Resolved--Sorry, but I need lots of DS advice...
Ryuu@AMcCF
Posts: 703
I'm trying to render a scene involving a character suspended in semi-transparent/translucent crystal (& there's a skydome involved), but I'm running into a number of problems.
First, I'm having a very hard time getting IRAY to render in any managable way.
No matter what my settings on the crystal, IRAY always renders it as completely opaque.
Without a skydome, my IRAY the sky renders as an alpha channel. With a skydome, it renders as if inclosed in a steel bowl (even with an IRAY skydome) as the existing lights lie outside the dome.
Which leave me no option but to try putting in lights manually, but that doesn't work well for me, either.
Even going back to Basic OpenGL or other render engines is a no-joy, too.
I was able to adjust the transparancy of the crystals in Basic OpenGL--but the crystals are rendering with an alphachannel.
Intermediate OpenGL just crashes the program each and every time.
3Delight just hangs for hours when the program reaches 99% of creating shadowmap of Light 1.
Can anyone advise me what I'm doing wrong??
Thanks in advance.
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Comments
Ok, first off - pick a render engine: 3Delight or Iray and (for this, at least) stick with it, as that will affect what shaders and lights, etc., you should use.
For Iray pick a suitable HDRI, for 3Delight a skydomw (often they load with supporting lights). For Iray you may not need a ground plane as the HDRI can supply one, though you may want to do somethign different later. Once you have th elighting sorted out, at least to a degree, then explore teh options for th gem, ensuring you use materials or shaders appropriate for the render engine you're using.
I've been trying to get the IRAY to work for me since so much of the newer products are using that. It's been a hit&miss with it, but mostly misses. I've tried several skydomes, including some that are supposed to be IRAY (which is what I've shown in my post above, and none of them have worked. In fact, the IRAY dome shown rendered beautifully in the Basic OpenGL. I only tried the other render engines because I've had so little joy with IRAY so far.
My biggest frustration has been trying to get the crystals to render correctly, but nothing I'm able to set the materials for seems to work. 3Delight is just not working at all--which is really frustrating in that before IRAY, I was having success on my projects. But no more. As I said, it's just hanging there on Shadow Map for Light #1.
As it sits right now, Basic OpenGL is the only one coming close to working, except for the annoying alpha channel rendering in the crystals.
Skydomes are for 3DL, with IRay you're supposed to use HDRIs, by your screenshots I can see you tried to use a skydome with 3DL surface in IRay. As you said yourself, the dome will block the light, resulting in a black render. There are ways to do it but requires some work. If you render in 3DL, forget the shadowmaps, they are truly a thing of the past! Select your light, go to parameters/light/shadow type and change it to ray traced shadows. Look better and render faster.
Thanks. Unfortunately when I tried what you suggested, I still got a hung 3Delight render attempt.
Ok I know very little about IRay, since I render in 3DL. My guess on the 3DL issue is:
a) Your rendersettings are way too heavy
b) There's a problem with the shader being used on the gem
c) There's a problem with the lighting being used in your scene
If you could share some info on those points, someone might get an idea about what's going on;)
If there's a figure inside the gem, being fairly complex, and there's refraction/reflection etc involved, this will make for some long rendering times, no matter what engine you use.
ETA: Did you try progressive rendering (render settings pane)? That should speed up the process in this case.
Thanks for taking the time to advise me.
The items in the scene are:
TCLP Cluster2 www.daz3d.com/crystal-dragon-lair
R.A.P.T.O.R. www.daz3d.com/r-a-p-t-o-r
Arcadia Wing www.daz3d.com/arcadia-wings
Rolling Hills www.daz3d.com/incantoo-rolling-hills
IRAY SkyDome www.daz3d.com/the-pit
The lights being used are just from one of the standard lighting options that come with DAZ Studio. As you suggested, I changed their shadow type to Raytrace.
The Raptor Robot and Arcadia Wings are both inside the crystal.
I never tried to be crazy with my renders, so I've always left things as default settings in all my engines. What I did tweak on was the material settings of the crystals--I initially used the preset Amethyst material and mostly adjusted just the color, opacity, reflection, index of refraction, to my liking in the viewer, and when I was satisfied, I would hit the render button.
