DAZ Studio rendering with POV-Ray

Author: Smags

Tools Needed

* DAZ Studio

* POV-Ray

* PoseRay

For this tutorial you will need to download and install Pov-Ray and the PoseRay plug-in. Pov-Ray and PoseRay are free. PoseRay will only work with the current stable Version of Pov-Ray. Do not install the BETA version of Pov-Ray. Pov-Ray is a powerful Public domain Ray-Tracer. You can render scenes made in DAZ Studio with Pov-Ray. Here is an example of the rendering capabilities of Pov-Ray.

Download PovRay at http://www.povray.org/download/

Download PoseRay at http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/

Install POV-Ray first. PoseRay is a zip archive. Download the archive and unzip the archive to any folder you wish. In the unzipped folder you can launch PoseRay by double clicking on the file “PoseRay.exe”.

Make sure that you have DAZ Studio version 1.3.1.0 or above installed. Make sure it's not version 1.3.0.1. Start DAZ studio and create a scene. I suggest keeping it simple for now. Be sure to create at least one light in your scene. For this tutorial I am going to create a sphere and a plane with textures applied. My scene will contain one spotlight, and the default camera will be used as my rendering viewport.

Now we need to export our scene for PoseRay. In DAZ Studio select “File– > Export” and select “Wavefront Object”. Set-up your export window as seen below.

Make sure that the Bryce Material option is enabled.

In this step we are going to save our lights and cameras as presets. We will import this with PoseRay later. In DAZ Studio click file – > Save as Lights Preset as in the image below.

** IMPORTANT ** Use the Text Option.

Now set up your options in the dialog box like this.

Next we will export our camera. Highlight the camera used to render your scene.

Click file – > Save as Cameras Preset. Again remember to use the text option when you export your camera. Now Set-up your export options like this.

Save your Project. Close DAZ Studio. Now we are ready to render our scene with POVRAY.

Browse to your POSERAY folder and run PoseRay.exe.

Now click the load button and select DAZ Studio scene.

In the DAZ Studio Import window load the Objects, lights, and cameras. You can create lights in POVRAY rather than importing the presets file, but that will be covered in another tutorial. For now set up your import window like this and click OK.

Let's preview our render. Click the Preview tab. There are a lot of options in the preview window, but for this tutorial we are only going to look at a couple vital features. We will start by clicking on the camera tab.

Here we can reposition our scene if we need to. The right button will zoom our scene. The Middle button will pan our scene. The function of the Left button can be changed by using the drop down menu located next to the “Left button- > ” Label.

In this step we will fine tune our lighting. In the preview window click on the lights tab. In this widow you can adjust the way your light looks and how it is positioned in your scene. In the image below I have changed the elevation and position of my light.

Note that there is not an undo function for the light and camera windows. If you need to start over, you can click on the From file tab to reload your original presets.

In Pose Ray select the “POV-Ray Output” Tab. If this is the first time you are running PoseRay, you need to locate the .exe for POV-Ray.

In the Scene and Output section of the POVRay output window you can select various render options. More on this in another tutorial, but feel free to experiment. PovRay can produce very realistic renders, however using very high quality settings will increase render times. For this scene I have selected Normal Radiosity and recursive AA.

Finally, it's time to render with POVRay. Click the button Save and Render. Click OK to all the message dialogs. Here is the final result in 40 seconds.

This tutorial continues in DAZ Studio rendering with POV-Ray (Part 2)