filtering). Could help speeding up your workflow in DAZ.
If that's not effective enough then I'd also recommend you check out the Eevee renderer in Blender 2.8.
Well I started using DS since day one to solve a problem at the time. My interest is in character animation and as a study tool DS fit will with the idea of I wanted ready to use characters that included the necessary assets to make a character act and focus on the skills of animation instead of spending the time (months) trying to build the necessary assets to get to the point of usability.
This "need" kind of fly's in the face of the more traditional approach that best practice is to become involved in all aspects of the construction over and above the purpose of intent. The thing is I've considered myself a person with the necessary skills to get the job done if for some r3eason I felt doing from scratch was necessary were the tools required to get the job done was not available. Granted there is that warm and fuzzy feeling of accomplishment if that's the "purpose of intent" from the start and when it came to Daz Studio was a hard sell that you did not have to reinvent the wheel each and every time you had a new idea.
Based on the description of your needs it's my opinion that DS will fill the gap of intent based on it's ability to lead you to the next step in the world of digital composition as 99% of all things done inside the box is by discovery.
The one thing I found DS very good at is allowing you to test an idea before committing to doing it the so called right way ;)