New and looking for info on posterization, why Daz3d renders poorly

winterwulf

Hello, I am new to Daz3D and have been looking around for some tutorials on how to render a posterized image and outlines/line-work. All I have been able to find on the subject so far has been this thread at http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/57301/carrara-challenge-18-graphic-novel-wip-thread-now-open/p4 which just shows that it can be done. Images of interest from this thread include (since you probably don't want to read the whole thing):

 

I have also been having some issues with IRAY taking forever and not seeming to use my NVIDA graphics card, which has so far put a damper on my playing around with Daz3d. If anyone would like to drop me a few tips to help with that, it would be nice (8 core i7 cpu 3.40 GHz, 16GB ram, integrated graphics w/ VIRTU Lucid logic [for vector rendering] and NVIDA GeForce 560 TI 2GB [not the 1 GB version] ). I understand that there are newer, shinier graphics cards, but Daz3d just isn't rendering anything well. IRAY often gets "stuck" for hours, untill I cancel it because my monitor alerts me the CPU is over heating. As for the other modes, they either render something that looks dreadfully wrong, damaged or incomplete. Usually, when I go to render something, I end up having to press the 'cancel' button, no matter what mode.

So I've just been letting Daz3d sit on my desktop, mostly unused, not knowing if it will even be a useful tool for me (though it sure does look nice). Since it's Sunday, I figured I'd take the time to make a post and see if it changes anything. But at this point, I have so many art tools to work with/learn more about, that I'm just running out of time to "test" Daz3d.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and if you find you can help, thanks again. If you find you can't help, no worries; I've got lots of stuff to do and maybe I'll try again in the future some time.

mjc1016

Actual screenshots of your results and settings will help to figure out what is going wrong.

Three Wishes

If you're running a GeForce 560 then you should have CUDA cores. I'm on a Mac, and the thing that stumped me on the first day was that CUDA wasn't enabled by default. I needed to download and install a driver update. (ymmv on Windows if that's what you're running.)

SpottedKitty

Note that you're not stuck with nothing but the Iray renderer. Iray is only the new default setting — the previous renderer, 3Delight, can be switched to on the Render Settings tab (use the drop-down menu right at the top). This isn't dependent on having a recent, high-power NVidia card, and in many cases will render faster.

Be aware, though, 3Delight is very different from Iray. It convincingly fakes a lot of the light effects that Iray actually simulates (this is partly why Iray needs a lot of horsepower in your computer), so if you've started to learn how lighting works in Iray, you'll have to re-learn the lighting system in 3Delight.

scorpio

To get the sort of effect shown in those images you posted (which presumably were done in Carrara not DS) I would use PWToon which only works with the 3delight renderer.

winterwulf

Thank you for your responses! I am using Windows 7, but I checked to make sure I had a CUDA driver installed (version 4.1.1 I think). Next I sat in front of my computer for a couple hours to babysit it while it rendered in a couple different modes. Things seemed to render better today – probably because I chose to render at a smaller size. If I try to render with Iray by checking that it should only use the GPU, I get a lightening fast render of... a transparency (checkerboard pattern). I managed to find my GPU monitor and confirmed my suspicions: The GPU isn't being used, sitting at a cool 33 degrees and 0% usage whial my CPU is screaming bloody murder. Maybe they had some sort of falling out... Daz3D does recognize I have a GPU, and will list it, but just won't use it.

 

Just to make sure the graphics card worked, I tried both Blender and MOI. The GPU monitor registered a nice big jump in usage.

 

I have tried turning off VIRTU, but to no effect.

 

At the moment I am staying faaaaar away from 3Delight – the first stage is a breeze, but I can never make it through the second stage without a CPU overheat warning, so haven't achieved a usable render from it yet (unless you like cubism, that is :D).

 

However, I did have success on one front: I was able to attach female hair to a male model – Ahahaha! That kept me entertained for a while, though I don't think I did it quite right.