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Hi and welcome. I hope your husband is recovering and feeling better.
Would you care to comment on the Luxrender/Reality issues we have been discussing in this thread, please? Particularly the tiling. It seems we have to revert to the standard DS shader in order for it to work and, admittedly not knowing precisely how shaders work, I'm still confused about what is and is not possible with anything other than the 3Delight engine.
I have to get ready for work now but I'll try to keep track of the conversation as the day progresses. It is probably late in the western US now anyway (I'm in the UK).
Thank you
I'm not sure how much I can help you with Reality or Luxus. I dabbled with Reality before version 2, but not much, and I did buy Luxus and played a little (personally I think I'll like Luxus more the Reality).. So I'm really no expert on how DS shader settings translate to LuxRender.
You're very welcome :) Will pray for y'all, if that's okay... :red:
We are working on addressing this.
With Reality 3 we will improve the already advanced shader translator but we will have some other initiative that we can't divulge at this time.
The important thing is to remember that the Reality Material Editor is there to help you. It was in fact made to allow you to edit easily any material. Reality does it's best to convert the materials automatically. In the two years of developimg Reality for Studio we have added hundreds of adjustments to the conversion process. Often based on the observation of how the translation operates on specific products.
With Reality 3 we will advance the system even more.
Now, one of the great things of ACSEL is that it helps you avoid repeating the same thing over and over again. Once you found the right settings for a certain model simply save them for ACSEL and, the next time that you use that model, Reality will load the settings automatically.
All the best.
I know this is late in the day to be saying this but I have realised that I'm not very clear on the difference between shaders and textures and materials. Then there's DAZ standard shaders, third party shaders, procedural shaders - I'm just a bit lost and I am not finding a good explanation in all the searches I've done today.
Anyone want to volunteer an explanation, please?
Oh - one more thing: I used to think that shaders would not display in the viewport (OpenGL) - only when rendered. At least I seem to remember that being the case when I had my Windows 7 PC. Now I have an iMac and I can see shaders in the viewport before I render (or spot render). Is my memory mistaken?
A texture is an image map [or possibly a procedurally generated map, depending how you want to count things]. So it would give the color, or the transparency, or the bump, etcetera.
A shader is more like a set of instructions for how a surface will be rendered. For example, a toon shader would render something with the same diffuse surface a lot differently from Ubersurface with SSS enabled. The DAZ default is, well, the default. Other shaders can add to or simplify your options, like letting you use anisotropic specular highlights.
In my mind, a material is the set of both a shader and its associated maps, so it makes a full surface. There may be some more technical definition [and I could be dead wrong], but I'm not familiar with it. Material presets in DS are generally for applying a look to a set of surfaces [like the eyes or an entire character]. They're associated with specific surfaces, while shader presets would be something designed to be applied to all sorts or surfaces. Shaer presets are often just called 'shaders,' but they really aren't shaders.
The DAZ standard shader is the default one that loads up on a created primitive. You might count Ubersurface and such since they get installed with the program, but I don't. I consider those third-party shaders still. Third-party shaders are ones created by other people, such as this blinn shader or the one that comes with DimensionTheory's Project EYEris. Procedural shaders could fit into either category. They're shaders which use math to create patterns instead of using image maps. It's possible to have a shader that uses both procedural patterns and textures.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. Things are a little clearer (I think).
So now I am wondering what are the criteria that determine whether a material/texture/shader which is designed to work in 3 Delight might also render correctly in luxrender (whether Reality or Luxus).
I much prefer shaders where possible, there is no stretching that way. I'm sure even a half way decent skin shader could be developed and the use LIE to overlay makeup or facial hair options.
Well, it's a matter of translation. If you'd want it to get translated automatically, the exporter has to be able to read the shader. I don't know which parameters Luxus or Reality translate over, or how they do so. Generally speaking, if you want good results you'll want to tweak the materials yourself and save them for later. None of the exporters will translate perfectly. Luckily, once you get something realistic in LuxRender, it usually looks pretty good under different lighting. 3Delight doesn't fare so well in this respect.
