Adding Figure slows down render?
I'm animating a shot in daz studio. I often render in background and foreground passes. The set will render quite speedily…maybe a minute or two per frame. But adding in a character in costume triples this time or more. I even turned off the "cast shadows" for the character and it's clothes. Still takes forever to render. Is there a way to lower the resolution of the character when he's in the distance so he renders faster?
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Select the character, go to the parameters tab, go to General -> Transforms -> Mesh Resolution, and where it says "High Resolution" change it to "Base". You may also be getting a long render time from the shader used on the skin. If changing the resolution doesn't fix your problem hollar back and I'll explain a reasonably quick and dirty way to change the skin shader to something faster.
That really helped. Another tool that will make like so much easier. Thanks a million. Of course I wouldn't kick your skin shader trick off the bus.
Open the surface tab if it's not already. Select Genesis or G2F/M in your scene tab. In the surface tab open up Gen/G2, if you're using Genesis select all the skin materials, don't forget the nails and nostrals. If you're using G2 use the skin selection set and then hold control key and add the nails and lips. Go to your library, the regular one not the smart content, look under Shader Presets / DS Defaults, hold down your control key, double click "dzDefault", when the little box pops up choose selected surfaces and ignore. Do a quick render to see how it looks, you probably will need to fix the specular strength and maybe the ambient, and maybe the diffuse color. Try Glossy 60, color medium grey, strength 15 for the specular. Make sure ambient strength is 0%. Change the diffuse color to white. That should be just fine for background characters. If you want to do close ups you'll probably need to adjust the bump strength.
Extra credit: Go to where the character is in your content library, and into the subfolder where the skin mat is that you used. Right click on an empty space and chose browse to location. When explorer opens up copy the folder path to your clipboard. Go back the DS, make sure you have your character selected in the scene tab. Go to file -> save as -> material preset. Paste in the folder location and press enter. Give it a name different from the default one, like "Quick Mat" or something. Press enter, a box will pop up, all the boxes should be check marked by default. Click okay. Then you'll have a quick one to use whenever you need it without having to go though all that annoyance.