Developers, what's one trick in Daz other devs should know of?

[Dr PinkCake]

I just lost a 12 hour animation because I by mistake rendered it as a movie instead of single frames (as I normally do). When the process was interrupted, all frames were lost.
Therefore, my tip is to always use "Image Series" in "Render settings>General" for animations.

Convert your frames to a lossless .avi file using the free tool ffmpeg, with the command:
.\ffmpeg.exe -framerate 30 -i your_image_series_folder\%02d.png -c:v huffyuv anim.avi

Then convert the .avi file to webm using the free tool Any Video converter.

Let's hear what favorite tricks you all would like to share. Don't assume that other devs know of them, no matter how small they may seem.

 

[f95zoneuser463]

The spot render tool to render only a specific area of a frame. That thing probably saved me weeks of rendering time already. I think my eyes where glowing when I found that button.

FFmpeg for the win ... the swiss army knife for video-stuff!
You should be able to convert from an image-sequence to .webm directly only using FFmpeg btw. Preferably with VP9- and Opus-compression. The .avi-container format is outdated, I'd avoid it.

 

[Rich]

Two favorites:

(1) Ghost lights. (A plane, set to emit, and then with its opacity set to like 0.000001 so it doesn't show up in the render.) A great way to add light to a portion of your scene when a spotlight won't work. You can have them right in the middle of the field of view, if necessary, to fill in a shadow. (We all know iRay loves extra light in scenes.) There are ghost light kits available on the Daz store, but there's really no magic to creating them.

(2) Iray Section Plane. Use one of these to slice off a wall or a roof or some such when you either need to let light in, or need to position your camera on the wrong side of a wall to get the angle you want. The "cut" won't show up in the normal viewport render unless you set it to iRay mode, however.

 

[Dr PinkCake]

Those are some great tips guys. I'll definitely try the ghost lights. I was in need of one yesterday, due to a reflection showing my light source.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

Some default Render Settings with scene lighting included.... There are too many people new and old DAZ users battling with grain in indoor scene renders. I have a setting that I use for most renders and it works 95% of the time.
I have found watching the DAZ official tuts on Youtube helps a lot.

IF i may, anyone used Photoshop's Animation tool yet to create avi's using an image series?
It looks promising but i do not have Adobe Media Encoder installed so have not used it for my Photoshop CS6...

 

[CheekyGimp]

Mine would be:
Learn how to create/use emissive planes. (It was the single biggest breakthrough for me in a long list of wins on my long journey from "complete noob" to "still mostly a noob".
I'm sure there's better tutorials out there, but this is the one that kicked it off for me:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Jai Ho]

I'm a Daz noob, so changing my Render/Environment/Dome Orientation Y option from 0 to 200 to make the shadows on my face change was pretty cool and pivotal for me at this stage. Each of these only took 29 seconds to render, so they're no masterpiece. Just wanted to show shadow change.

 

[seamanq]

Just a crazy observation. I had my machine lock up after over 30 hours of rendering a 30 frame sex scene, not listening to the good advice here. This was done using the Iray engine on my Nvidia 760GTX (ancient, I know, I know). I had read some things about 3delight possibly being faster. I have a Xeon E5-2680 processor (10 core, 20 threads) and 32GB of RAM. And I read that 3Delight renders entirely in CPU and ignores the video card entirely. Now I understand that my CPU (part of the original IvyBridge series) is an absolute beast, and most people won't have a processor this strong in their box, but my render time for Iray of 35+ hours for 30 frames dropped down to 40 MINUTES for 3delight. So I think I will be doing my sex video renders in 3Delight from now on and need to learn how to make 3Delight look more like Iray.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

Use Groups option in the Scenes window...

 

[OhWee]

This is more of an artist trick for Daz than a developer trick.

HDRI spheres!

These ones are free, although he does accept (well deserved) donations:

You must be registered to see the links

There are other sources as well.

For outdoor scenes, and some indoor, these spheres can give you rather realistic lighting in Iray (I can't speak to 3Delight, I'm on the Iray bandwagon, others can comment on that).

I've received a number of compliments on my lighting, when in many of these cases I didn't do anything special other than to load a HDRi sphere, MAAAAAYBE add an emissive plane or light to augment lighting from a specific angle, and just ran with it with simple intensity adjustments.

Set ground shadow to on, and in some cases you may need to bump the ground shadow intensity. This will give the illusion of your character standing on the ground, instead of 'hovering' inside of a sphere. I like to set ground plane to manual, that way if I want the feet to embed just slightly in the ground (think sandy beach or grass), the 'ground' will stay put.

Usually the background looks slightly blurry, but since a 'focus on the character' effect often looks good, this usually doesn't look out of place.

They won't be ideal all the time, especially if you are going for a specific 'look' that doesn't favor HDRI's, but they seem to render faster, and if you pick good ones and take the time to rotate things into the best view, yeah...

The downside to these is that you can't manipulate the background much, and you have to fiddle with the camera angles a bit to get the right 'look', and this can limit your choices for camera angles a bit. However, you CAN add 'background related' objects inside of the sphere (trees, ground, etc.) to get the advantages of both. There are a few products that do this, such as this one:

You must be registered to see the links

This one is rather simple (it just has the 'sand' ground plane), but others have shrubs, etc. in the foreground.

You should still learn the other lighting tricks (emissive surfaces/planes, yeah those are awesome, as Rich pointed out), but HDRIs save me a LOT of time and usually look rather good when I use them.