AWE Shading Kit for DAZ Studio and 3delight

Sven Dullah

Testscene 2

Mollytabby

Oh wow, @Sven Dullah, I've really got to master this. Those renders are brilliant!

Artini

Those look wonderful, Sven. Great work.

 

wowie

Artini said:

It was on the render.

Ah, so if I understand correctly, it was visible in the 'vanilla' render, but not with the render script? Interesting.

Mollytabby said:

At the moment my model's hair looks like cassette tape, lol. 

I've been playing with an alternate solution for hair. It does vary from hair to hair though, depending on the values used in the opacity mask. Try these values

Opacity Filter 1 50%, Opacity Filter 72.5% and set Opacity Optimization to 100%.

Just remember that most hair needs Use Face Forward to be enabled, even though you have Translucency Strength at 100%.

Mollytabby

Thank you @wowie l’ll try your suggested settings shortly. This is all new to me but I do love learning 

Artini

In documentation there was some links related to Unity.

Does it mean, that I can use Unity materials in Daz Studio. That will be awesome.

 

artistb3

Before spending money and, more importantly, precious time on another new 3DL approach, I would need to see a several test renders, preferably comparable with, say, 3DL uber/DAZ lighting and Iray/DAZ lighting.  Understood that the shaders/IBL/etc. will be different but I would imagine there must have been some testing done to determine how this solution stacks up.  I have a lot 3DL scenes in the convert-to-Iray queue and there is always an interest in a solution that shaves time off renders but it has to be capable of providing a quality render with a reduced overall time investment.

wowie

Artini said:

Does it mean, that I can use Unity materials in Daz Studio. That will be awesome.

Unfortunately, no. The Unity links are to their reference chart on albedo values (for diffuse color). But the texture maps can be used. I actually used some publicly available Unity/UnrealEngine texture sets during development.

artistb3 said:

Before spending money and, more importantly, precious time on another new 3DL approach, I would need to see a several test renders, preferably comparable with, say, 3DL uber/DAZ lighting and Iray/DAZ lighting.  Understood that the shaders/IBL/etc. will be different but I would imagine there must have been some testing done to determine how this solution stacks up.  I have a lot 3DL scenes in the convert-to-Iray queue and there is always an interest in a solution that shaves time off renders but it has to be capable of providing a quality render with a reduced overall time investment.

That's what the thread is for. But why not try it for yoursel? The shader is availabe for free in the freebie section. Feel free to share presets or scenes made with it. You can ask question here or on the freebie thread.

On a technical note, I'd say the shader and kit has a very different approach to UE2 and omnifreaker's shaders, or AoA's. It more closely resembles 3delight's own shaders used in 3delight for Maya and 3DSMax.

For example - global illumination. AoA's light only does ambient occlusion. While UE2 can be used for indirect light, it's rather prone to light leaks in certain scenarios. That's not a problem with AWE Surface global illumination. AWE Surface uses the same path tracing framework used by the in-house 3delight team but with added extras. It has no maximum trace distance and relies on Russian roulette to decide when to stop tracing more rays. I'll say this is actually very close to brute force path tracing.

Reflections and refractions use the same framework as well and does not take shortcuts with Fresnel.

Quite surprisingly, there's very little performance penalty with extremely high ray depth - you can raise your specular and diffuse or general ray depth to 32 bounces with a negligible hit of 5% longer render times. The shader just unlocks performance of renderer that was always there, all this time. 3delight has one of the fastest path tracing engines out there. This shader was built to harness that by doing path tracing, on everything, for everything, all the time, everytime.

I don't know about comparison to iray since I actually never used the renderer. Well, that's not true. I did once try rendering a very basic scene with just a HDRI and G2F with this shader and iray in DS 4.10. I have no experience whatsoever in setting up the scene, so I could just very well be not using the 'optimal' settings.

Oso3D

I would love to see someone with a deep familiarity with both Iray and 3DL do some comparisons.

My initial tests seemed to indicate the usual result, that Awe performed about as well as Iray in CPU mode. But that could be off by almost a magnitude, because of my much lesser familiarity with 3DL.

 

sriesch

wowie said:

I'll probably post some in this thread. I do wonder what works best though - a by the numbers tutorial or a video? Some people seem to prefer a how-to tutorial format.

It will differ for differerent people, but I've always found a non-video tutorial/manual hugely easier to refer back to than a video.  I can leave it open to a page, search for text, quickly scan through it to find the section I need or jump back and forth between different pages when referring to things, etc.