Hopefully, you might see where I'm doing something wrong from my screenshots below:
Oh, and I'm not sure where to find the progessive rendering you mentioned. There's nothing like that I can see on the Rendering Pane. Nevermind, found it.
Here are my settings on the 3Delight & IRAY:
You have to go into the editor in the render settings pane. There is a button for progressive mode. There also are settings for ray trace depth under samples. If set too high rendering takes forever. Start with a value of 2, set progressive on (progressive handles reflection rafraction and other raytracing faster) and try again;)
Here are my settings on the 3Delight & IRAY:
Yeah, my settings were already low, but I did find that Shadow Samples was at 10--moved to down to 2.
I also noticed that "casting shadows" is an option for the Skydome when the render engine is selected for 3Delight, but not there for IRAY (this is on the Parameters tab for the items in the scene). This is set to Off right now. When I tried in IRAY, still rendered a black scene. Currently waiting on 3Delight. But 8minutes into rendering, still nothing showing up. :/
12+ minutes and still nothing. Still have to use Task Manager to shut DAZ down when using 3Delight.
Okay, a lot of overnight success on the IRAY front!
I cheated like hell by turning the Skydome into something of a cyclorama by inverting its Z-scale to a -3% and moving it well behind the landscape
As for the crystal settings, I finally found the problem was caused by the Index of Refraction value being above 1, so now it's working pretty much as I need--although what I was wanting was to see items inside and behind the crystal to be visualized as though real cyrstals. But I guess that's too much to expect from the program....
As for the 3Delight engine, even getting rid of the skydome altogether still isn't showing any progress after 30+minutes, so it's likely still a matter of too much going on with the crystals for it to handle.
Thanks for all your help, Sven!
Glad you found a workaround;) Still, I think you need to set index of refraction to a value of 1.3 - 1.8 to get a nice effect, both in Iray and 3DL. Otherwise your crystal will look rather flat. Happy rendering
And btw, cheating is allowed and even highly recommended
Thanks! I'll give those values a shot when I can get a chance to play with it again, although I suspect I'll need to really dial back the Opacity setting. Reflection is already as low as I can reasonably make it. Here's to hoping something works
Well, unfortunately, those Index of Refraction settings didn't work for either IRAY or 3Delight. Still the same issues as from my original post.
Here, you can see the settings:
and here you can see the render in progress for IRAY:
And as I said about 3Delight, it still just hangs for hours
I don't own that particular crystal product, but I see a couple things that look "wrong"
Try this:
Is that looking closer to what you want, or is it still really bad?
Are you sure you don't have any IRAY shaders in the 3DL scene ? trying to render with an IRAY shader in 3DL can cause it to take pretty much forever to render.
Sorry about not getting on this sooner. That's quite a bit closer to what I'm looking for. THANKS!
And your comment about the colors made me rethink some of what I was doing. Tweaking several of the other color settings really helped pull out the surfaces more in the scene.
Still the same issues with the IRAY SkyDome, however.
I wasn't aware of any, but that's a possibility. Related to that, I did have "normal" materials in those IRAY renders, including the SkyDome. When I went back to The Pit, I made sure to selecte the IRAY dome from there, but it's still not working even in the IRAY render. I'll be sure to go through and look for all the props and figures and make sure they're in their proper separate .duf files, one for 3Delight and one for IRAY. Hopefully, that will help.
It looks like you have loaded a skydome object/prop in your scene. In an Iray render, that skydome prop will completely block the lights outside the dome. You noticed and mentioned that in your first message. The first thing to do for your Iray render is delete that skydome prop from the scene to let your lights through.
Skydomes for Iray are loaded as HDRI images in the Render Settings pane, not as props in the scene. It is a whole new way of working, so it takes some getting used to. The HDRI image loaded in the Render Settings provides lighting for your scene as well as a background (background will show in the render if you turn on show dome in the Render Settings). The HDRI background will not show in the normal viewport prieview, but it will show if you use Iray viewport preview (which can be slow). Note that the HDRI file you load in Render Settings must be a true HDRI image to get proper lighting information from it, not an 8 bit JPEG image.
An alternate way to get a background sky to show in your render is to load an image in the Environment pane. That provides a background but no lighting. You can use an 8 bit JPEG file (perhaps a photograph that you have taken).
Oh, wow! That fixed the IRAY dome issue!! Tremendous thanks, Barbult! And a great many thanks to everyone else who responded.