HMorton posted at 9:23PM Sun, 13 June 2021 - #4421212

The model corrections can be done any modeling software, so people don't really need to know how to model in Blender to get those problems solved. The shader system is the only other sticking point for rendering in Blender. If I export something form Daz, even with the best plugin there might be shader stuff that need to be manually adjusted for the best renders. That is double true if you wanna render with eevee it seems. Most of the plugins can optimize the shaders or convert them from one shader tree to another, but eevee isn't always compatible and requires special shaders and settings to do certain effects like glass or whatever.

You are very much correct in all your points as well. Geometry errors in a model or object that affect rendering can be corrected in just about any capable modeling software, that is true. As I mentioned, it is not necessary to learn these areas of Blender, but it is fundamentally efficient to have some basic understanding of them at least. It's also much more efficient to do as much as you can from within a single software rather than the antiquated "round-tripping" between multiple software packages when it isn't really necessary.

If a geometry error is the cause of some rendering issue, many people may not even recognize it as such. I've seen people spend days or even weeks trying to figure out unwanted rendering behavior only to find, in the end, it was caused by something as fundamental and simple as coincident faces somewhere on the object. The same with animation. If you don't have an understanding of how geometry should flow on a surface, you may not even realize that it's the geometry of a particular object at the root of the rendering issue.

The way geometry is set up or created has not always been a concern for rendering. Older render engines were very good at either completely ignoring or just simply eliminating geometry abnormalities at render time because things like lighting and shadow behavior in most render engines years ago were not very accurate, to begin with. Nowadays everything is based on path tracing, PBR, and physically correct lighting models. This kind of "physical correctness" has many, many benefits, but there are also new problems that can be frustrating to deal with if you are someone who is using models that weren't specifically created with physical correctness in mind.

Again, it's not necessary to learn modeling or sculpting, but I'm undeniably convinced that it would help to understand certain aspects of those skills if you really want to be as efficient as possible with rendering your scenes.

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