Daz 3D Beginners Tutorial : Basic Render Settings 

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Thanks! What poses set was used for this video?

@Axel201_sp Oh, you've got me there .. It's a heavily modified version of a standard "crouch against a wall" pose .. I always start with a base and then move bits around to get what I want. I categorize all my poses into groups so I get all of the same type in one place and so I can't really remember which one I used as a base here .. even what you see in this video is a modified version of the original pose I have for the image as the original is a little more .. revealing .. if you catch my drift. 😘 So sorry I can't help with that one!

@@RaukoDaz3DNice tuning, Master. Pose looks so natural!

Thanks for watching. These initial videos in the beginners are really aimed at complete newbies to Daz .. so soon we'll be stepping up!

Thanks Biscuits .. appreciate it you stopping by and watching!

Glad to help out - even if you didn't understand a word I said! :)

Good on you! Learn how to do it and then move from playing VNs to creating your own .. 👍 .. hopefully I can help you along the way!

Hey there .. the Exposure Value / Shutter Speed shouldn't impact upon render speed at all .. in Daz they are a post process effect and get applied after the screen is updated each frame. What's happened is you've removed extra light sources from your scene so your ONLY source of light is the light that is coming in from the window .. that's great .. you'll get much more realistic lighting .. but it means there's less light in the scene overall which makes the scene naturally darker and therefore Iray has to work harder to fill all the dark nooks and crannies in the room by bouncing the sunlight around the room (that's Ray Tracing baby!!) before it hits the dark corner .. and that slows down the render .. With the artificial lighting .. those dark nooks and crannies don't need the sunlight to bounce around the room off 1000 surfaces before they get lit .. as the spot light is lighting them directly. All the exposure settings are doing are increasing the overall brightness of the image and that will take a 10th of a second each time the canvas updates .. An indoor scene with just a HDRI / Sun Sky lighting the interior will see you get far better looking and more realistic images without the artificial lights lighting up the room .. but the price you pay for that is a slower render.

@@RaukoDaz3D Yea I guess that makes sense, thank you :-) Good thing I'm not in a real hurry to get them done. The renders DO come out a LOT better and more natural looking, so if that means I have to pay my fees in extra rendering time it's still worth it :-)

Obviously doesn't help me either, that I'm always rendering 4K native with no time limit, a max of 50k iterations, and "don't stop till you hit 99" lol

@@slewdart I think 4090s make us greedy .. It's like money - no matter how much you get paid you always run out by the end of the month ... you've got more to spend and so spend it you do. The 4090 is the same .. "Oh! I have a 4090! Let's go 8 Gen9 SubD 7 characters! In 4k! 5 million iterations! Let's go baby!!" ... 5 hours later ."Man! This is slow! I'm only at 30k iterations!" We kinda forget that if we were on a 2080 .. or a 1080 .. or, god forbid, my old 980ti .. 1 - it wouldn't render at all .. and 2, if it did, it would take 4 weeks to do 300 iterations and we'd be happy with that!

@@RaukoDaz3DThere's definite wisdom in those words :D

Lighting is the single most important thing to get to grips with within Daz. If memory serves me right - I'll have used a HDRI to provide the bulk of my light (call it ambient light within the scene) and then added the odd spotlight to remove any shadows I deemed too dark or to provide a skin highlight to the model. But, the spot lights would only have been added if I felt they were necessary. Too many people add too many lights. So, if you were trying to recreate a scene like this .. don't try and light the entire scene with spot or point lights. If you have any further questions - just ask away!

You're welcome!

Hey there ... yeah, the skin is the same for the model .. but there's been a little bit of toning done in Post that has warmed the overall image making her skin a little more tanned and contrasted. The white light I used in the render tended to wash her out a little bit so the toning just brought a warmer tone to her skin.

Thanks az .. will do!

Hey there .. I tend to always include a HDRI (or the sun / sky sometimes if outdoors) - even if it's just for an ambient light .. a place to start .. and then add in point / spot lights if and where needed .. sometimes I might just add 1 extra light sometimes 3 depending on how things look. You'll probably be surprised at the HDRI I used here: polyhaven.com/a/cave_wall

I think I looked at it once before and never noticed any difference in truth. The time it takes to render isn't the drawing to the screen - it's the calculation of the individual light rays. Modern graphics cards can easily do 60fps .. 100fps .. or more in games .. so updating the screen a 100 times over 5000 iterations will probably take a second or two at most out of the total render time.

