Hyper-realism in Daz Studio
This is a technology preview of an upcoming plugin from Pret-A-3D.
In the past months I’ve been working on a new idea to extend the rendering capabilities of Daz Studio. The result is an upcoming plug-in that opens new possibilities not available before for the Studio artist.
The following scene was created in Daz Studio, rendered from Studio with this new plugin. The image has absolutely no postwork, that is a straight-from-the-renderer file.
The scene uses only one light, a physically-accurate sun light. No Image-Base Lighting was used.
The water is physically based with real-life absorption mapped.
Please note the back-side of the columns, it has a bit of reflected light. Please note the underwater caustics and the ambient light. All this is automatically generated by a single light.
This is only one of the many features that I will introduce in the next few weeks.
More in the coming days. I hope you enjoy it and that it can inspire on what is going to be possible in Daz Studio. Click on the image to see it at full size.
The fact that all of those lighting effects were created by a single sun light, and without image-based lighting. This must be the plugin you mentioned working on over at the cow. Awesome!
Yes, that’s what I’ve been working for the past few months. There is a lot more but this is just a sample. More information and more samples in a week or two.
@Pret-A-3D
Will this work with D|S 3 standard as well as advanced?
Yes, there is nothing in DSA that is required to run this plugin.
Hi there Pret-A-3D, that looks very interesting. Actually it looks amazing and makes me think of using DS.
I am on a mac (like you) but although I have DAZ studio paid version I hardly touch it. I find the interface awful compared with the bigger folders in poser pro 2010 (you can resize the poser ones and the icons). The DS tree of content is so little and you seem to have to open it all and scroll through and then tidy it up again after, and also I find big scenes can actually take hours to save so the temptation is not to save and the next thing a crash happens and all is lost. Doesn’t DS drive you as crazy? Also things like dynamics, getting DS to see content from poser runtimes from a particular folder but can’t select just a folder on it’s own (it seems to only do whole hardrives or one at a time) and 64 bit that were promised for mac haven’t happened. so it is intriguing for me to see a clever person like you on a mac developing DS stuff.
I sometimes wonder if I just have it set up wrong or a wrong work flow or something, when I see people like you obviously happily using DS.
Love esther
Hi Esther.
Over the years Studio improved a lot and now it’s my favorite environment for humanoid-based scenes. Now with this plugin I can use it to create photograph-like images in a fraction of the time required with a more expensive application.
I started years ago with Poser and that UI drove me crazy
The size of Studio icons can be adjusted in the Preferences window, see if that helps. I have to say that, given the fact that I have a pretty large library of figures, the way Studio streamlines content browsing is a great feature for me.
Since you can use as many “Runtimes” as you want, I organize my content tree on a separate folder per product and add that folder to the directory listing of Studio. It makes it easy to isolate the files for each product and becomes automatically organized in the default tree view of Studio.
The “View Folders as tree” option in the Content pane is a good way of finding things quickly but my favorite is the content manager. It takes a little bit to add your stuff to it but now I have everything organized the way I like it. For example V4 is under People/Victoria. Under the People top category I can find everyone: V4, G4, A4, The Freak, V4 Skeleton etc. If I’m looking for an outfit for Victoria it’s under People/Victoria/Clothing and so on.
I don’t see any higher crash than any other apps and in developing this plugin I pounded on the damn thing very heavily so you might look into some of the possible causes of those crashes.
Organization of the content can help you getting your stuff easily accessible under Studio.
It’s a different beast than Poser but in many regards I see it as a more professional tool. The Skeleton Setup Tool is definitely a ahead of Poser and the general architecture of the plugin system is giving a lot of power for people who want to extend Studio.
Of course we are talking about personal preferences but if you have specific issues drop a line in the Studio forum at daz3d.com and we’ll try to help you.
Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.
I was wondering … I am on windows 7 do I need LuxRender for this to work within my DAZ … also is it restricted to DAZ3 since I also still use DAZ 2.3 … will it be expensive and how long is there left to go ??
@Dave Gynn
Hi Dave. Yes, you need LuxRender, which is FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) so it doesn’t cost you anything. LuxRender can be downloaded from http://www.luxrender.net but it will be included in the shipping version of Reality.
Reality needs Studio 3 and will be affordable even for the hobbyist. Release time has not been announced yet but it’s a matter of a few weeks more.