badtimetales

A dev's life - What makes a good render?

Added 2023-08-07 21:11:47 +0000 UTC

I've learnt a few things in the three years I've been working with Daz.

There are different aspects that make a render look good, like posing, lighting, cam settings.
All those fancy things you can learn from thousands of YouTube videos.

When you're doing a specific render, you have time to fine-tune all these technical things, but when you're doing a story with a lot of renders, you can't spend hours setting up a scene.
You have to compromise, especially when it comes to details and lighting.
Because once you have the perfect lighting for a scene, you move the character a tiny bit... and you have to adjust the lighting. All over again.

So what makes a good render in mass production?

Set up the scene with general lighting, some spot lighting to highlight the character or whatever you want to show in the scene.
The so-called "three point lighting" is a good start, add more lights if you feel the scene needs more.
It doesn't matter if it's point lights or spot lights, but I prefer spot lights.
You can easily adjust these lights for different character poses in a few minutes.

But it's still not a good render.
Whether it's a special render or a series, the most important thing is to show the situation.
Give the character an expression that fits the situation or discussion!
Unfortunately, a lot of Daz expressions are only made for the base models and look really bad on custom characters.
So you have to tweak them or create your own.
This can be frustrating and time consuming, but the results are worth it.

It does take some time to learn how to do this, but once you've set up a few hundred or thousand scenes, it's standard procedure and only takes a few minutes.