Today I spent 2 hours to put the right pose, lights, camera settings, DForce clothes and everything, only for 3 stupid frames. Am I missing something? Anyone has any tips or tutorials on how to speed up this process?
I'll have a go at answering this one as well. These are all tips I've picked up from lurking these forums and the daz official forums for years. (please ignore the fact that I am all talk and no game release, i promise i have lots of stillborn projects on which I actually did some stuff but never got far enough to release something)
1. it takes some time to get up to speed with the tools. as you get more experienced you'll be faster at doing stuff. a factor of 5x-10x improvement is not unreasonable.
2. if you're doing a "lot of renders" style of game, you'll inevitably get situations where there are dozens to hundreds of images that are set in the same scene or environment, with the same characters wearing the same clothes. This leads to being able to re-use previous work by selectively combining posed/dressed figures with already-set-up scenes.
3. You can optimise for "2." above by building up a "library" of saved sub-scene assets. i.e. a series of subfolders for the characters, with the base morph, and with the different clothing sets, and saved variations of pose or expression. Then you can "merge" those into your new scenes as needed. Similarly you should end up with a bunch of saved environments with all the extra decoration assets, lights and cameras already set up.
4. If you are not already using overnight/during work hours batch rendering, then grab "manfriday render queue" and start doing it! During your hands-on time, you work just to get the scene to "ready to render" state but don't actually commit the 20-30 mins needed to finish the render. just do low-res or low-iterations tests to make sure it is not borked, then save it and add it to a queue for a slow beautiful high-iteration render that is carried out by a magic robot when you are asleep.
4a. Selectively use Ai denoise tools to get away with reduced iteration counts - you shouldn't need much more than 2000-3000 for any scene (although there are exceptions). Use the "layered denoise technique" where you use an image editor to combine the orignal render (with high details) with an overlaid denoised copy, then adjust the transparency of the top layer / paint different parts with lower or higher transparency to remove the worst render noise parts while retaining details on important / low-noise areas.
5. use daz "spot render" tool to fix minor issues like poke through or to fix/update expressions or poses without needing to re-render the whole scene. You'll need to use an image editor to overlay the fixed parts but that's easy stuff.
6. avoid excessive d-force clothing or hair items as much as you can. they mostly don't add much to a scene and they cost a lot of time to both scene setup and render time. d-force is also quite bug prone so can be a hassle to iteratively get working or can even crash your daz! (there are of course situations where it is vital but those should be the exception, not the rule)
7. be super organised with your file folder structure and naming conventions. saves a lot of time when putting the renders into the game script, or looking to find stuff. A corollary of this is to ruthlessly delete/don't save bad stuff - if your folders are cluttered with trash renders, it's just wasting your cognitive power when looking for the good stuff.
8. make sure you are using daz in the way that makes the user interface as responsive as possible:
- there's a dropdown in the Daz settings for UI performance. It defaults to "compatibility" mode, but you should always choose performance if you have a modern video card. (the naming might be slightly different, it's been a while since I've had to change it.)
- while posing and navigating, switch to the low-resource (or hidden) versions of hair items unless you are specifically working with them
- don't install lots of random figures into your daz library folder, it causes scene load times to dramatically increase! If you've already done this and your install is dog slow, there's a tool by "NSWare" on this forum that helps clean up unused character assets (moves them out of the daz library paths to a storage folder) which can make a big difference. If you still want to try adding more figure assets, then create a different secondary library folder and use DIM installer to put the new ones in there. You can then disconnect the slow folder when you're working on your game waifus via the "content library manager" in daz UI.
- become one with the viewport camera movement controls. daz has a fucking bizzare and annoying nav system that makes you want to burn their office to the ground if you are coming from a different 3d software. but it is what it is and you just have to get used to it. Learn to love the "tool settings" panel to adjust the movement speed of the WASDQE keys to be suitable for the situation - large steps when moving around the scene, small steps for fine tuning.
9. save lots of progress copies of your scenes!! Daz loves to crash and occaisionally corrupt your files. Also, quitting and reloading daz periodically can cure memory leaks or slowdowns.
