Im hungry for knowledge and enjoy a challenging hobby. I think daz studio is abit of a dark horse and has alot more stuff to offer than is seen on the surface. It very customised with alot of hidden features that you need to dig to find. Its not as bad as i thought it would be compared to other progams. The only thing i dont like is iray render engine thingy. Is it just pherhaps because i am using a core i5 toaster?

I do like the 3delight render, because its fast. With the right skin texture, lighting and shaders it can give a really nice result to a scene. I am wanting to learn the skill of lighting and master the use of openGL. I like to work on things where "What you see is what your get" I hate second guessing what skin texture and scenes will look like untill a render is done. I am still noob to all this but I do want to learn all about lights because thats where the magic happens. Problem with open GL is getting the right hair for renders.

I have AMD graphics card HD7850 wit 2Gig and it is not good enough for iray so i am forced to use the CPU to render. I have 8 gig of ram but I cant believe the time it can take to render a image with IRAY. So often i see people talking about an hour or two for a render to finish. I mean what exactly does a person do while they wait for a render anyway ? When i render an image with Iray the pc is maxing out with lagg, its coughing and farting so i cant use it to do anything.

What did everyone use to render before iray came along to daz?

Hi and welcome Most people probably used the 3Delight renderer in Daz studio before Iray. A small minority of us export our Daz content to other programs for rendering. Octane ,Blender , C4D etc, (I use C4D)

NVidia IRay for Daz studio is a DUMB, unindirectional ,brute force, path tracer whos real utility is only accessable via graphics card hardware purchased from NVidia.

Using this engine with any other graphic hardware is truly a masochistic excercise in self flaggelation.

That said, it produces great renders for those who make the investment in NVidia hardware and its material system is fully supported in Daz Studio by Many Daz content creators. if you are fine with the renders you get from 3Delight then stay with it .

however there are external options for rendering your Daz content that do not severely punish you for not $$buying$$ hardware from NVidia.

Options such as Blender cycles via a free Daz scene export script called "Teleblender"

Blender cycles is an order of magnitude faster than DAZ IRay and has better de-noiseing and an Elegant ,node based Material system that use s the same "Principled shader system the Dysney /Pixar Studio uses.

there is an Octane plugin to send your sceness to the Octane render engine,,it too is faster than DAZ Iray with Non NVidia graphic cards.

I'm of the load-pose-render crowd and love to build huge scenes with lots of characters (wearing lots of clothes) and piles of props. My render times in IRay stretch into days for mediocre results. Do the shaders translate into Cycles without too much fiddling? I'm wondering if it would be worth it to me to try as I already do a lot of modeling in Blender. At the same time, I don't want to have to spend six hours adjusting shaders to save three hours off a render. Thanks.

SheikhalMaktoum posted at 7:47AM Wed, 18 July 2018 - #4333336

I'm of the load-pose-render crowd and love to build huge scenes with lots of characters (wearing lots of clothes) and piles of props. My render times in IRay stretch into days for mediocre results. Do the shaders translate into Cycles without too much fiddling? I'm wondering if it would be worth it to me to try as I already do a lot of modeling in Blender. At the same time, I don't want to have to spend six hours adjusting shaders to save three hours off a render. Thanks.

Hi typically there is always a need to change parameters when translating material to a different render engine particularly with glossy materials.

The teleblend script does a good job of creating complex Cycle shader node set ups that reference your image files used in your textures.

As a Blender user you have to decide if it is worth your time the adjust some gloss nodes before rendering.

From my perspective the result I get in the time I get them are worth whatver time I might spend adjusting my blender nodes.

For example this simple render of a middle aged Arab woman was rendered to this clarity in about 65 minutes on the CPU of a gateway **EC14 notebook with1.3GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100 CPU and an Intel GMA4500MHD graphics card. ** I had to add a gloss node to the completely transparent outer "wetness" layer of her eye geometry to get that those real world reflections in her eyes

And I replaced the utterly ridiculous Daz 4Kx4K textures of her clothing with simple principled BSDF shader materials.

This same image would have taken Days on this low spec hardware wit DAZ IRay and would likely still be grainy.

Imagine how much faster it would be on your main system even taking into account the time to make those few material adjustments.

You've convinced me.

I don't worry too much about most shader/materials as I'm primarily concerned with how the satin/organza/chiffon/silk materials look. I love the shimmery sheen of diaphanous items. I've played with those in Iray with less than spectacular results. At least Cycles is open source and information is freely available, unlike Daz's version of Iray.

A point I just thought of is using Cycles shaders made for Poser users. I read the Poser forums daily and took quite an interest in Baggibsbill's work on shaders for nylon and silk stockings (yum!). Is there any reason I can't use them on my imported items?

Thanks again.

SheikhalMaktoum posted at 10:26AM Wed, 18 July 2018 - #4333342

You've convinced me.

I don't worry too much about most shader/materials as I'm primarily concerned with how the satin/organza/chiffon/silk materials look. I love the shimmery sheen of diaphanous items. I've played with those in Iray with less than spectacular results. At least Cycles is open source and information is freely available, unlike Daz's version of Iray.

A point I just thought of is using Cycles shaders made for Poser users. I read the Poser forums daily and took quite an interest in Baggibsbill's work on shaders for nylon and silk stockings (yum!). Is there any reason I can't use them on my imported items?

Thanks again.

To be honest I do not know if those Poser "superfly" shaders from bagginsbill are "authentic" Blender native shaders and they are certainly are not from the principled BSDF shader system of blender as "superfly does not support the principled Shader.

I am not saying it is not possible to use the Poser "superfly shaders" in the REAL blender cycles I just have not read of anyone doing it or frankly needing to do it.

I personally use a fork of Blender based on version 2.79B call "Blender for artists" along with the free teleblender scene export script for Daz studio.

The BFA devs included ALL of the most popular third party Shader preset libraries from the blender community at large. The interface is icon and mouse based and a joy to work with. here is a sample of one of the rasberry jelly material presets that installs with "Blender for artists".

You mean https://www.bforartists.de/

You're preaching to the choir here. I looooove the program and got kicked out of the Blender forums for promoting it. I don't use Blender often enough to become totally familiar with the hotkeys and shortcuts. I'll usually spend several weeks making something then not touch it for awhile, making me rusty.

I grabbed the latest Teleblender this morning and will play tomorrow (today is make beer day and do the stupid laundry day).

Thanks again.

I just cant justify sitting around all day rendering an image. I couldnt give up using my computer for that. Maybe I could render when i go to sleep....Thats the only time i could really give up my time without a pc. Like i said before, Im to impatient so anymore than 10 minutes and im stopping the render lol. Im just having fun and trying to learn about lighting so 3delight and openGL are good enough for me. I would love to get into animation with daz studio but fat chance of that because of the lack of good inverse kinematics makes it hard. Even when you use them in poser they dont seem to have any inverse kinematics. Always has been a mystery to me. But thats all another story.

I have two PC's. The best (fastest and most amazingest) is used for graphics and doesn't ever, ever, never, ever go online. It has no antivirus or similar cycle-sucking dead weight and boots from cold in a microsecond. My older one is used for online stuff and runs Linux. I transfer stuff via USB sticks. At some point I build a new graphics computer; the old one gets reformatted and turned into the online toy, while the older online toy becomes a media server, or backup box or...well....something.

Ok so wolf359 mentioned a few other render methods and I had not thought about that option........So i been testing some other programs but Im not good at learning new stuff. Im trying out lightwave and cinema4d, but not reallyy getting the hang of them.

I mean alli i want to do is render models in them so I really should be looking at stand alone renderers.......and so keyshots is something i am about to try.