pwEffect for Iray?
Tanis Volta
Posts: 550
Are there's something like http://www.daz3d.com/pweffect for Iray?
and pwGhost for Iray? what can I do without postwork in photoshop? thanks!
Post edited by Tanis Volta on
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I want to know this too! I just bought pwGhost and was very disappointed to find it doesn't work with Iray. I hope a fix can be found.
pw shaders are custom 3Delight shaders, there's no way to get them to work with Iray.
I guess EquisVoid and I are asking if the vendor could update the package to include Iray versions of the shaders, or if another vendor could or has stepped in to fill the void.
pw shaders are pretty awesome but they're very old products (I bought the original DS3 products in 2006-2007), and the PA who created them originally has not been active for years AFAIK. Besides, creating an iray version would probably mean creating completely new shaders from scratch since those rely on custom 3delight shader code. So I really doubt they'll ever be updated to include an Iray version.
Now if some brave and skilled vendor felt like creating Iray equivalents I'm sure a lot of people would love it :)
I think they are even older than DS3, at least for the most part - DS 1 or 2 vintage.
Err good point, 2006 was indeed still DS1... I got confused as the product page lists only DS3 and 4 now.
Hmmm... never say never... I gave it a try with a test scene of G2M standing in one of Jack Tomalin's rooms, and the pwGhost plug-in did indeed make the man green plastic when I rendered in Iray -- like toy soldiers in the late 1950's/early 60's, before the original "G.I. Joe" series. Sorry, I wasn't able to quickly locate any clothes for my G2M, not even a T-shirt!
<-- insert embarrassment.
So I went back to 3DL and I made a reference layer of the figure alone with pwGhost applied... I saved that as a transparent .TIFF file.
Hmmm... strike two in that the Caribbean like, turquoise (?) color that is the default in pwGhost is kind of hard to work with... eg. it's not easy to intensify it if you will, by adjusting the levels and so on in an image editor... I'm not sure why that is; my un-doctored reference image works fine... anyway my second image below is fairly pale and un-exciting as these things go (or ought to). Not to worry, I was able to give it a bit of spark by adding more layers with varying degrees of transparency and opacity, and some noise and so on... you can still see some of the original pwGhost effect on the figure's left shoulder.
I stayed with it a bit longer and some motion blur (applied in an image editor to one of my assembled layers) seemed to do the trick, and the whole thing is heading towards having an ethereal or 1970's hologram quality.
On the figure's right thigh there is a bit of "misty volume" brought in using one of the other pwGhost effects, in its own layer.
So although I had to kind of leave pwGhost for the most part, to get what I wanted (?) to be fair to the plug-in I've barely started playing around with it.
When I was a kid I had the "Golden Book Encyclopedia" and they did Dickens' character Jacob Marley with pwGhost and its blacks, and turquoisey glowing greens... kind of sticks in my mind like those early toy soldiers. "Warriors Of The World" by Marx were much better though, and you could actually get Romans!
If pwGhost is only setting shader values, as opposed to such things as doing post-script work to manipulate the rendered pieces, then you could apply it to a surface, and manually convert to Iray using the Uber shader. Iray must have materials in its unique form of shader, and D|S will auto-convert 3Delight shaders to Iray when needed. However, you have less control over the final appearance when using 3DL shaders, so you might as well do the conversion yourself, then adjust.
I think I have pwGhost but seldom used it. It's pretty easy to replicate in Iray using Cutout Opacity, Refractive Index, or both. There are some toon-ish shaders from the same developer that I'm pretty sure aren't at all Iray-compatible, as these use functions specific to 3Delight.
Tobor, if you can replicate it, I'd sure like to learn how. pwGhost hides the far side of "ghostly" people and objects so you don't see things like the ear on the other side of the head that can make the image difficult to interpret or just plain revolting. (Seeing the face through the back of the head looks like a gruesome injury.) For me, messing with making characters transparent in Iray has so far simply revealed too much anatomy and does not replicate what pwGhost does. But I'm still a noob, so I'm not disputing whether you can get good results using Cutout Opacity or something else--but if you can, please share your technique with us!
I see what you mean for human characters where the innards can be pretty ugly -- those teeth! I was thinking more in general, like a ghosting a (Casper-like) ghost, where it's fairly common to show the transparency to the back side.
pwGhost may render out to multiple layers and then by script adjust the mix of those. I haven't seen anyone do this as an automatic process for Iray, but it's quite feasible manually with canvases. You render a node-based Beauty canvas twice: one with the full scene but without the ghost, and the second the ghost only. (Though this depends on your desired end result.) You'd then composite them in a photo editing program like Photoshop or GIMP. You could apply an overall green look, though it might be more interesting to apply the color effects in the render by changing the color of the shaders.
How you render the ghost would influence other scene elements. If you deselect the character for a node-based canvas, you'll still get the character's shadow. Do ghosts cast shadows? I imagine they could, but you might be of the belief that ghosts have no shadow, as they aren't also supposed to have a reflection. So if you don't want shadows, you'd just hide the full character and render regularly without it. (Put the figure and all clothes etc in a group, then you can "eyeball" the group and everything disappears at once.)
I ought to dig out my copy of pwGhost and give it another try. I see I got it in 2012, and I think I used it for a project then, but haven't run it since.
I think that's what I was doing... I played around with it for another hour and included some work with the shadows in the area of the feet. In particular my test scene had the floorboards running near-vertically through the figure so I touched on "intensifying" that, or not. And I think certain things like the hair and ears need postwork assistance, for pwghost so I did that too. And I did a bit of targeted blurring as well.
Don't forget that you can modify your figure (or future "ghost") layer(s) right from the get-go: here I have knocked down the color a bit to make my base TIFF layer more cadaver or vampire-ish... screen shot attached.
The pwGhost materials may work best on a black background or a very dark room, a night scene etc.
I don't think I understand what "node-based" means in this context. Please explain?
Not sure how good it is, but there was a free ghost shader for iray on sharecg if I remember right.
Thanks for replies, I really appreciate Roman effort showing different ghost, you are a great artist, mate
Found the sharecg ghost iray shader, thanks katkbliss
http://www.sharecg.com/v/80867/browse/7/Material-and-Shader/DS-4.8-Iray-Ghost-Shader
I forgot about that one. I remember downloading it, but never tried it. This tidbit from the posting is interesting:
"Use a negatively dialed geoshell to avoid shining through eyes and mouth"
Sounds like a nifty trick for things like this. I know some people use it for their Iray skins, as a kind of subdermal layer.
I think that the technique for getting the silhouette edges is to take the dot product of the face normal, relative to the camera position and direction vector. If the dot product is greater than a certain value (lets say around 0.2) then don't render the pixel. The dot product of a facenormal relative to the camera vector will tell you by how much the face is facing the camera. A value of 1 means that the face is directly facing the camera. A negative value means the face is facing away from the camera. The properties of the surface would include a high and low threshold value that would represent the point at which the silhouette edge starts to become more and more transparent. Once it gets to the high threshold, no pixel is drawn. This would give you smoothly fading silhouette edges.
I'd give it a try but I don't really know enough to jump into the Renderman code for such a task or even try it using the shader builder. Certainly a great topic and the pwGhost shader is a great shader too. I'd love to see something like that for iRay.
Geeez, I wish I would have saw this thread, I just bought the product as a bundle, tested all of them, many are duplicates, no Iray capability, 3 had error messages, and some of them do not even work at all.
Error messages sound like an install problem.
Anyway, if you bought them less than 30 days ago you can get a refund.