well i finally did it, i crossed over to the dark side :thumbupboth: to try out the animation capabilities of Daz Studio, i must admit so far i'm impressed with the smoothness of the animation it produces. I do have a question though, after 10 years with poser in its various formats, i'm finding the render engine a little strange, and wonder if someone could point me in the right direction to the render settings that give a decent balance of quality over time taken to render, and also is it still better to render pngs and recompile externally , the reason i ask is, i tried a couple of sample animations this weekend, i rendered to avi format, but i ran into 2 problems.

a. the avi's were unplayable in either windows media player, irfan view, or real player

b. when i finally did get one to be recognised, the output was just a series of flickering vertical lines.

I'm obviously missing something key in the daz renders engines so any light you guys can shed on the subject would be gratefully recieved

It's always best to render as image sequences. whether you use .png (or in my case I use .tif) files.  If your computer or DS crashes, you can always pick up where you left off, with a video format, you loose the whole thing.  Composite them later in the video format you need. (I use Afer Effects to composite them in layers, so I can render foreground and background images separately), but you can use whatever video editor you like to do this.

Lighting will affect the render quality.  Experiment with lighting. Stay away from some of the presets that look great, but take forever to render, instead look for ways to light your scene with lighting set ups that won't slow you down.

I use DS all the time for animation (and Poser before that) and find DS much better for my purposes.

Good luck!

-AniMajik
 

thanks for the reply, but i think you missed the point of my thread, i've never rendered with ds before for anything, so i really would like to know what settings to use, ie shadows on, good quality render but not excessive in time, the render set up is completely alien to me.

You could try:-

Bucket size: 16

Shadow samples: 32

Pixel samples (x, y): 4

Shading rate: 0.2

Quote - thanks for the reply, but i think you missed the point of my thread, i've never rendered with ds before for anything, so i really would like to know what settings to use, ie shadows on, good quality render but not excessive in time, the render set up is completely alien to me.

Since your question regarding rendering was of a general nature, I gave you some advice in a general nature.  Settings really depend on the scene you are trying to render.  Shaders also play a large part in the "quality" of the render.

I alway use the highest quality render setting, but like I said, avoid lights set that slow things such as the Ubersoft lights (unless you really need them) as they slow render times to a crawl.  Animation is always a trade-off between quality vs render time.

You also asked about whether to render out .png or an .avi - I also answered that as well.

What point did I miss?

no disrespect animaljigrafphics, but i did also mention that i had no idea how the various render settings work in DS, 3delight, 3delight script, hardware shading etc worked, ive read that poser lights dont work, so this is just a noob question , ghostwulf was actually answering the question that i asked with some numbers. i'm using ds for a specific purpose so forgive my replies if they appear curt in anyway. i'm still trying to work out why my avi is unreadable or flickering lines when it does.

Glad GhostWulf's was able to help you.

"Flickering lines" may be due to the codec you are using for the avi.  Try rendering out as an image sequemce and see if the "flickering" is still present in the images.

If it's still there, you might check to see if you have any small vertical or horizontal lines in the scene (or texture map) could also be the cause of the flickering lines.

-AniMajik