Hey there - sorry you're having the issues that you are. Sadly (or fortunately for me!) I've not experienced any issue similar to your own so I can't really help you specifically. A couple of general thoughts though : I've read that some hair assets from OOT can have issues with the latest version of Daz (4.22). So if it's Hair from OOT and you're on 4.22 it could be related to that. I think OOT is busily trying to update all their hair assets. GPU Memory. Hair assets notoriously use way more memory than you think they should do. Could it be you're having memory issues that's causing Daz to fall over? If you're on PC - Open Task Manager > Performance > Memory before starting your render and see what if you're filling up on both GPU and System memory. Beyond that, without anymore specifics, I can't really comment further. If it's not a OOT hair and not memory related - if you let me know the name of the Hair Asset - I'll check if I have it in my own library and will try and investigate if I do ..

@@RaukoDaz3D Heck, yes! It's in fact OOT's Linda ponytail hair! So, that's possibly the reason! I've also checked with another image containing a different OOT hair and heck, again, it crashes when rendering or creating the NVIDIA preview! So this must be the reason. Fact is I have several OOT hair in my collection, so I'm a bit worried. I guess there's nothing I can do, for now, hoping they'll fix the matter in the next future. So I bought a different ponytail, and... this time it seems it doesn't work at all, it loads all distorted on the model and I don't know how to fix it. I guess ponytails are becoming my personal Achille's heel. It's Titan XI's Teased ponytail this time, by the way. I've also checked the GPU memory as you said, for my curiosity, while rendering a different image. Results are that GPU literally never goes beyond 1% of use, while Memory stays around 75% with peaks of even 100%, especially at the beginning. I guess this is not a good performance. Thanks Rauko, your help is much appreciated!

​@@fantescelto3445 Definitely seems like the OOT hair then .. good guess on my part .. :) Your GPU only at 1% though is a pressing matter and far more important. It means your GPU isn't doing any rendering and all the work is falling on your CPU which will be much slower. There are a few reasons how this could be: 1) You don't have a NVIDIA graphics card. Daz uses the Iray Render Engine which is a NVIDIA property. As such, you need a NVIDIA graphics card to get the most out of it. Without one, your renders will drop to the CPU which is .. slow. NVIDIA doesn't want it's competitors using it's properties. 2) You have a NVIDIA card but Daz isn't seeing your GPU. Go into Daz .. Go to the "Render Settings" tab. Click the "Advanced" button at the top and then make sure under Devices that your GPU is ticked and CPU is unticked. 3) You DO have a NVIDIA graphics card, it's selected correctly in Daz .. in which case it's memory is being maxed out and the render is dropping to CPU as it can't handle the scene. In which case, try and simplify your scenes .. take things out until the GPU is able to handle what you've got. 4) Like above - but your system memory is being maxed out. Ideally, you should have 4x system memory than graphics card memory. So if your NVIDIA GPU has 4gb of memory - your system will need at least 16gb of memory to accommodate the card. When the system memory gets full .. the render will drop to CPU and once more everything will render slow.

@@RaukoDaz3D I do have an NVIDIA graphics card, so I've checked as you said. In fact, as per point 2), both CPU and GPU were ticked: I've unticked CPU now. Tried to render again, but things basically stayed the same, so I've realized there are 2 "Devices", one is Photoreal mode and the other Interactive (biased) mode. I had unticked only the first. Both CPU under both menus should be unticked? Thanks!

@@fantescelto3445 I have them both unticked, yes .. With you having a NVIDEA card the only only issue will be whether your filling out the ram on it or on your system menu. The fact it's usage is dropping to 1% while the CPU is going high means the renderer is falling back to CPU - so something must be getting filled up. So let me know what graphics card you do have so I know how much GPU memory you have on board .. oh, and let me know how much system ram.

Yes, you should be fine with that for doing simple scenes .. you'll start to run into problems if you have multiple models and actors .. but for simple scenes - you'll should be ok.

@@RaukoDaz3D thank you for the quick reply I recently found your video you are amazing teacher:) May I ask when I use the default gen 9 model and use Nvidia preview my pc start to get slightly shutter then I found in advance settings there's and options to disable CPU on interactive mode is good to disable that?

@@Jooji777 Yes, you're better off unchecking CPU on both Interactive mode and Photoreal mode as they'll start to impact on your PC otherwise (as you've noticed).

It increases the tolerance for what Iray deems to be a complete converged render. It won't make the render better - but will force a longer render time to achieve the criteria of when a render is "done" .. the result will be a cleaner image at the end. So for instance, the default number of iterations that Iray will run is 5000 as seen in Max Samples. However, with a render quality of 1 .. it might only take 1000 iterations for Iray to deem the image to be good / clean enough to be considered "done" .. and the render will finish early. However, by setting Render Quality to 2 .. it might take 3000 iterations for Iray to be satisfied that it's finished and for the render to stop early. A render quality of 5 might mean it needs 10000 iterations for Iray to determine it's complete although the max samples will stop the render regardless at 5000 (in this example).

