Are there 3Delight texturing courses/tutorials?
DigitalSteam
Posts: 299
Are there 3Delight texturing courses/tutorials? Free or for sale... Do you have a favorite, or one you'd endorse?
I was gone for a long time... I bought a mess of stuff for Poser in 2003 & 2004, then work ate my life and I didn't really have time to do anything in 3D (but I'd still buy stuff every few years, thinking "If I spend money on it, I'll have to make time for it, right?") then in... 2018, I finally start getting enough time that I can at least open DS and start learning it, instead of Poser, and everything is Iray, Iray, Iray, so I don't really pay much attention to 3Delight... But now I'm wondering if maybe I should?
It seems I see a lot of posts about people wanting more 3Delight textures & support, but also a lot of posts about how PAs will tell you there just aren't enough sales to justify putting the work in, so I'm not sure I should spend time on it at all, but then... Should I?
I mean, when I Google 3Delight it doesn't seem like it's a dead proposition... Other threads I've scanned while trying to find answers on this so I didn't have to ask a dumb question and look like a doofus say it's more the way DS handles 3Delight... So, is that an argument in favor of learning it, if you think there's any chance you'll be exporting and rendering in something else?
I've fried my brain trying to find answers without bugging anyone. I've accepted defeat. I'm asking... Sorry. :)
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Texturing hasn't really got much to do with the render engine used, its the shader and its settings that alter appreances in either Iray or 3dl.
If you mean setting up surfaces and adjusting shadersettings, not sure, best way is to dig in, and ask stupid questions on the forums:)
Maybe you should! Depends on your goal, your hardware, artistic desires and many other things.
Well...as you said it's all IRay now. If you are a "click and render" user you'd better use IRay. 3DL users now need to learn how to best convert everything, need to know what shaders to use, and in many cases need to find workarounds for IRay custom shaders that won't convert. On the other hand, you also need to learn the IRay Uber if you want the best results with IRay.
3Delight is very much alive. Only DS support is slowly fading, even the DS originals now are optimized for IRay. On the other hand, users such as Mustakettu85 and wowie has done what DAZ wouldn't do, and made 3DL pathtracing available to end users. That means you can do scripted pathtracing similar to IRay on the CPU. If you want to loolk into that, search the store for awe Shading kit. Personally I love using a biased renderer like 3DL, it opens up so many possibilities, you can go for realism or toon and everything inbetween:)
Yeah, now I've fried my brain trying to come up with something clever to say=) If you want to look into 3Delight there are a number of dedicated threads, and dedicated users too:)
Well, there's one problem made evident - since I'm an artist and not a programmer, and my knowledge on some of this stuff is almost 25 years old (and more the latter than the former, I assume), I'm not 100% sure of what the differences are between "textures", "materials", "surfaces", "shaders", and... it seems like there are others, and when to correctly use each term. When I was doing a lot of this, and in the crowds I was doing it, we pretty much used to always say "textures" (or "maps" or even "UVs" - which is more correctly just the layout of the images used, right?) for any image-based (as opposed to what I guess were early procedurally based, like "red plastic" in Ray Dream Designer, or Bryce stuff) ...wrappings... for a model.
So... I can get into Photoshop and/or Substance and/or Materialize and make good diffuse, normal, height, edge, ao, etc. maps, but then, evidently, I can refer to them all wrong and not actually ask what I'm hoping to ask. :(
So. I'll go Google articles on the correct terminology and the difference between them. (And if anyone knows a really, really good one, offhand, feel free to share it?)
aweShading Kit looked up and wishlisted, thank you - but, primarily, what I'm interested in is _creating_ (materials? shaders? textures?) for 3Delight users, and understanding them well enough to know when I want to give the NVIDIA card a rest and use them instead.