Sven Dullah

So now we just need AWE grass- and rockshaders, AWE ghost opacity and AWE Uber/EasyVolume, to name a few

...and of course the AWE Dynamic LensFlares that work with HDRI lighting

Sven Dullah

sriesch said:

wowie said:

I'll probably post some in this thread. I do wonder what works best though - a by the numbers tutorial or a video? Some people seem to prefer a how-to tutorial format.

It will differ for differerent people, but I've always found a non-video tutorial/manual hugely easier to refer back to than a video.  I can leave it open to a page, search for text, quickly scan through it to find the section I need or jump back and forth between different pages when referring to things, etc.

I like text documents better, FWIW;)

artistb3

wowie said:

Artini said:

Does it mean, that I can use Unity materials in Daz Studio. That will be awesome.

Unfortunately, no. The Unity links are to their reference chart on albedo values (for diffuse color). But the texture maps can be used. I actually used some publicly available Unity/UnrealEngine texture sets during development.

artistb3 said:

Before spending money and, more importantly, precious time on another new 3DL approach, I would need to see a several test renders, preferably comparable with, say, 3DL uber/DAZ lighting and Iray/DAZ lighting.  Understood that the shaders/IBL/etc. will be different but I would imagine there must have been some testing done to determine how this solution stacks up.  I have a lot 3DL scenes in the convert-to-Iray queue and there is always an interest in a solution that shaves time off renders but it has to be capable of providing a quality render with a reduced overall time investment.

That's what the thread is for. But why not try it for yoursel? The shader is availabe for free in the freebie section. Feel free to share presets or scenes made with it. You can ask question here or on the freebie thread.

On a technical note, I'd say the shader and kit has a very different approach to UE2 and omnifreaker's shaders, or AoA's. It more closely resembles 3delight's own shaders used in 3delight for Maya and 3DSMax.

For example - global illumination. AoA's light only does ambient occlusion. While UE2 can be used for indirect light, it's rather prone to light leaks in certain scenarios. That's not a problem with AWE Surface global illumination. AWE Surface uses the same path tracing framework used by the in-house 3delight team but with added extras. It has no maximum trace distance and relies on Russian roulette to decide when to stop tracing more rays. I'll say this is actually very close to brute force path tracing.

Reflections and refractions use the same framework as well and does not take shortcuts with Fresnel.

Quite surprisingly, there's very little performance penalty with extremely high ray depth - you can raise your specular and diffuse or general ray depth to 32 bounces with a negligible hit of 5% longer render times. The shader just unlocks performance of renderer that was always there, all this time. 3delight has one of the fastest path tracing engines out there. This shader was built to harness that by doing path tracing, on everything, for everything, all the time, everytime.

I don't know about comparison to iray since I actually never used the renderer. Well, that's not true. I did once try rendering a very basic scene with just a HDRI and G2F with this shader and iray in DS 4.10. I have no experience whatsoever in setting up the scene, so I could just very well be not using the 'optimal' settings.

Please re-read my post.  The fact that shader is free doesn't actually mean that much to me.  If I had more evidence that it was worth the time, I would pay for the product and spend the time to determine what it can do.  It is actually more about the time required in order to experiement with something that I know little about.  If there existed evidence (via images produced from tests) that the renders compare well with Iray, are superior in quality to 3DL-uber, and can save render time, then I would take the plunge and do the testing.  As it stands, I don't yet see evidence that this is the case.

RAMWolff

I love video how to's myself since I'm a visual learner.....

Kevin Sanderson

artistb3 said:

wowie said:

Artini said:

Does it mean, that I can use Unity materials in Daz Studio. That will be awesome.

Unfortunately, no. The Unity links are to their reference chart on albedo values (for diffuse color). But the texture maps can be used. I actually used some publicly available Unity/UnrealEngine texture sets during development.

artistb3 said:

Before spending money and, more importantly, precious time on another new 3DL approach, I would need to see a several test renders, preferably comparable with, say, 3DL uber/DAZ lighting and Iray/DAZ lighting.  Understood that the shaders/IBL/etc. will be different but I would imagine there must have been some testing done to determine how this solution stacks up.  I have a lot 3DL scenes in the convert-to-Iray queue and there is always an interest in a solution that shaves time off renders but it has to be capable of providing a quality render with a reduced overall time investment.

