Hi guys,

I know that the main factor when it comes to achieving photo-realism in your character is the artist's skill-set, but with that aside which rendering engine do you think has a slight advantage when it comes to creating photo-realistic characters?

Are physically based(unbiased) rendering engine more suitable? other than the built in poser or daz rendering engine, or perhaps luxrender, does anyone have experience with any other rendering engine?

I work on mainly small projects and still images with the focus on character (so nothing too complex or contains too many objects or scenes)

I do however plan on giving a try on animation as well in the near future.

Would Arnold be a good rendering engine? I've heard, so much good things about it !

anywayo, hope to hear from everyone soon, i'm open to all suggestions!

thanks in advance

"Arnold" does not work with Poser or DS - only Maya and Softimage.

I would try something like the "Reality" renderer for either Poser or DS as a more photorealist renderer. Good for still images, but render times are much too long for animation.

The proper lighting set up can help a great deal too using the regular render engines in either app.

-AniMajik

Arnold is an awesome render engine .... but as others have said there is no plugin for DS/Poser, and no simple to use standalone GUI (though there is a comand line intrerface). If you have a copy of Maya, XSI, or Houdini floating around - there are plugins for them.

Actually, 3Delight, the renderer used in DS, is a great render engine, and has been used for several big films. If you're willing to "get under the hood" of the shaders and lighting, you can actually do a lot with it. But it does seem the the DS version is a bit slow, and a bit behind the full commercial version releases. So, you actually have a top notch render engine with DS.

Reality/LuxRender is a very affordable way to get into fully unbiased rendering in either Poser of DS, but your render time will typically be longer. The materials system is fairly simple to understand, but like any external renderer, you will need to do some material editing to get the best results (though most materials transfer very well with Reality). For DS you also have the option of using Luxus (at DAZ) to render with Lux. Some people prefer the Reality interface, others like Luxus, it really comes down to personal preference. Either plugin is very affordable, and LuxRender is free.

Ocatne is another possibility for unbiased rendering if you have a decent Nvidia video card, with a min. of 2Gb of VRAM. There are plugins for both Poser and DS. I really like Octane. It's not for everyone, but it sounds like it would work well for the types of scenes you render. It's also a lot more expensive than Reality or Luxus, but it is really fast with outstanding results. You will typically need to adjust mat/shaders with Octane, but the shader system using either of the plugins is very easy to understand.

Another option is Carrara, I've use Carrara for years, and it has a very good render engine that I've found to be faster than either DS or Poser. I also find the shader system to be much more intuitive than eiather DS or Poser. Lighting is also quite easy for me, and the quality settings are quite esay to understand. For rendering right now, I typically prefer Carrara and Octane over DS/3Delight or Poser/Firefly.

Vue is another option, with Pioneer being free (and fairly limited) up to Infinite at  $1295. A lot of people really like using Vue to render Poser/DS content. If you lke to do large outdoor landscape type scenes, it could be a very good choice. But you will have the learning curve of another 3D application to endure.

Other options that would reguire exporting DS or Poser scenes (via .obj) for rendering that are good choices would be Blender/Cycles (free) or TheaRender (€295.00 -r ~$400) which has biased and unbiased rendering as well as CPU, GPU, and CPU?GPU hybrid renderes.

Of all of the "external" renderer options, the plugin route is typically the easiest (smallest learning curve). The plugins for LuxRender would be the least expensive, and would be the best way to see if you like unbiased renderers. A lot of the skills learned with Lux will easily transfer to Octane if you decide to go with it.

If your interested to see a comparison of what someone with modest skills in DS or Poser can do with Carrara, Octane, Reality/Lux (via Poser and DS), or Luxus/Lux, take a quick look at my gallery here, I have renders done with all of them.

Hope this helps!

but you can export daz or poser content into maya i think.... and arnold has a plugin for maya, so i should be able to do lighting and rendering via arnold this way i believe

If you have Poser Pro you can use Poser Fusion to host a static Poser scene in Maya. A single lcense of Arnold will cost $1300 (educational licenses are only sold to institutions), and right now there is a 5 license minimum purchase (though they do say this restriction will be removed in the future).

But if you have Maya, Maxwell render would probably do a great job for you, It's built for a production environment, is fast, and used in many different industries, where Arnold is really designed for use in larger VFX/CGI houses. Maxwell is only $795 per seat.