Something procedural won't translate directly, though similar effects could likely be achieved with work - luckily DS shaders tend to rely on texture maps. Something which is mostly based on textures you should be able to copy over yourself even if it doesn't get translated automatically.
The problem comes with shaders that use unrealistic shading like toon or edge blending for effect, or mixed materials/maps. Reality doesn't really allow for the tweaking of Mix materials right now. Luxus has a beta of a plugin called Eluxir out which allows you to tweak materials with a lot of customization possible. It's node-based and a bit esoteric at the moment if you don't have the Lux wiki open. A bit rough around the edges, but you can get a lot more out of it than you can with Reality. Even the regular Luxus is capable of more materials, and working with volumes, which Reality really isn't equipped to handle at the moment.
Depends what shaders you're talking about. Most rely on UVs for mapping, so there's an equal amount of stretching going on.
I have now slept on this and, as usual, I woke with a better idea of the process involved (I hope).
So, if I have it right, a texture is a jpeg applied to a flattened area of the model (UV map?). It has all the colours and patterns and placement of patterns because it is a picture image. A shader is a definition file which has values (e.g. #ff05c3) for colours and specularity and glossiness etc., although I'm not sure how it deals with patterns such as gingham or floral prints. Perhaps Reality expects to receive the shader in DAZ default format so it knows how to translate it and then, when 3rd. Party shaders deviate from this format too much, translation becomes more difficult? A pattern could also be a repeating seamless tile which is applied according to the tiling values in the surface settings.
I'm not clear on how a texture image and its shader equivalent work together, though.
What has been said about stretching seems to be the case in my latest Reality test. I used a gingham shader and it has no stretching that I can detect - I am impressed!
Getting there :)
It looks great! I'd personally change the stocking material to matte, cloth, or possibly velvet so they don't have that sharp glossy specular to them.
As for what's been said about texture stretching, I honestly don't understand the idea that a shader won't stretch. If a texture gets blown up to 200% on certain areas of an outfit with a certain morph dialed in, a shader will get blown up to 200% as well if it uses the same UV mapping [which it does in all the DS shaders I'm familiar with; things would get wonky in most cases otherwise]. Where does the lack of texture stretching come in?
Thanks. The tiny "bright spots" on the material are from slight poke through. I forgot to give it my usual 0.12 push modifier.
As for your point about stretching - I can't say that I understand the process well (or even at all) but I imagined that shaders were applied to the surface after fitting to the body shape whereas textures are applied to a flat surface and then draped around the figure?
Only procedural shaders can avoid stretching issues, because they are not in any way tied to the UV coordinates the object contains; they use worldspace coordinates. When using a tiled image, the shader still makes use of the UV coordinates in the object. So when you enlarge the object in some places but not others, you get texture stretching. The shaders in this package are not procedural -- they are based on tiled images, so will still show stretching. An easy way to see this is load up a female figure, put a tight-fitting shirt on her, dial up the breast size and then apply one of the lace or fishnet options from this shader package to the shirt. The stretching of the tile shape should be quite obvious. Using the base colour sheer shader instead of the lace/nets will make this a lot less obvious because the pattern is basically very uniform and subtle, being almost invisible as a pattern.)
Background explanation:
The way UV coordinates work (in Lux at least) is that every vertex in the mesh has U,V coordinates stored for it. U,V indicate an X,Y position within an imagemap to retrieve the colour/specularity/normal/etc information from. All faces are triangles (Lux tessellates all quads into tris during the refinement stage that happens just before rendering actually starts). When a ray intersects a face, Lux interpolates the UV coordinates for the spot on the face hit from the three vertexes that make up the face. So when you scale a shape up in only certain places (such as when you increase breast size), the vertex points of the faces are moved further apart from each other for only a subset of the total mesh. This is why you see texture stretching -- the face is still determined by those same three vertexes, but they're no-longer at the relative distances from each other they were originally designed for. To really avoid this, you need a new UV map for the mesh that changes the U,V values for the vertexes to make them pull from different areas of the imagemap -- hence why many of the more 'extreme' shapes for Genesis include alternate UV mappings.
