Studio comes with a lot of tools and there are some awesome scripts you can purchase that can improve your workflow and your renders.
I tend to render a bunch of characters in my scenes, and while I’ve got 2 relatively powerful GPUs (2080tis) reducing your scenes down can help speed up your renders no matter what kind of card you have (even if you have a 3090!) and if you want to do animation it can dramatically speed things up there as well.
DAZ Decimator is a tool that comes with DAZ that is originally designed for those wanting to move their DAZ assets over to game engines. Game engines like Unreal or Unity work best with figures with low to medium poly counts. Not the high and super high poly counts that DAZ tends to produce. And when you add SubD into the mix you can easily push millions of polygons in your figures.
That’s great if you’re rendering a portrait but if you want to render a scene with a bunch of different figures in it (especially background figures) then that just wastes resources.
You can easily use the DAZ Decimator tool to create lower resolution versions of your figures, props, and assets like clothes and vehicles.
If the figure or object is in the background of your scene and not the primary focus of your scene there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever for the object to have a high poly count!
So explore the DAZ Decimator and explore reducing the detail level and resolution of your figures and assets. You’ll be amazed at how much it speeds up your workflow!
Scene Optimizer is another must-have script. There is no reason for eyebrows and eyelashes to have large textures! Reduce those suckers down from 4000x4000 down to 512x512 and save your VRAM.
Same for the texture size for pants and other clothes. There’s one vendor at Renderosity that loves to release 8000x8000 textures (and higher) for his pants and other wardrobe. That’s insane, and only wastes VRAM.
You can experiment with what works best for you.
But between reducing the size of your textures, and the resolution of your figures, you can significantly reduce the render times of your renders or reduce the resources your scene uses so you can make more complex scenes or add more figures!
The Iray Stand Kit only renders what’s within the virtual walls of the Iray stand. This is useful if you want to create a diorama for example, or if your scene is very large. You can size the stand to fit within the confines of your camera view and then only what’s visible will consume resources. A very helpful script indeed!
RSSY 3Delight to Iray Converter. No need to buy Iray texture addons for your old assets (or freebies you might have downloaded). This script will convert your 3Delight (and to an extent Poser native textures) into Iray. It requires some tweaking, but for the most part it will do a pretty good job right out the box. Put your old content to new use and breathe new life into your runtime!
RSSY has scripts that will do the reverse (Iray to 3Delight) and recently released a script that will convert 3Delight and Iray to Filament.
I’ve got Filament and 3Delight both disabled in my Studio as I only do Iray renders but Filament is very powerful, and I’m sure I’ll use it more in the future.
Any way, just some thoughts.
Happy rendering!