The program I use for all of the renders and animations is Daz Studio. You can download the program for free at
www.daz3d.com. You will have to register and it will install Daz Install Manager (DIM) that will install the rest of the program and free content.
The main program and fuctions are all free. But the content, like custom characters and morphs, environments, hair, clothing and special programs are bought. There is a lot of free content online if you know where to look though. Pretty much enough to create any character you can imagine.
The base program comes with 4 default versions of the 4 most recent figure releases. Male and female versions of Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3 and Genesis 8. With each of those you will get some free cloth, hair and minimal ability to change the body. To be able to alter your characters in any way you want try to find the body and face morphs for whatever character you decide to use (I use Genesis 2 characters exclusively, since they are a bit easier to animate). Extract the file, then drop the contents in your
My DAZ 3D Library folder.
System requirements: Computer animation is pretty dependant on your graphics card. In Daz Studio the best renderer is the Iray renderer, which is designed to be used with Nvidia GeForce graphics cards. Basically the more total Cuda cores your computer's graphics cards have the faster Iray will render. I have a single 1070GTX and I render a full body character to 99% is about 30 seconds. Once I upgrade to say... two 1080GTX TIs I could render 4x as fast. Or about 7 seconds for the same full body character.
Speeding up rendering: Try to use a single light source. The more lights you use might look better, but it will slow down the render times. I mostly use a single HDRi environment map and use "dome rotation" in the Iray settings to adjust the lighting. Also, using environments slows down rendering considerably. For example if you render a character by itself, it will render quickly, but if you place it inside a house an render it again, it will render very slowly, because the light has to bounce off all the walls of the house and not just the character. For animations generally I render the environments once by themselves, and then just use it as a 2D background and render my animated characters over it. For single images rendering them together is fine.
This is just an overview of getting started and what to expect. There are hundreds of things that new users of Daz Studio will have to learn through trial and error or asking questions, but I can't go in to every one of them in this post. There are also thousands of Daz tutorials on YouTube that go through the basics. Feel free to post in this thread or PM me if you have specific questions.