If you take a look at the features comming out in Octane 2 they are pretty impressive. But 1.5 does extremely well. So for just a little more than the price of a single seat of Arnold, you could get Octane, the Poser or DS plugin, and a Nvidia Titan to run it, and you could have jaw dropping renders in seconds to minutes (with SSS, caustics, etc.) all with live updates everytime you change something in the scene. Using Poser Fusion, any pose/prop adjustments need to be done in Poser, saved, then reopened in Maya. Also all matereials/shaders and lights will need to be adjusted/setup in Maya.

With DS, you would need to export the scene to Maya as .obj, then open in Maya, setup your mats/shaders, and render. You could do this same process using Blender/Cycles for free with mcjTeleblender2.

Keep in mind that in the hands of an accomplished artist (i.e. someone who knows the shader/lighting system inside -out), just about any modern render engine is capable of outstanding results. The one area where FireFly falls on it's face is cuastics (not available), 3Delight supports all the major features and is very stable. I've never used Arnold, and probably very few, if anyone, here has, so I can't say how easy it is to use. But before jumping into a $1000+ render engine, I'd definitely explore the other options first, but you milage may vary 

Casual has a script for passing a DS scene to the Blender Cycles renderer - check the General Freepozitory, I think, on the DAZ forums.

@RHazatine - the cycles renderer looks like a good (and free) option - will have to try that!

Here are other methods not mentioned.

Another method would be to use After Effect CC (which comes with Cineware and Cinema 4D lite) and bring in an .obj file.  You can use the ray tracing engine in AE and manipulate your .obj in 3D on the AE timeline, cameras and lighting plus access to all the Color correction and effects AE has to offer.  I just started the trial of CC and plan to subscribe this month, so I can do some test animations.  Make compositing a dream!

For that matter, if you have Cinema 4D, you could use the fantastic plug-in IPP (InterPosePro) and import Poser characters and props. You can also import ,bvh files for animation very well (even export AniBlocks as .bvh and import those). I used in in my animation using Nursoda's "Bong" character here on Renderosity in a  couple of the scenes.  VIEW HERE.  C4D has many 3rd party plugoms available for it as well such as "Lux" same as used in DS/Poser Reality, Maxwell Render, etc.  C4D, while not cheap is less expensive than a Maya lic. and can do much the same.

Yet another is AE with the fantastic plug-in call Elements 3D (VideoCopilot.net) which allows you to directly import, textures and animate object directly in the plugin in AE and maipulate in 3D. Has somme hreat replication tools to manipulate the object firther.  I have this plugin and used it on several occasions and it works great.  You can animate props iin AE to some extent, sich as wheels on a car. etc or short .obj sequences.  Will try to post some test renders here soon.

-AniMajik

I tried Key Shot 4 within a trial period once. It is a very speedy pure CPU renderer for Mac OS X and Windows and you can export via OBJ to it and then set-up materials internally. As almost all external rendering engines, it takes quite some time to adjust the materials. I very much liked it and the speed is within a bit slower than Octane margins on a decently fast computer only, but unfortunately the price tag is rather high with $995 for the base version even, so I pretty much gave up hope for that one.

As was said before, Blender Cycles or LuxRender are probably the renderers that are cheapest to try out price wise. LuxRender is relatively easy to set-up and the automatic material translation of both DAZ Studio plugins (I used Reality in the beginning and then switched to Luxus) is at least good enough for many materials. Note that these two LuxRender plugins have a very different approach how e.g materials are handled respective adjusted. Luxus tries to integrate fully within the DAZ Studio surface tab and allows also for direct, textual LuxRender definitions passed to the renderer, while Reality uses a separate window for material setup and a material database that gets filled by users of Reality. I never tried out Cycles since me and Blender don't go along well 

If you plan on using it as an alternative engine for Daz and with the focus on human characters then, in my opinion the best option is Octane.

I use Thea, wich is a great render suite and i've tryied Luxrender, Cycles and Arion (ex Fryrender) but once you have a good material for skin, wich there are quite a few examples around, Octane is the most consistent in getting good result under different light conditions, and by far. 

I can't tell for Arnold, but i remember seeing around a pic comparison between it and Octane and there wasn't much difference.

Octane is by far the most expensive option, the price point of the software alone rules out many hobbyists and it also requires a powerful GPU to get quick results and the texture size is limited to the GPU RAM capacity, GPU's upgrades can also necessitate a PSU upgrade to power the card(s). For a professional it may be a great production pipeline but the cost made it highly impractical for my use.

I rendered this using Reality into LuxRender on a dual xeon 2.26 GHz. Mac that's over 4 year old, these are the results after after one hour and sixteen. minutes

WA

WAY late to this discussion, but I've installed LuxRender and I keep getting an .exe error that says "The program can't start because OpenCL.dll is missing from your computer.  Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."  Did that, no joy.  I'm running Windows 7 on an eMachine.  I have DAZ Studio 4.6, Poser 2012, Blender, and a couple of other programs.  Plenty of RAM.