Whereas a procedural shader is 100% mathematical (noise, metal simulation, marble simulation, even brick simulations, etc.), and it simply takes the location where the ray hit the face and uses those coordinates as the inputs to the mathematical function. It does not try to interpolate a U,V location from the vertexes of the face that got struck, because there is no imagemap used.
Is there an easy way to determine whether a shader is procedural? Any examples in the DAZ store?
Procedural shaders in Studio are built using Shader Builder or Shader Mixer. (However, just because something is using one of those doesn't mean it is procedural. After all, these sheer shaders are using Shader Mixer to extend the standard DAZ Default Shader that is still ultimately based on image maps.) Off the top of my head, the metal shader in Bot Genesis is procedural (but again for certain areas like the face, it uses a slightly different Shader Mixer network that includes an imagemap and is thus dependent on a UV map). But metal is easily reproduced in Lux by selecting Lux's metal shader for converting those materials. If you tell Lux to use an imagemap for the metal colour, then it will still have to look up U,V coordinates. But if you just use measured data for the metal (e.g., the various .nk files that Reality includes as presets for "gold", "silver", etc) then it will be fully procedural and use worldspace coordinates.
It's probably pretty safe to assume that almost all shaders in the store are NOT procedural. Procedural shaders can be very powerful, but they're a lot harder to build. Programming a procedural texture to replicate various lace patterns, for example, would be orders of magnitude more work than simply including the patterns as tiled images.
Actually, a good procedural shader for this sort of thing does not use world coordinates. It uses the UV coordinates as well. Otherwise you wouldn't get a consistent effect on the same outfit. Turning the character, moving anything, morphing would all change what the shader did. It makes predicting results difficult and animation impossible unless you're deliberately going for that look. It also generally doesn't play with perspective nicely.
There aren't any procedural DS shaders in the store of which I know, unless you count the glass shaders. Technically they all can be procedural - just don't put any image maps into them, but they're still designed to be used with textures. What people generally mean by a 'procedural' shader is one in which the bump/specularity/diffuse/sss/etcetera are all controlled by a mathematically generated pattern, often noise maps.
In that case, you'd configure it to use local coordinates instead of global. They are still in worldspace, however.
I don't know about texture stretching but I know that tiling textures can increase the potential for a higher resolution image with a smaller texture image.
UV coordinates are typically a float ranging from 0 to 1. That's why you can load a texture at 2k resolution or 4k resolution and the renderer doesn't care, since it's calculating the actual pixel location by multiplying the resolution by the coordinate offset. Being a float offset, it's easy to account for tiling by including the tiling scale in that calculation to get the actual pixel coordinates in the imagemap.
I personally really like Reality. I never really made that many adjustments with DS tabs just some adjustments here and there. I am at the point that I pretty well have the expected results when adjusting materials in Reality.
I used to think it was all about Lux. Then I realized I was not giving Reality it's full credit until "another" plug in was released...
I have produced many many quality renders...
Really looking forward to R3...
In that case, you'd configure it to use local coordinates instead of global. They are still in worldspace, however.
...So are textures, then? Not sure what you mean by 'worldspace.' Procedural shaders generally do use the underlying UV. Just having one use the object's position rather than the scene's 'center' won't solve the problem of the pattern shifting improperly with any morphing or bending.
The only thing Reality does better than Luxus is surface translation in certain cases [and depending how you look at it, the ACSEL database]. Luxus has the edge on integration with both DAZ Studio and LuxRender, and on tweaking surfaces, lights, and volumes.
Never wont'be simple, every, remark, every unbiased rendering it needs to be tweaked for perfection, neither LuxRender nor Reality does a perfect translation of another set of parameters.
LuxRender is the most friendly unbiased render I know, to DazStudio, if you are not comformtable with the pre-process of tweak shaders, surfaces and textures, and time and patience for this kind of external render engines, believe me, maybe this is not for you.
Lux,Vray,Maxwell, Keyshot,Kerkythea,Modo...ALL of this GREAT render engines need a preparation of OBJ scenes when exported from Daz, All of them.
my 2 cents, and my experience with the render engines listed above, and the results of them in my dA gallery can prove you that. =)
Well, in the case of Lux, it supports multiple coordinate mapping modes for procedural textures, including UV. So depending on the nature of your procedural, you might choose UV over local or global.
