Quote - Agent0013, I have followed your progress here with great interest. I have similar interests and I have some experience with Blender and DAZ Studio.

I would like your opinion on final render quality: At some future time I intend to make fully animated work in either DAZ or blender but both have plusses and minuses.

For example, rigging in Blender is tedious while DAZ already has the rigging done for you including speech morphs (something I would not want to struggle through creating in Blender). It would be nice to only do the shots you want in one program and then others in the other one but I am sure that lighting and texturing would not give a coherent result: so what do you suggest ?

Of course, I could be wrong about any of this too - there is just so much complexity and too much to learn !

 

One thing that I have learned about animations is that they can take a lot of time to render, due to several factors.

First is the amount of frames you want to have in your video. Each frame will require a certain amount of time to render, and then the next one starts to render. Since any animation is made up of a series of still images, you can see that the render time is going to be massive. A good rule of thumb to have fair quality in your animation is to have 25 to 30 frames per second of video. It makes the motion look smoother.

Second is the complexity of your scene in the animation. If there is a lot of static content in the scene, (things that do not move in any way), they will be included in the rendering for each frame. If something moves in the scene due to camera panning, that too must be figured into the render time. The more you have moving in a scene, whether it is due to camera panning, or to the characters and other objects moving according to a predetermined setting for each of them, the greater the render times will be. This is why a lot of computer generated animations have simplified scenery.

Third is the size of screen you want your video to fit. You can compromise here by lowering the resolution some but the quality of the video will be lower as well. Large screens obviously will require greater resolution, which will in turn require more render time.

Finally, there is the processing power you have access to. This is determined by the amount of RAM you have. The more your computer has the better, but if you are using the 32 bit version of DAZ Studio it will only render using up to 2 gigabytes of RAM, even if you have a significantly greater amount. So if you Operating System is 64 bit, I reccommend you have the 64 bit version of DAZ Studio. DS 4.5 Pro is currently being offered for free, so if you do not have it already, now would be a great time to upgrade.  

I have not done any animations with Blender at all, so I cannot say much about it. Still if you think you can pull it off, I see no reason to not use both for animating a single production. I know the first part of this post is a bit discouraging, but if you have the patience, skill, and determination for it, I say go for it. I personally do not have the resources to make a video that would be worth much. My computer only has 4 gigabytes of RAM so animations of any good length would be too much to ask of it.

Anyway, thank you for asking me for my opinion. I hope I have been able to give you as good as I am can, but I suspect that you will need to continue your search for information concerning this subject.

Stay awesome!

Agent 0013.