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I agree, one wont look better over the other; this is because they are both physically based renderers.
Any preference will be down to the particular shader/material you are using. Have a look on Blender Artists at what folks achieve; that is what the software is capable of, not to mention the large number of commercial projects it has been used for.
I'm working on my own shader, well two versions; I have a stylised version meant for more stylised characters and scenes, which I'm still tweaking. The reason I'm doing this is that changes to the plugin's shader will change what I get, so I may then get issues using characters I've already created.
If you like the default shader the plugin creates, and it does look good, then there may be a time saving; other times, there will not, but I'm not doing purely as a time-saver. If that was the only reason, I'd buy a new graphics card and use Iray as I have previously, well other than I object to paying what imo is Nvidia tax.
Thanks for the opinions. I was mostly interested in Blender because I've heard (anecdotally) that it handles human skin SSS far better, especially with "random walk."
@Paintbox The purpose of the plugin is to match the iray materials, not to "improve" them. Also because "improvement" may be a very subjective matter.
@wolf359 Mostly agreed. A strong point of the plugin is though that it makes it much faster to edit daz assets in blender. And I believe if used this way you can improve portraits too, because iray and specifically the uber shader seems to be not optimal for human characters, at least reading the "iray photorealism" discussion here.
@Leonides02 Yes it does, but you have to build your own materials with cycles, not use those generated by the plugin that simply mimic iray so they'll not do any better. The plugin can help anyway if you choose the principled option for materials, this way you have a good base to start from to create pure cycles materials.
I, of course, agree with virtually all of this.
But I think that Daz Studio's superiority is in creating the *character*. But even a still is more than just the subject. I cannot think of anything beyond the character itself that Blender isn't simply better at, and by a wide margin.
Just because you are producing a still does not mean that you won't need good modeling tools, volumetrics, particles, realtime cloth, fire, smoke and fluids, force fields, soft/rigid body sims, etc... Each one of these things is better in Blender ither outright, or merely by virtue of existing in the first place.
EDIT: I completely forgot about the latest thing to blow my mind with the implications of its raw power that truly competent Blender users (of which I do not yet count myself) have known about for years: drivers. In Daz Studio, even for a still, how would one make the wine is a tilted glass appear level, even as one art directs the tilt of the glass?
You are quite correct of course.
Blender is superior to Daz studio by every conceivable measure as full CG/3DCC application
I am thrilled beyond description about Mantaflow,EEVEE and all of the modeling/sculpting tools, but I am a VFX artist, Character animator, and 3D content creator who actually needs these tools.
https://www.blendernation.com/2020/04/29/behind-the-scenes-sci-fi-armor/
But whenever I see threads here about a "Daz studio to Blender workflow" I see little to no discussion about the modeling ,animation or VFX features of Blender but only questions about accurately replicating the exact look of the hair skins &Joints of the Daz G8 women in over in Blender for still portraits.
I honestly do not find it a worthwhile effort to try to replicate the Daz Iray ,still portrait asthetic ,in another program, when Daz has done such a stellar job of making these static images so easy to produce within Daz studio.
Hm. To me, why I want to replicate (or improve on!) a photoreal Daz character in Belnder is because, as mysteryisthepoint said, Daz is first and foremost a character creation toolkit - and the best one on the market, I'd argue!
But since Blender does everything else better, I'd love to be able to create my character in Daz and port them over to a 3D program that is only limited by my imagination.
I think they can look really good with some TLC. Here’s a Cycles render after doing a bit of manual work on the shaders.
One great thing about working with Blender is the shader node editor, which allows for easily doing things like tiled pore maps.
@nicstt I saw you asking for permission in the other thread. Thank you for going above and beyond. I'd really like to play around with it in Cycles; I've never done a direct comparison.
I don't believe you can really; I also don't think it's fair to either Render engine either.
You can, however, at least get an idea of what the differences are using two such scenes, and some of what's needed when converting. It is also useful for finding out if one can get results faster with one medium or the other; as I also enjoy tinkering with settings - can't remember the last time I loaded and press render - I find it more versatile in Blender - even though there is an increased amount of complexity to go with all the options; Studio and Blender don't target the same user demographic, even though there is some cross-over.
Cycles SSS is different, which if you look at the first image in comparrison to the rest, is noticeable; the wax sphere (upper left) looks different.