Never wont'be simple, every, remark, every unbiased rendering it needs to be tweaked for perfection, neither LuxRender nor Reality does a perfect translation of another set of parameters.
LuxRender is the most friendly unbiased render I know, to DazStudio, if you are not comformtable with the pre-process of tweak shaders, surfaces and textures, and time and patience for this kind of external render engines, believe me, maybe this is not for you.
Lux,Vray,Maxwell, Keyshot,Kerkythea,Modo...ALL of this GREAT render engines need a preparation of OBJ scenes when exported from Daz, All of them.
my 2 cents, and my experience with the render engines listed above, and the results of them in my dA gallery can prove you that. =)
I think there has been some progress in my understanding since I posted that comment. Some way to go yet but I'm getting there. I am sure you are very skilled but please don't talk down to me.
Well, in the case of Lux, it supports multiple coordinate mapping modes for procedural textures, including UV. So depending on the nature of your procedural, you might choose UV over local or global.
Indeed. I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding about whether procedural textures would distort. It's true you can set them up so they don't, but the ones that follow the object's surface, like most cloth shaders, will distort just like texture-based ones.
It would be fun if there were a way to have a shader recognize the model's starting point and subsequent distortion, and adjust the mapping to take it into account, but I can't think of a way to actually do that; it's no longer just a surface problem.
I think there has been some progress in my understanding since I posted that comment. Some way to go yet but I'm getting there. I am sure you are very skilled but please don't talk down to me.
Zilver's incredibly friendly, believe me; he's just trying to point out you generally won't be able to get optimal results without adjusting surfaces. It's true even for 3Delight renders in DS.
Have you by any chance tried Luxus? The material settings there are much easier to tweak than in Reality [though there aren't so many predone settings], plus you can easily see which are part of which character, as it uses the same materials panel as DS. It'll only show materials for the selected item(s), and you can tweak as many at the same time as you like, easily.
I can't recall for certain whether you can tweak multiple materials at once in Reality, but I think it was possible using Shift/Ctrl-click or something or the sort.
not my intention, and nope, I'm not skilled, just trying to warning about how external engines work, sorry if you got the wrong way of my words.
not my intention, and nope, I'm not skilled, just trying to warning about how external engines work, sorry if you got the wrong way of my words.
Point one: I think you are skilled, I've seen and admired your work and it shows considerable talent.
Second point: I should have allowed for the fact that English may not be your first language. It was late for me and I responded just before going to bed.
On to the subject at hand though. I am being patient. I am reading all that I can on Luxrender and Reality and experimenting when I get chance. We have a long weekend for the Easter holiday now so I hope to get more time to play. I like to understand something of the mechanics of the process so that I know why I'm adjusting certain parameters. Shaders have been a particularly hard concept for me to grasp but, thanks to the excellent advice on this forum, I'm starting to get it now.
As for Luxus, I have it and have attempted to use it. I probably need to give it a lot more time but so far I am not so impressed with the results as I am with what I can get from Reality. In fact, of all the renders I have seen posted here and elsewhere, I think Luxus doesn't match Reality for quality though I'm not sure of the reason for that because they both use the Luxrender engine.
I admit that I did lose patience with Luxus when I tried to light interior scenes and was only able to get completely black renders. I asked the question (as did other people) but have not seen any advice on how to overcome that.
I know a lot of the reason for preference is familiarity and that may be the reason I returned to Reality. I don't like the way all the controls for Luxus are mixed in with the DAZ Studio panels. I would rather have the separate panel but, from what I understand, perhaps the next version of Reality will also integrate the controls with the DS panels? There are people here who love working in Carrara. I paid for it but it sits there hardly used because I loathe it. As I say - personal preference.
One thing I do like about Luxus is the ability to enter Luxrender script directly via a text input window (sorry for my amateur attempt at describing that, I'm sure you will know what I mean). I have not found the equivalent in Reality but I guess the .lxs files are there to edit if one knows what to change. For example, I'd like to try Hybrid mode when I figure out how to enable it.