When I did my last work machine upgrade, I configured it specifically with the plan of transitioning from almost exclusively 2D work to doing much more video editing, After Effects & motion graphics, and 3D - specifically DAZ, Blender, and TBD - ZBrush, it looks like. The primary plot points on that part of the current business plan are PA work for DAZ Studio, and publishing non-linear and VR/Viz content in Unreal Engine. I've sought out and bookmarked or purchased a lot of training materials, and started blocking out time to go through them, but so far, searches for stuff for 3Delight aren't bearing fruit.
Actually - I was just going to say "I've sifted through the results of so many forum searches and not found what I'm looking for..." but then it suddenly occurred to me... I bet I'm not finding what I'm looking for because I'm not using the right technical terminology. >.<
So, I'll go learn that, then search again. Thank you. :)
Meanwhile, if anyone does know of or have any favorites, I'm happy to hear about them. :)
A “surface” is simply a zone defined on a mesh.
A “shader”, like uberSurface for 3DL or Iray uber shader, is basically code telling the render engine how each point on one surface will behave, and in our case it’s use especially to determine how it will react to light. It will use various settings as inputs to compute the results, which can be numbers, true/false flags to activate something or not, use 2D maps to control the effects... (like for example an opacity map to make part of the surface semi-transparent). “Textures” refers to those maps, often to the one used for the “diffuse color” setting.
A ”material” refers to the shader and corresponding settings used on one surface or “material zone”.
A “material preset” will apply materials to one or more surfaces of the selected object. Those surfaces will be identified by their name, if there’s no surface with that name it won’t do anything.
A “shader preset” can apply one material to any surface, it doesn’t care what its name is. For example you can have a “gold” shader preset that you may want to use on any metallic object. You use it by selecting the object and surfaces you want to apply the material to.
One of the sources I found in trying to standardize my uses of these terms - a textbook, at that - had a table where it listed different types of "shaders" - and the explanation of one of them was "Specular textures make an object look shiny" :)
While I knew, of course, that the specular layer in a PBR - well, texture, I've always said? - acted on - well, I would have said more reflection than 'shine', but - I was like "You're not helping!"
Kind of like
Don't get me wrong - I very much appreciate your comment, and I understand (mostly - getting there) what you're saying - I'm just saying it's funny how much the terms get intertwined, even when properly used. :)
Why keep it simple, right? ;)
As a DS user I have always had to convert stuff, most items used to only come with Poser mats these had to be converted and altered to look good in DS, so its not a recent thing.
Well of course not:) However, if you're a 3DL user, things are getting harder. Most poser mats would use the same maps as 3DL, just a matter of adjusting diffuse color, glossiness, ambience and bump/displacement strength. Many if not most new IRay optimized products come with roughness-, metallicy-, emissive- and other types of maps that have no equivalence in the standard 3DL shaders. And there are more and more custom shaders using diffuse overlays with independent tiling, those can't be converted simply by using a script, or even manually. I have a few examples in my runtime, either by mistake or because I wanted to see if I can fix them up.
I use aweSurface and do pathtracing in 3DL now, luckily I can use most of the IRay specific maps in the shader. Certain types of custom mdl shaders still are impossible to convert. And for new users that want to use 3DL for a number of reasons life will be tough.
I've picked up Slickleyield & Riversoft's iray to 3DL converter to try to figure that out - or just use :) - but it seems like it shouldn't be too terribly difficult to bake the metalicity and glossiness and other shaders into the specular map for 3DL... Right?
Bear in mind that there is no equivalent to metalicity in the ds default shader. The closest you get to metal is using reflection strength where white is 100% reflective and black is 0%. You then have to set reflection color to that of the reflecting object, for a metal look. If you insert a map into the reflection color, you will lose the raytracing, the map will simply be projected in (wrapped around) the reflective areas of the object, defined by reflection strength.
Also, glossiness is the opposite of roughness. So in theory a roughness map inserted in the glossiness slot would have to be inverted. In other words, a roughness of 0 is a totally smooth surface with infinitely small highlights = 100% glossy. A specular map only controls the strength (amount) of specular highlights. A map inserted in specular color controls the color of the specular highlight.