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Only with the best part of the kit - the pathtraced area lights.
Have you tried my recipe for the aweStarter scene?
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4005391/#Comment_4005391
Unlike AoA, aweSurface does not carry the legacy of shader mixer bugs that eat render time, if anything. Learning to customise aweSurface will save you a lot of time in the end.
Please don't.
Standard Example is just that, an example for developers; it's pretty much useless for any production work.
The Point cloud script invokes totally different algorithms, so if you don't know how to actually make use of point clouds, you won't gain anything useful from them.
Moreover, point clouds are pretty much obsolete technology; path-traced GI with diffuse ray caching (the latter only available via the scripts coming with the aweSurface) and raytraced SSS are faster to set up and at least as fast, or faster, to render.
Ah okay, thanks anyway. I'll need to keep on looking =D
Like which sort of procedural shaders?
Well... marble, rock, grass, fractal patterns... to name a few;)
Ok thanks a lot ! This workaround work just fine for me !!
My coding skills. :D
Quite possible. Disney/Pixar tends relies heavily on procedural shaders without having to rely on UVs.
Here's a very nice video exploring what you can do with procedural bitmaps in OSL. Much of it can actually be quickly ported to RSL (Renderman Shading Language).
With DS, the major issue is that you need access to source code and a good understanding of RSL to do it in Shader Builder. It's possible to do it in Shader Mixer, but Shader Mixer has lots of restrictions and lack support support for newer 3delight features/shadeops. Technically, it should be possible to import Shader Builder code into Shader Mixer, but I've never been successful doing it. If anyone have done it or did it, please let me know how to do it properly.
An alternative would be to build the procedural shader in Shader Mixer/Builder, then bake the result into textures. Load that into the final shader of choice. A third option, I could bolt that to AWE Surface, but that makes the shader bigger than it already is and it will not be as flexible since the parameter will always be fixed (you can't add/remove stuff).
Ok tks wowie! Good to know it's possible;)
Look, I love your stuff and I have the deepest respect for your skills and ambition, this is the best thing that has happened to me for a loooong time, believe me! And I know you're working on an update. I just have to let out some internal pressure LOL. There is a serious glitch somewhere. It may be DS, it may be your shaders, I don't know. I've been learning this stuff now for a couple of weeks and it's been pleasure and pain. When it works it's beautiful. Everytime I set up a scene I spend hours and even days trying to get things that are supposed to work ..well to work. You have been very supportive and given me lots of good advice and I very much appreciate that! You've seen some examples I have posted. Here is yet another one. I've spent 20h now to work on this, starting with converting every surface, doing testrenders, finding camera angles and so on. It's a spaceship model with complete interior (Vanguard). I did this draft render of the interior and was very happy with it.
So I added my characters, did the posing/positioning and testrendered, basically it looked good but I wanted to add a fill light, so I loaded an emissive plane to make a rim. Nada! Tried the Omnifreaker light disc with your arealight shader. Nada! Created a primitive plane and applied the area light shader. It decided to cast light only on the characters, nothing else whatever I did. The light panels in the interior render work. I took two screenshots of the setup, one with the emitter right next to the characters, the other with the emitter on the outside. Makes no difference.
I could possibly get it to work if I applied the DS vanilla shader to everything in the scene, then apply the awe base shader to everything and make all adjustment one more time. That's how I've got around to make things work. There are hundereds of material zones and I'm very very tired. So I will take a break and do something else, sleep, walk the dog
Sorry if I sound a bit harsh but I just had to say this. I just want to know what the ... is going on here. Is it me, is it my Mac, DS, something else? Ok rant over, and over and out
Sven
Update: I just had to try, added a standard DS spot and it worked, so I'll use that one for now, just wanted you to know;) Goodnight!
I've debated doing some procedural shaders for 3DL, but I'm always a bit overwhelmed with figuring out which stuff in 3DL to make it compatible with. (or even HOW to make it compatible with stuff)
Well, you would need to code a full surface shader anyway; why bother with compatibility? ;D
Jokes aside, this is only the first in a line of problems. Wowie explained this one already.
And then there is antialiasing that _all_ textures, mapped or procedural, require in each and every renderer out there, real-time or offline.
With maps, most texture-reading operators have antialiasing hard-coded into them by the renderer developers.
With procedural texturing, you're always on your own. Which is a mathematically challenging issue.
What the hell is antialiasing in terms of textures, some may ask... Here's some reading material on this, there's no way I'd be able to explain it better than Mr Gritz: http://hradec.com/ebooks/CGI/RPS_13.5/prman_technical_rendering/AppNotes/appnote.25.html
So yeah, in theory procedural shading is awesome. When you have someone else implementing the code =)
I know you can do it, go man, GO!
So after a good night's sleep I had another go at the Vanguard. Saved as a materials preset, applied the DS default shader, applied my preset, made no difference. Again applied the DS default and applied the awe base shader, here is the result... the black square is teh awe emitter plane 1, intensity scale cranked up all the way...
I also tried to enable the "use face forward" for all surfaces, no cigar:(
Ok I finally might be onto something, but I cannot explain what's happening.