That's what the thread is for. But why not try it for yoursel? The shader is availabe for free in the freebie section. Feel free to share presets or scenes made with it. You can ask question here or on the freebie thread.

On a technical note, I'd say the shader and kit has a very different approach to UE2 and omnifreaker's shaders, or AoA's. It more closely resembles 3delight's own shaders used in 3delight for Maya and 3DSMax.

For example - global illumination. AoA's light only does ambient occlusion. While UE2 can be used for indirect light, it's rather prone to light leaks in certain scenarios. That's not a problem with AWE Surface global illumination. AWE Surface uses the same path tracing framework used by the in-house 3delight team but with added extras. It has no maximum trace distance and relies on Russian roulette to decide when to stop tracing more rays. I'll say this is actually very close to brute force path tracing.

Reflections and refractions use the same framework as well and does not take shortcuts with Fresnel.

Quite surprisingly, there's very little performance penalty with extremely high ray depth - you can raise your specular and diffuse or general ray depth to 32 bounces with a negligible hit of 5% longer render times. The shader just unlocks performance of renderer that was always there, all this time. 3delight has one of the fastest path tracing engines out there. This shader was built to harness that by doing path tracing, on everything, for everything, all the time, everytime.

I don't know about comparison to iray since I actually never used the renderer. Well, that's not true. I did once try rendering a very basic scene with just a HDRI and G2F with this shader and iray in DS 4.10. I have no experience whatsoever in setting up the scene, so I could just very well be not using the 'optimal' settings.

Please re-read my post.  The fact that shader is free doesn't actually mean that much to me.  If I had more evidence that it was worth the time, I would pay for the product and spend the time to determine what it can do.  It is actually more about the time required in order to experiement with something that I know little about.  If there existed evidence (via images produced from tests) that the renders compare well with Iray, are superior in quality to 3DL-uber, and can save render time, then I would take the plunge and do the testing.  As it stands, I don't yet see evidence that this is the case.

You can find proof of performance in this looooong thread. I'm posting a link from page 81 of the thread. There are some images on the pages after to see, but scroll down to see a Stonemason set near the bottom of page 81. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/55128/3delight-laboratory-thread-tips-questions-experiments/p81

wowie

artistb3 said:

Please re-read my post.  The fact that shader is free doesn't actually mean that much to me.  If I had more evidence that it was worth the time, I would pay for the product and spend the time to determine what it can do.  It is actually more about the time required in order to experiement with something that I know little about.  If there existed evidence (via images produced from tests) that the renders compare well with Iray, are superior in quality to 3DL-uber, and can save render time, then I would take the plunge and do the testing.  As it stands, I don't yet see evidence that this is the case.

Personally, I don't think there's more compelling evidence that your own experience. I can provide renders along with information on settings, resolutions and machine specifications, but those can't reproduce the experience of setting the shader up, how difficult/easy it is to make adjustments, how simple/complex converting from DAZ dsDefaultMaterial or any other available shaders.

Based on experience with various product, I found the best way to really know if it works for me is to try it out. I also found it a very good way to avoid cases of cherry picking scenarios that one renderer excels and other ones don't.

Kevin Sanderson said:

You can find proof of performance in this looooong thread. I'm posting a link from page 81 of the thread. There are some images on the pages after to see, but scroll down to see a Stonemason set near the bottom of page 81. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/55128/3delight-laboratory-thread-tips-questions-experiments/p81

Thanks Kevin, but those WIPs are done ages ago and the shader have changed since then.

Mustakettu85

artistb3 said:

  I have a lot 3DL scenes in the convert-to-Iray queue...

What Wowie says: it's your conversion. Only you can determine if it's easy for you to work with or not. I'd say, get the commercial version - it has click-on presets. Test them in your production environment. If you find it doesn't specifically help _you_ - DAZ has this return policy you can make use of.

ArkadySkies

Glad to see the 3DL support and it looks awesome (really, REALLY awesome) but... What happened to your other products? They're gone. I can sort of understand if you mean for this to completely replace Lumina Library, but Beautiful Bends was you right? Even that's gone.

wowie

ArkadySkies said:

Glad to see the 3DL support and it looks awesome (really, REALLY awesome) but... What happened to your other products? They're gone. I can sort of understand if you mean for this to completely replace Lumina Library, but Beautiful Bends was you right? Even that's gone.

Oh, they probably just haven't reverted those products yet. You can always PM me about those. I've actually been working on them (at least the ones for Genesis 2) from time to time. Mainly because I hate the rigging structure of Genesis 3 and 8 (one bone for bending, another for twisting). If you need them, PM me and we'll work out a solution.

