Looking for Daz3D Realistic Render Tips? You have been practising and you are ready to step up the game to the next level? We will review a few core tips to make your renders look just astonishing, with the photorealism you dream of. And it is not specifically any rocket science; what you just need is to turn your attention to some fine details. So, let’s start!
For this tutorial I will make use of the following products that you can find following the link in each of its title names:
- You Luk Bundle
- Melo Hair for Genesis 3 and 8 Female
- dForce X-Fashion Cyberpunk Outfit 2.0 for Genesis 8 Female
Our beautiful assistant for the occasion – Source Gou Luk Bundle
Content Quality
This is the first and foremost advice. It is all about quality materials! Just as in any actual artistic discipline, you will want to probably purchase the best utensils and supplies. Well, if we extrapolate it to our virtual world, to start off on the right foot you need to make quality purchases. What I mean is, analyze your products before you buy them, check the models and their texture maps. If our characters are Genesis 8 HD, you already have the boost from the beginning.
Do not buy second-rate and later on follow some advice to compensate for the bad textures and poor quality geometry. It is always best to invest some extra bucks on the right products and save it on the headaches.
The more texture maps and level of content included with the product the better.
Morphs and Poses
This piece of advice will save you a lot of time, believe me! I have seen a lot of renders on the web, and I have also seen a common mistake throughout them all. They have unreal gestures and poses.
Well, to be more specific, some renders look out from the freezer. This is because they have rigid poses. How to solve this? Easy, we need to support our work on real actual references from the real world. To better understand how muscles work and avoid unreal gestures, use image references found on the web. The real fact is that the pose and gesture you are trying to mimic, they both already exist in the real world: so go for it without any shame and copy!
Secondly, all faces are asymmetrical. So are gestures.In general it is not perceivable by the naked eye but it is more evident in some facial features like the nose and the eyes. Try to see any photography with smiling people in it and you will notice one eye squints slightly more than the other.
In this case, I changed a few parameters and made small adjustments to the facial features, they look unperceivable but will help create this effect of spontaneity.
Lighting for Daz3D Realistic Render
Lighting is crucial in order to achieve outstanding render quality. In fact, lighting is as important as it is modeling and texturing. For that reason, we will review some basic notions that will help you recreate natural and artificial lighting conditions. Have a look at our detailed Daz3d Iray Lighting Tutorial and Daz3d Night Render Iray Tutorial.
Natural Lighting
This chart clearly shows the natural lighting spectrum and values for each specific lighting condition. We can say that the lower the value, the smaller the source of heat and the higher, the greater and further. Candlelight is set around 1800K and the Blue Sky which is vast and plentiful goes from 8000 to 12000K.
Examples of natural light in the Kelvin scale (from higher to lower value).
Artificial Lighting (Urban Light)
The artificial lighting, on the contrary, covers the full spectrum of colors.
A good way of using light is having its sources from a pair of complementary colors. This gives an extra boost to photorealism and helps create contrast and visual interest. In my case, as I want to recreate urban lighting from street signs, I will use this type of lighting.
Urban lighting that creates contrast – Source Artistic Lighting Kit: Intensity
As seen in the image, this is a good example of complementary colors playing together to create contrast in an artificial lighting environment.
You can always use HDRI Maps to import environments with lighting included. Thus, you make sure the lighting conditions are appropriate. Ideally, resort to trusted sites and get good quality maps above 4K; Daz offers great packs at great value.
Natural Lighting HDRI – Source Mountain Lake HDRI
Artificial Lighting HDRI – Source Spaceship Interiors HDRI
You can also check this and more products to help enrich your scene lighting.
Volumetric lighting to create specific atmospheres – Source Iray Ghost Light Kit 3
Last but not least, If you are interested in mastering the magic of lighting, check this complete (and phenomenal) tutorial here.
Depth of Field
I highly recommend using depth of field in your scenes, especially when you have many elements in the composition. The depth of field helps the viewer understand and establish what is the most important part of the photography. It also helps separate objects from one another and create contrast, which is a key element that will always enrich our work.
Related to photorealism, we need to do manually what the human eye does naturally. In real life, we do not see all objects with the same clarity. For that reason, we should also bring it to our renders. Below an example out of our in detail Daz3D Depth of Field Tutorial.
From our Daz3D Depth of Field Tutorial
As a visual guide, here it is a very useful chart to understand aperture values for the depth of field.
Denoising
Image treatment is very important, and denoising is no exception. As part of the process of rendering, you might consider using denoising tools to remove grains most likely caused by intense exposure to light.
The general idea is to avoid post denoisers since they remove texture quality. Key fact: to achieve photorealism we should not optimize rendering times. Post denoiser is opposite to render quality.
In the Render Settings Pane, go to Filtering and make sure Post Denoiser is not active. We will keep it off at all times.
So, what to do? The best thing you can do is double the resolution of the render. This is also called “oversampling”. Once finished, you squeeze the resolution back to its original pre-conceived resolution and the pixels will also pack reducing noise.
You can learn more following our Daz3d Denoiser: How to Reduce Noise in Renders tutorial.
Other Daz3D Realistic Render Setting Tips
In the Advanced Tab within the render settings, we have a section named Texture Compression. We will change our values to match the ones in the screenshot. In this way there is no compression and texture quality can stay at 8K pixels of resolution if applicable. Also make sure to have a look at our Daz3D Render Settings in depth article.
Our final result:
Conclusion – Daz3D Realistic Render Tips
As we have seen in this Daz3D Realistic Render Tips tutorial, from good to amazing there is a rather short distance. Also, there is a high chance you already even knew some of these tips intuitively. This is why it is always good to refresh some of them as well as incorporating fundamental other ones. I encourage you to keep practising simply because you are doing absolutely phenomenal already by reaching this tutorial.
Once last piece of advice, do consider post-processing softwares like Photoshop for final retouches and keep reading as we update on new topics. Have a nice rendering!