Deleted the plane tested with a primitive sphere, didn't work. Tried with the Omnifreaker light disc again with the awe area shader, didn't work. DELETED the Vanguard, loaded the original set from the poser library, applied my mat preset and BAM:
I thought wow nice and moved the disc to the edge of the HDRI and made necessary adjustments to light intensity... and it stopped working. So I deleted Vanguard again and moved the disc just next to the characters floating in space and it wouldn't light them. So I applied the DS def shader to the disc and re applied the area shader, started working. Moved the disc to the edge of the known universe and made adjustments and it worked on the characters. Reloaded the original poser Vanguard, applied my mat preset:
So obviously nothing wrong with your shaders, wowie, and I knew it all the time. It must be a DS .duf sort of issue, if I may be so bald to take a guess. Well this is what I have so far, testing continues...
Sven
... and a render...
Don't worry. I'd love to find out what's going on also, but I simply can't reproduce some of the stuff in DS 4.7. I'm guessing it's mostly DS bugs. Maybe I could email you with a list of props/scenes I have and if you don't mind testing, we could really sort what's going on and file a bug report. Even if it's not something inherent with any of my shaders.
Sweet! I'd be more than happy to do what I can to sort it out! Hope we can make ends meet:)
Already sent you a PM with a list of things I have.
I've also looked at your recent render with the room and I think I have a better grasp of what's happening with that particular model.
Thank you! I'll look into it;)
Hi,
II used a AOA ambient to "bypass" dark shaders renders. Is there a better workaround ?
regards
Yup, select the black area with the surface selection tool, go to the surface pane and scroll down till you see the "use face forward". Enable it for the problematic dark spots. It forces normals to always face the camera.
More on this in here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/284366/the-official-awesurface-test-track/p4
Or - if you mean not 100% black spots but just dark scenes overall - the aweEnvironment light has global exposure controls.
Hmm, maybe use a plane with camera visibility off to get more 'bounce' fill? Here's a very nice tutorial about lighting a scene.
It's for a different renderer, but the workflow should be similar.
ok thanks a lot, i will try this one !
ahem, i was wrong, it is not a AWE surface problem but using other shader (EX AOA grass) with AWE scripted renderer options
Strange but still going to ask. What if I were to release settings based on AWE shaders for a character but the end user didn't have AWE installed? Would the 3Delight engine just ignore what wasn't there or would it error out??
It would render but it would look all white or black, since DS substitutes a very basic shader for those it cannot find.
Since the base aweSurface is free, you could just provide a link in your documentation.
Oh yea, DUH... I keep forgetting! LOL Thanks for the reminder! I'm such a numb skull sometimes!
Moving forward. Thanks for all the tips and info Mustakettu85 Very useful. i did need more Diffuse strength than you suggested. My maps look like zombie maps when the Diffuse strength is set to the AWE default or your suggested 60% so I have mine set to 85% to bring some flush back into the skin. The inner mouth was pretty easy to fix with some messing with the Diffuse strength and the Diffuse color channels (same with the Eye Socket / Lacrimials) The eyes on the other hand look pretty bad. Not sure what to do to get reflections going again since this set up has SO MANY options compared to other 3Delight setups do. .... Suggestions?? Also, what would I do to get some of the gloss off of the skin, it's a bit too shiny for my tastes. Looks like he just got out of the shower. I am using the dome that Wowie included with the DAZ Default HDR plugged into it.
I do like the quality of the skin as it's rendering but it's a bit slower than my other 3DL setup that I'm developing for a character I'm getting ready for market...
I set diffuse strength to about 60-65%, leave SSS strength at 100% and adjust the SSS scale and phase (and maybe absorbation) to get the desired result. Try lowering spec2 strength or set spec2 color to a light grey, also for a more "weathered" look try decreasign spec2 roughness a bit. You can try enabling spec 1 reflections for the eyes and experiment with roughness and so on. Also if that doesn't give you enough environmental reflections try enabling the base thin coat and increase thin coat thickness or whatever it is called;) Also experiment with the environment exposure! Aand, check cornea bulge morph, try dialing in a fair bit, can help with reflections.
Be aware that if you use displacement I've found it's not properly calibrated (sorry wowie). If you set the min value to -1 and the max value to -0.59, then adjust strength, you'll get pretty nice results.
More findings and discussions in here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/284366/the-official-awesurface-test-track/p1
Thanks for the tips. The eyes are not improving with that bit of info sadly! I've even tried to raise up the thin coat thickness to no avail.
Also I find it interesting that the environment sphere with the light emitter applied to it is NOT showing in renders, even with the front/back option enabled. Also tends to wash out the figure to white unless I lower the Spread angle down to something like 17%. The Gamma is set to 1 but I thought we were all using 2.0 these days or something like that!
Wait... you should be using the awe environmental shader on the env. sphere! Load the awe starter scene, save the awe environment as a subset, it has a light node included with many adjustment options. You can save the shader as a preset and apply it to stuff like light bulbs and neon signs too!