Suggestions?

Tony O'seland

y 

I attempted to try Octane but was incredibly disappointed.

For the price they are asking, I would expect the DS plug in to be handled more professionally. Instead it's a professional price, with an amateur execution.

$400 purchase and I was requesting a refund within six hours of the sale.

To just stick to the facts...

The plug in is way out of date compared to the main program. And has no time of release, estimated or promised. It also doesn't work with a pretty large segment of the recent NVIDIA cards.

If you are going to go the Octane route, then make sure you read all of the fine print. Check out the forum. Use the stand alone demo and test it out. Sadly there is no demo of the DS plug in to test.

Just make sure you make an informed purchase and not a spur of the moment one.

Quote - WA

 WAY late to this discussion, but I've installed LuxRender and I keep getting an .exe error that says "The program can't start because OpenCL.dll is missing from your computer.  Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."  Did that, no joy.  I'm running Windows 7 on an eMachine.  I have DAZ Studio 4.6, Poser 2012, Blender, and a couple of other programs.  Plenty of RAM.

Suggestions?

Tony O'seland

 y 

You probably don't have an OpenGL video card. Download the non-Open GL version of LuxRender. Link to that instead of the version of LuxRender you are using.

Quote - I attempted to try Octane but was incredibly disappointed.

For the price they are asking, I would expect the DS plug in to be handled more professionally. Instead it's a professional price, with an amateur execution.

$400 purchase and I was requesting a refund within six hours of the sale.

To just stick to the facts...

The plug in is way out of date compared to the main program. And has no time of release, estimated or promised. It also doesn't work with a pretty large segment of the recent NVIDIA cards.

If you are going to go the Octane route, then make sure you read all of the fine print. Check out the forum. Use the stand alone demo and test it out. Sadly there is no demo of the DS plug in to test.

Just make sure you make an informed purchase and not a spur of the moment one.

Yes, unfortunately compared to the development of the other plugins, the DS plugin is way behind. It's also quite unfortunate that the developer chooses to not communicate with the users either.

I'm still reasonably happy with it, and feel that when the 2.0 update does get released, it will be quite good. But the development cycle being 6 months to a year behind the other plugins is not a good way to make sales.

If you have Poser, that could be a good alternative, the development cycle (and quality) for the Poser plugin is top notch. I'm trying to save to get it. Poser dynamic hair is already supported in Octane via the plugin.

yes maxwell render via Maya Poser Fusion plugin

Quote - Yes, unfortunately compared to the development of the other plugins, the DS plugin is way behind. It's also quite unfortunate that the developer chooses to not communicate with the users either. I'm still reasonably happy with it, and feel that when the 2.0 update does get released, it will be quite good. But the development cycle being 6 months to a year behind the other plugins is not a good way to make sales.

If you have Poser, that could be a good alternative, the development cycle (and quality) for the Poser plugin is top notch. I'm trying to save to get it. Poser dynamic hair is already supported in Octane via the plugin.

I am jealous that you were / are able to get it to work. I had been looking forward to using Octane for over a year now. I think, anyway, I know it seems that long since I first heard about it.

I couldn't use it before because of my video card being a ATI Radeon. And I really didn't want to crack open the case and do a swap.

Unfortunately even if the updated plug in was released today, I don't think I could bring myself to try again. My experience was so poor and the plug in so unprofessional that I can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on it.

But I will still be jealous all the same. :)

Quote - Unfortunately even if the updated plug in was released today, I don't think I could bring myself to try again. My experience was so poor and the plug in so unprofessional that I can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on it. But I will still be jealous all the same. :)

It's really unfortunate that your experience with the DS plugin, and the slow development, left such a bad taste in your mouth. Octane seems to be a high quality product, the standalone is very stable, and 2.0 has added a lot of great features.

But, I can understand your frustration, especially when you go on the DS plugin forum and see there is so little information about when the 1.5 or 2.0 update will be available, or even any recent posts on the progress on it.  The latest version of the plugin is a bit unstable for me as well, but the version just prior to it works quite well on my system.

Some of the issues with development could be the poor documentation on the DS plugin API. I know the updated version of Reality for DS is about 9 months past the projected release date, and I have heard (read) complaints about the lack of support/documentation for plugin developers.

I really like Octane, and enjoy using it despite some of the issues with the plugin. But I'm also a very patient person. Maybe someday it will be worth it to try Octane again, so you can get the use out of your video card that you purchased it for.