Render times. Daz vs Blender

Usernamenottaken

I know nothing about blender but I'd consider using it for rendering IF it helps quicken the process. 

Daz has been great, I'll continue to use it. Very easy and basically second nature at this point - but say I had an animation that I did in daz and exported it to blender (Countless tutorials on how to do this and it seems relatively easy). 

How fast does blender render? What render engine does it use? Have you had good experiences with it?

TheMysteryIsThePoint

If you use EEVEE, there is simply no comparison. EEVEE renders in a few seconds what would take IRay, or even Cycles HOURS. Typically, I use EEVEE for background architecture and volumetrics, and the characters in Cycles.

I can't do a direct comparison, but Cycles seems faster than IRay. But I do think Cycles is easier to tweak for big performance gains.

The Optix denoiser in the Cycles engine is AMAZING. You can get by with one half to one quarter the samples you would normally need.

Also, my greatest critique of Blender is that many of its defaults are usually waaay off. Case in point: The light paths for Diffuse, Glossy, Transparency, and Transmission being set too high and results in longer render times. These can usually be set to 4, 4, 2, and 2 respectively, depending on the scene of course, with Volume set to 0. The defaults are much higher.

Under performance, I've heard various things about what to set the tilse size to; you should experiment from 64 to 512.

And finally, something that doesn't get much attention is that if you'ved got multiple GPUs, it is trivial to run multiple instances of Blender and have each render the nth frame. This way, two, three, or four GPUs will actually give you two, three, or four times the performance. It's much faster than a single instance with all the GPUs. This is a big deal.

BlenderGuru has an excellent tutorial about how to speed up Cycles, I can't remember where I saw it, though.

But appreciate that there are many reasons to use Blender alongside Daz, and actually rendering speed is not even in my top 5 reasons.

Padone

I agree every point with @TheMystery

Robinson

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

If you use EEVEE, there is simply no comparison. EEVEE renders in a few seconds what would take IRay, or even Cycles HOURS. Typically, I use EEVEE for background architecture and volumetrics, and the characters in Cycles.

Do you export .obj for that?  Otherwise you don't get subd (fbx export), you get the low poly characters.  So you presumably also have to configure materials and so forth, i.e. it's not just export and render, there's some significant work involved too, correct?

TheMysteryIsThePoint

@Robinson Yes, you're right. Whether one imports via Alembic, OBJ, Diffeomorphic, or whatever, the materials are not going to match perfectly (the recent awesome work in Daz Importer notwithstanding). I use the Daz Importer to generate materials that I use as a starting point.

But the point I think that many people who point to this as a reason not to do it are missing is that you really only have to do this once, and then your library of reusable materials grows. And after you've got some skin, any skin, looking right, it is very easy in Blender's node system to start with something close to what you want that you've already perfected, and tweak it until it's perfect. And, like anything in life, you quickly get better at it.

Everytime I import into Blender, I have a script that re-applies all the materials, appending them from a single .blend file that holds all the materials that I've made. It's a one-click process.

To me, it is an incredibly small price to pay to then have your beautiful Daz model in an environment that is worthy of it.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Padone said:

I agree every point with @TheMystery

Thanks, you have no idea how validated I feel, that coming from you :)