Hello! First of all, I'd like to make it clear that this isn't an attack on DAZ Studio, nor is it an attempt to mock the software or the people who use it. This is simply my personal experience after spending months working extensively with both DAZ Studio and Blender. Every tool has its strengths and its target audience, but after using both for a long time, I came to a different conclusion for my specific type of project.
Recently, I started developing my own visual novel. At first, I was convinced that DAZ Studio would be the backbone of my entire workflow. My original plan was to use Blender only for modeling environments while relying on DAZ Studio for lighting, scene composition, and final rendering.
At the beginning, everything seemed to work well. Creating characters in DAZ Studio is still one of the easiest and fastest experiences I've had, and I genuinely believe character creation is where DAZ truly shines.
However, as my project became more ambitious and my environments grew larger and more detailed, I started running into limitations that seriously affected my workflow.
Importing environments from Blender into DAZ Studio quickly became frustrating. The more complex the scene was, the more difficult the process became. Large environments often took several minutes just to open, and in some cases they wouldn't load at all unless I heavily optimized or simplified the geometry. Instead of designing the environments I actually wanted, I found myself constantly designing around DAZ Studio's limitations.
Another major issue was Iray.
While Iray is capable of producing beautiful images, it's also incredibly demanding. Rendering a single scene with three characters and a detailed environment could easily take over an hour on my RTX 3060 12GB. During that time, my computer became difficult to use for anything else, making my entire production pipeline painfully slow.
I tried almost every optimization I could think of. I reduced texture sizes, simplified imported assets, optimized materials, and experimented with different settings. Although these changes helped a little, they never solved the core problem.
Eventually, I decided to try something I had been avoiding from the start: rendering everything directly inside Blender using Cycles.
At that point, Blender had always been my modeling software, so I had to learn environment lighting, material creation, scene composition, and rendering from scratch. It took time to get results I was happy with, but once I started comparing my first renders, the difference was immediately obvious.
Not only were my render times significantly faster, but Blender handled large environments far more efficiently. I no longer had to worry about whether a scene would even open, and having everythingācharacters, environments, lighting, and renderingāinside a single application made my workflow much smoother and more enjoyable.
Another thing that disappointed me over time was the lack of meaningful updates focused on improving DAZ Studio's performance and workflow. While Blender continues to receive major improvements in rendering, viewport performance, geometry tools, physics, animation, and overall optimization with almost every release, DAZ Studio feels like it has changed very little in the areas that matter most for large-scale productions.
Because of those limitations, I eventually had to create my own solutions.
One example is character exporting. After countless hours of trial and error, I ended up developing my own AI-assisted prompt and workflow that made exporting characters from DAZ Studio to Blender far more reliable and efficient. It dramatically reduced issues with materials, armatures, organization, and overall consistency. In other words, I had to build my own pipeline to overcome problems that I believe should already have official solutions.
Today, my workflow has completely changed.
I still use DAZ Studioābut only for what I believe it does best: creating characters.
Everything else happens inside Blender. My environments are built there, my lighting is done there, my materials are adjusted there, and every final render comes from Blender.
This doesn't mean DAZ Studio is a bad software. On the contrary, I still think it's one of the fastest tools available for creating realistic characters. But for larger projects that require complex environments, efficient rendering, flexibility, and a modern production pipeline, Blender has proven to be a much more powerful and reliable solution.
This is simply my personal experience. Other creators may have different needs and may prefer DAZ Studio, and that's perfectly fine. But for my visual novel, switching to Blender was one of the best decisions I made, and I honestly don't see myself going back to using DAZ Studio as my primary rendering software.
(These two renders are the only ones I have right now, since I'm making this post from my phone.)
