Whoa, I just checked your patreon and noticed your a one man army, thats awesome. I was looking in to getting in to the same thing (definitely more of a hobby at this point) and wondering if you have any more particular wisdom to shed?
So you take a character from Daz and import them into Blender to fine tune and for rendering?
I've notified him that you're trying to reach him. He'll answer sometime today. Usually the best way to get a hold of him is the Discord channel, though, especially if you think you'll have lots of follow up questions. Here's the link. https://discord.gg/8N5g8X
Originally my intention was to do all of the rendering in Daz, but I found too many limitations for my specific goals. After spending about a month trying to get my characters and renders looking as I wanted, I decided to scrap them and migrate to a more robust 3d system. That said, Daz is legitimately good for rendering small groups of people (2 or 3 max) and small environments, especially if you want photo real characters. Over the past year, they've also improved hair systems, too, so if I was to make the choice today, i can't really say if I would have invested the time to learn something like Blender or Maya.
As for my full production order, the characters start in Daz, import to Maya, sculpt any additional features or details (or remove them, since a lot of times a toony character looks creepy with too much detail), customize skins and subsurface maps in Photoshop/surface painter (though sometimes the skins that import from Daz are perfectly good), correct the shaders (this was the hardest part to really get right for me, since the skin-feel of the characters was one of the main reasons I went to Maya), then sculpt out the hair using xgen, which is the native hair tool in Maya (though I've considered using other tools for hair, like ornatrix, but learning a new tool always takes time, and I'm not sure if it'll be worth it right now). I call these my clean characters, since they have none of the clothes or general fluff that will be added in other production scenes, so the file sizes are generally pretty small. I just turn off the hair, then use them to pose and animate things for simulations so that my semi-crappy computer doesn't work too hard.
Of course, there's always a lot of trial and error when doing something like this. Once you enter a semi-professional software ecosystem, a lot of the handholding that we take for granted is removed and instead you're given an esoteric error message or a software crash when you make a mistake. It took a long time for me to realize that Daz files import into Maya at a 100 to 1 size ratio, for example. It doesn't really matter much unless you're simulating something, because cloth acts different if it's a mile wide. I guess it's really just that the more stuff you can change, the more stuff there is that you can screw up.