Also, an addendum to my post you have quoted; I imported the scene with Diffemorphic; the character I didn't touch, although the spheres and other objects - and the light - I had to update or create from scratch.
Yes, I saw your write up on Blender Nation and was like "Hey, I know that guy!". But I had already kind of figured out that the man knows of which he speaks :)
I don't see the "effort" to replicate IRay in Blender as being worthwhile either, but if @JClave's work is going to give it to me with no effort, I would certainly like to use in Blender many assets that look great in IRay. Sure, Daz Importer will get me reasonably close, but who would not prefer to have one less thing to think about having to perfect once in Blender?
@Lionides02 It's really subjective... I think it'll come down to how much time you're willing to devote to iteratively tweaking your skin materials. A few times, I thought I was done, it's perfect, only to find a normal map strength or something that I liked better. But then a few days later decide that I liked it better the first way. When you start to vacilate like that, I think you're done. But the good thing about Blender's node system being so front and center is that you can easily experiment, knowing that the perfect material is in there, you just have to find it according to your tastes. I mean, can't we be sure that the authors of the IRay skin textures did precisely the same thing?
You don't strictly need anything more than the textures from your model in Daz; you can create a material node in Blender from the same maps. If you're thinking about Blender, that might even be an important exercize.
Way to difinitively put an end to the question, @SadRobot That's a very nice image.
Thank you for actually posting a render! That looks quite lovely. :)
One thing that I wish someone had told me, though, is that the defaults for nearly everything in Blender from node strengths to simulation parameters are generally waaaay too high. Before I had enough experience to know that something should be working, I had a lot of frustration with several things because a certain parameter was 100 times greater than the useful value. Just watch out for that.
As someone who has remdered portraits of pretty ladies in both I think I can give a good rundown.
Chromatic SSS vs Random Walk. Both are aproximating the same thing. Random walk should be faster and is, in my exprirence, less fiddly. But in terms of "realism" one isnt necesarily better (random walk is better for the eyes as you can actually blend it with a glass shader for the cornea, but again this isnt more "realistic" per se, just easier to get looking good)
DS' ubershader vs nodes: It is infinitely faster to set up your materials in DS. full stop. even just editing multiple material zones in blender is less than fun. you want to change the settings for the torso and head at the same time? its going to be fiddly. (you set up a nodegroup. all the things within the nodegroup can be edited together across materials, but this requires much more planing than just selecting multiple materials) That said cycles and nodes give a level of control and abilities Iray absolutely lacks: glass that refracts properly but doesnt cast shadows is an obvious example, using the noise texture to add some nice microbump is another. nodes are fun and theres all sorts of nifty things you can do
hair instances and memory allocation: Blender is better at this hands down. With the advent of the strand editor DS is probably equal or better for short hair and has made massive improvements in terms of realism (hair is one of the main reasons I semi-switched to cycles for a bit) the DS strand editor is still a bit fiddly for long hair and as end users you can only see it in its editor interacting with 1 object Blender is more full featured (although ease of use is still less than ideal) and requires so much less memory its not even funny. Seriously Cycles has infinitely better memory allocation for particles and hair (also in the viewport)
some examples (bearing in mind all thse renders are 2 years old or so)
long hair with lots of detail its made up of multiple particle systems. In DS it world be impossible to edit these while seeing the others (also this is the most recent so It definitely is using random walk not christiensen-burley)
hair + a sweater also completely covered in fuzz I am 100% confident trying to do this in daz would make my computer cry I rendered this on my old laptop with a 2gb memry card and it didnt even stutter
yeah try getting hair where the tips change to an emmission shader in Iray (seriously can someone better at the shader mixer than me try this? because I did and had no luck) also flame balls were created using the smoke simulator which is a thing that does not exist in DS
and a really old render but that moss is made up of a couple hundred thousand instances I still have the scene so I briefly ran it (the textures I would need to refind) and the max memory used was 98 MB. add to that the setup was easy and I could have 50000 visible right in the viewport and pan around like its nothing (also the bg behide the moss is a photo I faked deph with by sculpting and projection mapping again something that cant be done in DS) some of the weird shadow on the moss is that theres an invisible figure casting a shadow because the scene was composited with the character rendered in Iray and the hair rendered in 3delight
Now the key here is despite all this I still have gone back to mostly using Iray because setting up in Cycles to make the most of it takes much more time per scene. there are no presets to click. you spend a lot of time manually loading texture maps. If your're doing anything where you are reusing the same character many times: animation or sequential art the math might change, as there are ways to set up for that, but If you have to set up materials ets for every scene your render output will drop. dramatically
Damn. This is extremely impressive, j cade. Do you export subdivided characters to Blender, or do you work in Zbrush?
