Higher Quality?
craanbery
Posts: 20
I have been using DAZ for about a year and have recently learned about this bridge to Blender. I really want to make my models and environment look better and have heard that Blender has higher quality resources like skin?
So if I'm looking to have better quality models with skin and hair, etc. Is the bridge the way to go?
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Blender is a 3d app, meaning you make stuff with it, not like DS where you can click a button and change the skin to another set. Personally I like diffeomorphic bridge the best, you can get full scenes into blender to alter or render or whatever you want. You can absolutely get great renders in blender, but you have to know the shader system, cameras, lights etc. Plus, there is two major render systems that are totally different from each other. Cycles, it's more like iray type rendering PBR, and the new evee, which is more like a realtime game render engine.
No, you will still have to use the skin texture shader materials sets supplied with your DAZ purchases and the renders won't look more realistic unless you go to much trouble to set up the lighting asnd the shader materials just right.
A fellow named Mal3Imag3ry in the DAZ forums has recently become a PA and he is quite good at doing realistic (well old fashioned photographic print realism) renders in Blender. He uses the textures/images from his DAZ purchases though but have created his own shader settings and lighting settings in Blender and they are quite good. You could do the same in DAZ Studio but I am not enough of a tinkerer with shader material settings to do it myself. There is a lady named j.cade in the forums that is quite good at that though although hers looks less like photographic prints and more like very detailed prints of paintings.
I render everything in Blender.
Studio, however, has all the tools you need to get really great looking images. I would suggest learning how to use the tools.
@craanbery Actually daz studio gets a horrible denoiser that only works fine on high iterations, that means very slow renderings. You can't even use external denoisers because iray doesn't export the albedo and displacement buffers needed for the denoisers to work fine. Plus the animation tools are broken and doesn't seem it is a priority for daz to fix them since the bugs are around since the first 4.12 release that's a long time right now. Not to talk about simulations and effects that are just at the first stage, aka broken (dforce is very unstable) or inexistent.
Then as @nicstt says you can get great renderings with daz studio. Provided you don't need animation and effects and you have the time and patience to wait for the rendering to converge good enough.
I am no blender expert by any means, I know modelling and UV mapping to a point, but I have been stuck for two days trying to figure out a way to string a bow I modelled. Thought it would be easy at first, but so far everything I have tried ended up looking like ass, and having to try a different idea lol.
I never upgraded past version 4.12.086 however I did use it with no problems to complete the final shots of My animated film before completely migrating over to Iclone/CC3/Blender. .
@wolf359 Then 4.12.0.86 has serious issues with the new ik tools, that don't affect you if you don't use them. So 4.12.0.86 is "broken" as well. Apart also having a serious installation issue where you have to first install 4.11 otherwise 4.12.0.86 will not install. And indeed it is called 4.11 in the system icon, that's obviously showing something went south in the compilation process. At the very least they rushed it out. Plus there are issues with vram allocation that is not optimal since it requires an "extra" scene to be stored in vram, that was fixed in the next releases but other animation bugs came out.
As for 4.11 it doesn't get the new ik chains but all the animation tools it gets there work fine. It is also cheaper on vram since you can turn optix off. Until they fix 4.12 personally I'd advise everyone to use 4.11 as the last stable release.
However in the interest of fairness, Daz has publicly stated (via moderator posts) that the manual frame by frame Foot pinning system being (quite charitably IMHO), called an "IK" system is a "work in progress",Whatever that means as practical matter for those still trying to use it for actual foot/floor contact during root locomotion.
And just FYI,
I have succesfully Installed Daz studio 4.12.086 on three PC's ,all of which never had any Daz software previously installed,but ..yeah the 4.11 taskbar icon is a bit puzzling.
Will an thin cylinder stretched out then appropriately textured not do?
You could also model a small section of string, to get a good twist, then either just Array it to the required size, or have it follow a curve - or combine the two.
The straight stretched part is easy, it's the part where it splits into 2 to make the loops at the ends, and then getting those around the bow ind in the notch that was giving me fits. I was able to model it a few ways, but it wouldn't work when the bow was drawn. I ended up making it with a few different parts that can work more like a hinge when drawn, instead of one solid piece like I wanted. I guess I just get mad when I have to compromise on my vision and or "realism" because I simply can't get it to work lol. At least for the next bow I know where I ran into problems with this one, maybe I will be able to avoid the issue altogether in the creation process.
Maybe I am not fully understanding.
But I would assume a bezier curve should be able to do what you want. just set the bevel offset to 1 mm or so, with a handle in the middle and one in each end, maybe more if you want the string to curl.
That's the part that I couldn't figure out. The traditional bow strings split and loop around at the ends, with no knot.
Also, keep in mind the end result is going into DS, and is part of a fairly high poly scene already, limits some of the solutions that I could do if it was just staying in blender. I am not a grand master at blender by any stretch of the imagination, I just keep watching tutorials, picking up a trick or two, problem is forgetting lol.
It possible to get particle hair to follow curves and behave according to how the curves are manipulated; would look great done with particle hairs - interesting to do too maybe!
Getting a curve aligned with the overall shape is fairly simple. But if you want the twisted wire it might be more of a challenge. And I think you will end with a high poly count just for the string.
So I think my suggestion would be to use a curve for the overall shale, and then a normal or bump map to give the illusion of the twist.
Maybe if you searched for the math functions that would describe how they wove that bow string you could then use a procedure in Blender to make your bow string for you. There might even be a Blender add-on that has that capability already.
Thank you for the info, it must be my download that got corrupted then, since I do need to install 4.11 first. I opened a ticket but unfortunately it seems the daz support can't provide 4.12.0.86 back. I'm quite happy with 4.11 though as of general stability also because of the low vram with no optix, that my 1060 is especially grateful for.