How to render an animation in DAZ Studio

I start with this post a series of tutorials on how to use DAZ Studio, very popular software developed by DAZ 3D, used to create 3D art and animations.

Let’s start with a simple guide on how to render an animation in DAZ Studio, a topic enough requested by users visiting my YouTube channel. 

At the bottom I have also included a video showing the various steps.

Once prepared our animation, just click on the Render menu and select Render Settings or alternately, click directly on the Render tab.

Between the options of the Render Settings tab we must select Make Movie, leave unchanged Start Frame and End Frame if we want to render the entire animation, otherwise we can manually set up the values to render parts of the scene.

Now we can proceed in two manner:

• selecting Movie File
• or Image Series.

Render an animation with Movie File

In the Render To section we must select Movie File, choose where save the video and give it a name. Now DAZ Studio will render the different frames and at the end will create the avi file. The last thing to do is select the type of compression that we want to give to the animation.

Render an animation with Image series

This method saves an image for each frame rendered in a specific folder.
The advantages are obvious, if we have some crashes we can resume our work directly from the last frame saved, as well as we can stop the render at any point of the animation and then resume it easily later.

Once we have finished all the animation rendering we need a video editing program, such as the free VirtualDub, to convert images to video.
First of all on the DAZ Studio’s Timeline control the FPS set for our animation.

Now open VirtualDub, click on Options and on the menu select Preferences.

In the new tab we must click on Images and enter the FPS value detected on the DAZ Studio’s Timeline.

Click on File and in the menu we must select Open video file…

We must search to the folder where we saved the images, once found select the first picture and must click on Open. VirtualDub automatically will import all the image series.

We are almost done, if we are interested we can set the compression of the video so that it will become more “lightweight”, because the video without compression will tend to weight several MB or even GB depending on the length of the animation (for example, a video of 4 seconds with frames rendered at 1280×720 without compression exceeds 300 MB) .

Just go in Video and into the menu click on Compression.

Now we can finally create the video, just click on File, select Save as AVI, give a name at our animation and give a last click on Save.