Oso3D

I just ignore the two bones and do whichever I land on. I don't think it actually matters.

 

RAMWolff

Actually one of the bones that is doubled up like that has one bone that seems to have most of the rotations and then the other only has like twist I think.  It IS quite annoying I must say!

Oso3D

Any tips on how to set up stained glass?

I converted a glass plane, set color in the transmission... and bupkis. The emission plane's light just seems to stop dead at the glass.

 

Mollytabby

Firstly, for anyone reading this post, please don't judge the product by the quality of my renders. I'm total 3Delight newbie and have very little idea about what I'm doinig 

@wowie, I'm having a lot of fun learning how to use this product and I'm gradually picking up a smattering of understand of some elements. I dove straight in and started with working with figures, which probably isn't a good idea due the complexity of the surfaces on human beings!

I have some quick questions because I've come to a halt with regards to the eyes.

1. Am I right in assuming that when I select my G3F figure and click the Awe Genesis 3 Script it converts the whole figure, including the eyes, and not just the skin?

2. I'm having trouble with the Lacrimals of the eyes (see the attached images). They are rendering very red and I'm struggling to work out what to do with them. Do you have any tips?

When I select the area, it selects "Eye Socket" on the figure (which in this case is G3F Pepper). I thought clicking on the script Awe Eye Lacrimals this might do something but I didn't see any visual difference. I tried the script Awe Eye Tear but this made them disappear entirely!

Any advice greatly appreciated! 

 

wowie

Mollytabby said:

1. Am I right in assuming that when I select my G3F figure and click the Awe Genesis 3 Script it converts the whole figure, including the eyes, and not just the skin?

Yes. The Genesis 3 MAT is actually the same as the Genesis 8 MAT. It converts all available surfaces on the figure.

Mollytabby said:

2. I'm having trouble with the Lacrimals of the eyes (see the attached images). They are rendering very red and I'm struggling to work out what to do with them. Do you have any tips?

The lacrimals, gums, inner mouth and tongue actually use the same settings - the generic 'Mouth' shader preset. The reason they're rendering very red is most likely because of the diffuse color were converted to a saturated red (255,128,128) during conversion. The subsurface color is set to an even more saturated red (255, 63,63). If your albedo/diffuse color are already very saturated, you probably just need to revert both colors to white.

Oso3D said:

Any tips on how to set up stained glass?

I converted a glass plane, set color in the transmission... and bupkis. The emission plane's light just seems to stop dead at the glass.

Are you trying to color the glass or have the glass shadow have color? Using transmission color should work for coloring the glass, but for the glass shadow this works for me. Have Transmission Shadow more than zero and Transmission Scale somewhat higher so the glass is more saturated.

I'm using the base glass preset, with transmission color (255,0,0), Transmission Scale/Absorption 20, Transmission Shadow 100%. Adjust the scale and Transmission Shadow as needed. You can plug a texture inside the Transmission Color if you want to.

Use Face Forward if you want to have colored glass on both sides of the plane.

Mollytabby

Thank you @wowie I’ll take a look at that.

Mustakettu85

What I keep telling everyone is that if you want to feel like you're an artist, you should always mess with presets to make them reflect your own style.

So, let's try and customise the G2F preset found in the starter scene.

I am using a DoF camera, so that 3Delight takes surface relief into account very minutely when breaking up highlights. It makes the quality of relief maps paramount - every clumsy brush stroke will be very very evident (I'm looking at you, o the alternative-female-figure-that-can't-be-named-but-has-great-shoulders...). Overdoing the bump will create rather harsh-looking patches, similar to sandpaper.

What I want is skin that has a bit of "lived-in" oiliness and a non-high-summer skin tone. =)))

Edit: here is the result I prefer, GGX and all.

I use the "templates" for quickly selecting the skin I want to adjust. It's the first three templates in Genesis2. Yes that includes nails. I find they look okay this way. If something extra is required, these two surfaces can be adjusted later (more shine etc).

Lacrimals with Bree maps don't need that default extra red in the diffuse and SSS swatches, so I dial it down.

Light adjustment: only the emitter - intensity 4, exposure 1.

So, here are the skin-specific steps.

1. Kill those Bree "subsurface maps". I've always hated them. They're good for simulating skin disorders, and that's all =)

2. Step 1 in combating sunburn:
Reduce red channel in the diffuse colour swatch down to 230 (makes for a light cyan colour).