I'm very excited right now, I finally completed the animated short I've been working on in Blender using the Diffeomorphic tool to bring over characters and environments. If anyone would care to watch it, you can do so here! This is all rendered in Eevee as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STigHE8PjrE&t=9s
export subdivided. I have also on occasion used the multiresolution modifier to sculpt some extra detail in blender. do some modelling to fix clothes, add a solidify modifier etc (i think in that first render for instance I quickly morphed some irregularity on the teeth)
I mostly use teleblender rather than the diffeomorphic plugin - if you're rendering stills bringing in rigging just adds unnecesary complications. since I end up tweaking all the materials any way the fact that diffeo does a better (imo) job with its material conversion ends up pretty irrelevant.
I still use blender a lot rendering in Iray. most of my Iray renders will have meshes I tweaked in blender (cloth brush is my new best friend) and theres still the occasional render where theres something I want to do thats just simpler in blender. (usually particle related)
Sorry for the million questions but...
Are you able to save the Blender equivalent of "hair presets?"
I ask because I create web comics, and while the Blender hair looks great, recreating a hairstyle for each render would take way too much time.
Yes, like @j cade said, a skullcap is a must, not only so that you can save/append it separately, but also so that collisions will work. If the particle emitter is also a collision object, it sends waves of perturbations up the strand that if you clamp/damp them out, then the hair never really moves naturally.
I'm actually working on a script right now that will take a scullcap object and constrain all its vertices to move with the vertices from the head that they were copied from, offset by just enough so that the sim will work.
Wow, @j cade, just wow to all of that. Especially the first one... The question is truly settled.
Thank you both! The hair in particular looks amazing, j cade. I'm glad Daz is finally using SBH but - well - in my opinion it doesn't really look like hair yet.
The Blender hair seems to look great and sim easily.
I'm starting on a couple Youtube tutorials now. Specifically, Grant Abbit. I don't know if he's the best, but I find his manner very soothing. I consider myself a fairly advanced user of Daz, so starting over is both exciting and frustrating.
That was awesome. I guess you figured out the kimono simulation that was giving you a hard time because it looked great as she climbed onto the bridge.
Just to be clear, the material transfer work I'm doing will only translate Iray Uber Shader to Blender Cycles.
I noticed some Daz assets use Shader Brick materials instead of Iray Uber.
With my approach, those Shader Brick materials will have to be converted to Iray Uber Shader in Daz before being exported to Blender.
This means that, those materials (which comprise a minor subset of total materials in Daz store) may look somewhat different to the original materials in Daz. (though should be much more of acceptable quality than materials created using existing methods)
Once the Iray Uber Shader implementation in Blender is successful, I will try my luck contacting Daz to see whether they would be willing to help me figure out all the Shader Bricks so they can be translated.
@wolf359 - rendering in Daz Iray is great if you are happy with the feature sets provided.
But if you want to do even just 5% more especially when extracting useful render passes for postwork / non-photorealistic rendering, you will have to do a lot of manual work for each time you generate render passes, or pray to Daz and Nvidia to provide extra features.
My ultimate goal with Blender is to customise Cycles further to generate purpose-built render passes that will be used for non-photorealistic rendering
I guess I underestimate, if you need to make that caveat. I don't think I have any important assets that aren't... I should really check. But thanks for the clarification.
Thank you so much for checking it out and thinking it was awesome :D And yeah, I finally did figure it out after so much trial and error. Everything just clicked at one point in my mind at what I was doing wrong, I'm so glad with how that turned out! It was all in the weight painting as I misunderstood how exactly that worked.
Hope it isn't too nit-picky to mention a couple of things that caught my eye although I need to run the video again when I have more time to watch it properly. For example, I did notice her hair disappearing into his neck around the 8:20 mark. Also the teeth on both characters look wrong to me. None of which takes away from a truly impressive achievement using free software. I wouldn't know where to start on a project like that.
By the way, that quote - I think you mean Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (not Kugler).
For anyone interested, here's a Maya artist getting his hands dirty in Blender for the first time. I'm impressed by how quickly he finds his way around.
I saw that too... he really sounded like a Blender shill :)