Hey there - there are many factors that determine how long a render is going to take including graphics card and scene set up. You could set up a scene that could render perfectly clean in a few minutes but then add a couple of extra elements (for instance, turn an outdoor scene into an indoor scene) and it can suddenly take hours to render clean. Basically, the more complex a scene you plan on doing - the more powerful a graphics card you're going to need .. but even the most powerful graphics cards can take hours with the most complex scenes. I would consider a low-end graphics card to be anything less than a 3000 series of cards from NVIDIA. A 3060 would be fine for your average user - but again, that's depending on the complexity of your scene. If you just want to do a single character in either an outdoor scene (using a HDRI for lighting) or a single character in a studio type of environment (like what you might see in promo images on the Daz store) - then any 3000 series card should be enough for now and will render that type of scene fairly quickly (and a 3080 / 3090 would blitz it). If you want to start getting more complex (more models; complex indoor scenes) then you'll need to be at least at a 3080 / 3090 level or a 4070 and above otherwise you will start to get into the "hours to render" territory. Even then though, they're will still be a wait time. What card did you get ?

@@RaukoDaz3D I bought a 4070 ti with an i9 13900kf processor. I just wasn’t sure if those specs were good for 3d rendering or better just for gaming. But after hearing from u I do feel more confident when my build arrives. And my only real concern is. I wanted certain scenes to have more then 5 figures in them. But it’s probably not possible if I want high render quality with my specs. Unless I’m okay with a 8 hour render time

@@jichuu06 The 4070ti will be more than plenty for most Daz users from a speed perspective .. the 4080 / 4090 are for high end power users and while yes, it's always better to have more rendering power, for most they are probably a bit overkill - certainly the 4090. But don't have your expectations TOO high .. rendering even semi-complex scenes takes time .. even on the top end cards. I have a 4090 and I'm currently rendering a series of complex outdoor scenes in 4k resolution with just 2 models and it's take over a hour per image. If I turned the resolution down to standard HD that they'd be done in 5 minutes but I'd lose that little extra quality. That's part of the problem - the more power you have, the more you use .. it's like money .. no matter how much your monthly income grows - you always end up spending it regardless each month! Or at least I do .. :) If you're wanting multiple characters then you might struggle with the 12gb vram the 4070ti .. but there are ways around that too .. but see how it goes and if you're running into walls then let me know and I'll share some of the ways to get around it

@@RaukoDaz3D Great info to know. In the case of an animation, perhaps it makes more sense to render at 1080p then simply use one of the AI upscalers that are out now which do unbelievable work in much less time than what daz will take at 4k, what are you thoughts?

@@WillyCash69 Hey there - at the moment, I'm not a fan of AI Upscalers (given the speed of AI advancement - I've just checked one out before replying - first time for a few months!) .. they still tend to smooth out a few too many details for my liking. Also, in the test I've just done it Un-Depth of Fielded my Depth of field .. I wanted the background a bit blurry but it sharpened it up and actually created a few artifacts. As much as a pain as it is with the rendering - i think I'll still grit my teeth and put up with the grind for now.

There are a lot of factors when rendering that determine how long things take. But is it a case of being spoilt? I know at times it is for me. I did a render today that took over a hour .. a hour!!😱 But I was rendering a full 16:9 4k image .. back in my 980ti days it probably would have taken 20 hours .. but this took a hour and I was sat wondering why it was so "slow" .. 😀 There are a number of things that can slow down a render .. indoor scenes with few escape routes for light, low level lighting (dark scenes), "busy" scenes - ie, lots of objects or people and, in my opinion at least, using spot / point lights vs HDRI .. As long as your 4090 is selected in Render Settings > Advanced (and uncheck CPU) and you have the latest drivers then your 4090 should be cooking ..

@RaukoDaz3D it's just a scene in a classroom. I have emmissives and spot lights and volumetric lighting to create some slight god rays

@@Elfmind The volumetric will add a bit of time to it too ... What resolution and aspect ratio are you rendering in and how long does it take to get to 1000 iterations? (if you don't want to test it - that's fine!)

@@RaukoDaz3D I am not able to get to my PC tonight. I will have a look tomorrow and come back to you

@RaukoDaz3D hey! So I'm rendering 16:9 at 4k resolution and to get to 1000 samples took about 8-9mins...is that normal? I kinda want to show you so I can get an idea if something is wrong or not. Any chance we could get in a discord call?

What is the cost per render / hour for such a service?