How I use Daz Studio
I thought it might be time to share what I've been doing with Daz Studio. I've been using both Daz and Vue for quite a few years in my design work, first as a reference tool for my airbrush work and, more recently, to produce figures to be included in composited designs for printing on scenery panels for fairground rides. This first design was done fairly recently, but before I discovered Sub Surace Shaders in Daz. The central figure is V4 in Bot Armour, posed in Daz but exported to Vue to render. The Aliens are Genesis morphs and the spaceships include Wasp, Typhoon Fighter, Skyhammer and Shuttlestar. All were rendered separately. cut out from their backgrounds and composited in Photoshop with some stock photos. The design was printed on dibond panels and laquered then fitted to the ride.
Comments
That is one awesome use for this software!
Must be a blast for the artists who designed the figures as well.
Oh and besides, it looks great :D
to cool - love it :-)
Wow! That is really awesome.
Holy Cow! That looks great! GJ
Jared has poor taste, but he's right about this one.
"Stellar" job, Paul! =]
Thanks, everyone. Here's a couple more that were, unfortunately, rejected at the last minute over fears of the printed vinyl's longevity. The designs ended up being airbrushed instead by someone else. A shame really as they would have been a great showcase - 90ft long and 40ft long respectively. They were done a couple of years ago so have the same mixture of Daz and Vue renders composited in Photoshop.......I love those 3D Universe models!!
WOW that is some really awesome art!!
Here's some of the first work using renders for printed panels - done about 6 years ago.
Wow these really are fantastic. Thanks for posting these and nice to see a fellow Vue user also. Tell me, how do you use Vue and Daz together? I've experimented with importing Daz figures as .OBJ files into Vue but have found I lose textures (especially with the Daz Supersuit) and have also rendered Daz and Vue images separately and then comped together but found I sacrifice not having Vue's excellent radiosity on the figure!
What do you do if y you don't mind me à asking?
Cheers
Jay
Great work Paul, really cool!
Jay, I don't think I ever had much trouble exporting obj files and their textures from Daz to Vue - looking at your excellent portfolio it seems you are much more advanced than me in terms of rendering so I hesitate to ask if you had the "write surfaces" box ticked in the Daz export options? At the beginning, it didn't really matter anyway as I was converting a lot of figures to metallic "robots" - before the days of Sub Surface Scattering in Daz. I loved the resulting renders I got in Vue - didn't much like the time it took to render them! These days most of my renders are done solely in Daz Studio, it's so much quicker and, the more I learn about different lighting techniques, the closer I'm getting to that lovely radiosity you talk of in Vue renders. One of these days I'll get around to buting Light Dome Pro for Daz to see how much that replicates Vue's atmospheres. The Sub Surface Shaders have been another revelation that help towards that goal. In fact, I'm getting slightly frustrated that there is so much development in Daz, with something new every week that I think might help towards improving renders - my bank balance is feeling the strain! In my workflow I really need renders to happen relatively quickly (over 180 individual penguin renders for a recent job!) and Vue isn't particularily suited to that.
Pictures below of a job earlier this year where the figures were all posed in Daz and exported to Vue for rendering - posed individually, I think, and then composited in Photoshop. It was only a few months ago but the rendering is pretty poor, and I'm not sure why I didn't render them as groups.
How fun! Those are really neat.
Hi Paul, thanks for the reply. That latest upload looks real fun. I wonder if for myself it could be a lack of knowledge in how Daz's lighting works. I'm getting to grips with Uberlighting and to be honest know very little about sub surface scattering (very familiar with how it works in Vue though). Trying to get my head round how fog cameras work at the moment as the method as I'm sure you'd agree with is vastly different to Vue's way.
The forum here has been very helpful in answering many of my questions though as I go along. Definitely do use the 'write maps' option when exporting though but then in Vue find I have to heavily edit thinks like reflectivity and bump maps etc to get the figure looking decent. I find that for some reason some of the Supersuit stuff doesn't go into Vue very well and some characters like Garoul (the werewolf) looses the hair texture in Vue and is a smooth brown look. Ah well, I shall keep testing! :-)
Ultimately id like to train as a compositor so for the past few months ive been mulling over and testing what is the best method Daz
Vue and Daz play together. The Star Wars and LoTR image 'Hero's Rest' were done via comping the Daz and Vue render together in PS but 'The Messenger' was all done and rendered in Vue via .obj imports
I know what you mean regarding Vue's rendering speed! My last Jungle Cat image took about 50 plus hours to cook!
Thanks again for replying and also checking out my gallery, its very much appreciated. Once again though those are cracking renders you have made!
Jay
WOW! really great design!!
Here's a fairly recent design for some Ghost Train panels - about 8metres wide by 6 metres high and a work in progress. Currently at the Global Village in Dubai.
Hey, there's the ogre!
It's very cool to see the follow through from, digital to real world application. Talk about a massive print job! wow!
WOW those are hugh....and scary......Trish
I've been really busy with Christmas stuff recently - most of it is embargoed until later in the month, but here's one or two things. One for a 25ft sign and another for a Snowglobe backdrop