3. Step 2 in combating sunburn:
Change scatter colour to RGB(118, 28, 0) and strength to 2

4. Step 3 in combating sunburn:
Dial down absorption strength to 0.05

5. Rebalance diffuse and SSS (it's a pretty non-linear equation that combines them into the final result, so this will always need tweaking):

Diffuse: 60% strength, 56% roughness
SSS: 80% strength, 0.5 phase

6. Kill all specular maps. Switch specular to GGX (which right now means switching to Cook-Torrance, I think, but this will be fixed soon...).

7. Set specular2 roughness to 27%. Insert this roughness map into the roughness slot for template 1 (Face and Lips) - it's attached last.

I painted this map in two minutes using Paint.NET. Basically it halves the roughness for cheeks, lips and T-zone. Get inspired and paint your own for any figure out there.

8. Up the bump (+- 0.015, strength 100%) - will require tweaking for every map. Some bump maps will be just pretty much unusable (like, if there are JPEG compression artefacts, chances are you will see them vividly). Some maps will have problems around the head UV seam area - where most characters will have hair, but whenever you have a 100% bald one, the seam be visible and may require editing the map (the resolution mismatch between the head front on the face map and the back of the head on the torso map will make it worse).

I also added some highlight to the irises and enabled my "IrisOrganic" morphs - to do the Pixar trick and simulate a bit of caustics.

Sclera has also undergone some messing with - some SSS got added (marble with scatter strength dialled down to 2, and then diffuse and SSS were rebalanced).

Here are the renders; the real GGX takes 5 mins on my specs, and IMO looks more believable. Cook-Torrance takes 4 mins.

And there's also my camera preset, in case anyone wants to try DoF.

The final render is the one with DoF turned off, only for comparison. It's GGX, and renders 30 seconds faster than with DoF, but IMO it doesn't look as good as the "real deal". The highlights don't interact with the relief that well. I pretty much never render without DoF.

khorneV2

Hello all,

I see that using the script render for exporting RIB files (and using the standalone renderer)

 crashes often and doesn't work until Studio is restarted.

Is there a special workaround for this kind of use or is it an issue ?

 

wowie

khorneV2 said:

Hello all,

I see that using the script render for exporting RIB files (and using the standalone renderer)

 crashes often and doesn't work until Studio is restarted.

Is there a special workaround for this kind of use or is it an issue ?

If I remember correctly, the RIB Export doesn't do proper referencing to .obj and .sdl used by DAZ Studio. So if you want to render with the standalone, you need to keep DS running, until you've started rendering in the standalone. Afterwards, as long as 3delight i-display is open, you can still re-render the scene over and over again.

It is an issue, but the script wouldn't be necessary if DAZ add the renderer options the script exposes. Honestly, I would be much happier if DAZ did so, then people can fiddle with the settings in the 'standard' 3delight renderer settings.

Unless, I'm completely off the mark and there's a bug with newer DS builds. I never experienced any crashes with 4.7.

Mustakettu85

khorneV2 said:

Hello all,

I see that using the script render for exporting RIB files (and using the standalone renderer)

 crashes often and doesn't work until Studio is restarted.

Is there a special workaround for this kind of use or is it an issue ?

If you mean that once you export the RIB via scripted rendering, DS won't export another one or go back to rendering to window, that's a DS bug. As any bugs related to the DS/3Delight integration, it's unlikely to be fixed in the near future.

So yeah, it basically requires reloading DS after you export.

If you want to have that folder with .sdl and .tdl files and correct references in the RIB, you need to run ribdepends on the RIB while DS has your scene opened.

I'm on Windows, and there you can use the command line or just make a shortcut with a path like this:

"C:\Program Files\3Delight\bin\ribdepends.exe" -package "C:\Users\Forever\Documents\!_3D models\!_RSL RIB\cast" "C:\Users\Forever\Documents\!_3D models\!_RSL RIB\dawndusksense1.rib"

So the first part is your path to ribdepends, then after the -package param the first option is the folder where you want to have the files copied (you _have_to_ create it beforehand), and the second option is the path to your RIB.

Other OS should have different path syntax, but similar command line mechanisms.

khorneV2

thanks, too bad as the shading kit is fantastic and very flexible/"open source".

Great results !

Thanks Kettu & Wowie for the quick answers and for the Fix, i'll will try that