1. So you want to try rendering a DAZ Studio portrait in Keyshot? First set up your scene with a character and background, in DAZ Studio or Poser. Ensure the background has no plants and trees in it, as multiple leaf transparency problems in Keyshot are a nightmare to fix. Then export the entire scene and posed character as an .obj file and materials.
The basic portrait view seen in DAZ Studio.
2. Load the .obj into Keyshot, set camera to 200mm (it’s best for portraits) and roughly relocate your original Daz Studio camera view in the scene.
3. The portrait in Keyshot. Yes, it’s The Terrible Transparency Trouble! Keyshot has also mis-imported a texture on the background, but worry about that later. First double-click on the hair, identify its entry in the Scene items list. Turn off the hair visibility. There may be several parts to turn off.
4. With the hair off, you can access and fix those eyes and eyelashes, without the hair getting in the way. One of the eye pupils missing? Double click on it and the Material tab will load. Switch through to the textures tab and double-click on the Color material to open up a folder of your available textures. Tell the folder to show thumbnail previews, and you should be able to spot the eyeball texture that you need to load.
5. Now click on the eyelashes. In the Material tab, switch to the Textures, then double-click on the empty Opacity. Load the b&w texture (opacity map) that looks like it has the eylashes in. Then scroll down to the bottom of the tab and ensure “Sync” is ticked. Now you may have to play around with the Scale: X and Scale: Y sliders. I found that a setting on each slider of 1.12 aligned the eyelash textures correctly on this character.
6. Now turn the hair back on, but section by section. Go to the Scene tab and turn on one hair part, then double-click its entry to load the Material tab. Slide down this tab and find and turn off “Glossy”. Now click through to the Textures sub-tab. Load up the Opacity and Bump textures for that hair segment, and remember to slide down the tab and make sure that “Sync” is checked. Makes sure also that the “Type:” is set to “UV Coordinates”. Now do the same for all the hair parts. It may be that you find you don’t actually need all the hair parts turned back on.
7. Now scroll down the Scene item list, looking for Head | SkinFace or similarly named entries. Ensure each of the face textures has a Bump map and Specular (if there is one) applied. Do the same for upper neck, torso etc if this body area is also visible in the portrait. Large sections of fabric should also have a bump map, so if it’s missing find it and apply it.
8. Check for texture mis-matches in your background scene, and fix these if needed.
9. Ok, your portrait is ready to light in Keyshot. You can either try HDR lights and see what fits, or use the Edit HDRI and drop pin lights directly onto the scene parts you want to light. If using HDR, remember that you can rotate and dim these lights, and you don’t have to accept the default angle and strength. Once happy with a basic lighting setup, you may want to gently re-introduce “Gloss” to hair parts, and also to the lips.
10. Close DAZ Studio, if you haven’t already, to give more computer power to Keyshot, because now you’re going to render. The nice thing is that rendering in Keyshot doesn’t bring your PC to a near-stop, and you can happily run a music player and a Web browser and even Photoshop while rendering in the background. But still, it’s probably good to give it as much of the CPU as possible.
Above are the straight Keyshot results, prior to any Photoshop, but reduced to 1920px. Original was 4000px x 2450px on a 4-core modern desktop PC = 72 minutes rendering. Not bad for a first try, but it needs improving in Photoshop. Sadly the green eyes have been lost in Keyshot, turning brown for some reason. The eyes also need a little postwork in Photoshop to get them looking more glossy and limpid.
Here’s the same render in 1920px, after a very quick Photoshopping. Sloppy lighting, not-great skin or eyes, but this was just a tutorial test…
Carrara 8 is DAZ Studio's official 'big sister' software.
Carrara loads all DAZ and Poser characters and scenes,
and supports LuxRender for top-quality realistic rendering.