Beginner problems with rendering

MuzMel

Hey guys, newbie here, just got this 2 days back. FIguring stuff out but had a couple questions about rendering

1) Why do my 3Delight renders look so cartoony? The skin looks really dark, the hair colour looks washed out. The only one this doesn't happen to is the generic genesis 8 basic female that's included in the starters. Any other character I use for gen 8, male or female, has that look. Pic attached so you can see difference. The black eyes haven't happened before, that's new. Also my 3Delight renders take only 1-2 min, as opposed to the Iray which is about 30 min for 25% at the 3000x2400 resolution. Is there some sort of setting mess up thats making it lose quality?

2) When to stop rendering? What does rendering do? Is it just adding more detail? As a test I rendered two images, stopped one at 30% and the other at 96%. To my untrained eye I don't really see much of a difference in these two pics. Also the less rendered pic is a larger size than the more rendered one.

3) What does rendering fix? If there's a bright spot issue, or there are random white dots scattered at 20% render, these issues will stay even at 100%?

4) Is it a big strain to increase the render resolution? I would personally prefer a higher res low rendered image as opposed to a low res high rendered. Which is tougher on the system?

These are my questions. Sorry if I have used incorrect terms or said anything that might seem stupid. I've looked these up but not been able to find these things because they're too basic

Richard Haseltine

1) how are you lighting the scene?

2) in Iray the percentage (which is actually the percentage of the ctarget value reached, so by default 100% on the progress bar is 95% converged) measures how many pixels have reached their final value (and the Render Quality determiens how narrowly that is defined). Depending on the image, on whether you have de-noising on, and on the lighting the valeu that looks acceptable may not always be the same.

3) generally rendering doesn't fix issues - though noise, bright and dark pixels, will usually be reduced (this is the pixels converging on their final value).

MuzMel

Richard Haseltine said:

1) how are you lighting the scene?

2) in Iray the percentage (which is actually the percentage of the ctarget value reached, so by default 100% on the progress bar is 95% converged) measures how many pixels have reached their final value (and the Render Quality determiens how narrowly that is defined). Depending on the image, on whether you have de-noising on, and on the lighting the valeu that looks acceptable may not always be the same.

3) generally rendering doesn't fix issues - though noise, bright and dark pixels, will usually be reduced (this is the pixels converging on their final value).

Thank you for the response. I have not learnt lightning yet, I just use the auto headlamp. If it is a lightning issue, why does one model look fine while the other is a mess?

Richard Haseltine

There can be quite a bit of variation in how skins are set up, especially for 3Delight.

Peter Wade

Iray renders usually look more realistic than 3Delight, but 3Delight renders can look bad if you use materials that were designed for Iray.

Daz had the 3Delight renderer before it had Iray, Their version of Iray is designed to try and adapt to 3Delight materials but not the other way round. A lot of new content is only designed for Iray, a lot of old content only comes with 3Delight materials. I reckon that Genesis 3 or 8 stuff is most likely to be Iray, older stuff probaby 3Delight. Some content comes with materials for both. The Genesis 8 base figures have both but a lot of Genesis 8 based characters are Iray only.

If you select your figure, go to the Surfaces tab and select a surface it will tell you what shader the surface is using at the top of the surfaces box. If it says Shader:Iray Uber it is definitley Iray. If it says Daz Default or something starting in AoA it is probably 3Delight. 

You can buy utilites in the store to convert materials both ways. The results are generally not perfect but they can be very good.

Iray uses a sort of continuous refinement process. You can stop it whenever you think the image is good enough. After a while the improvements can quite subtle, you might notice them if you look at the image very closely. How quickly the image improves depends on the lighting, the materials and how complicated the scene is. A lot of reflective or transparent surfaces can make the render go slowly.

3Delight renders sections of the image until it thinks they are finished then goes to the next one. You can't stop a 3Delight render before it finishes and get the whole image.

MuzMel

Thank you guys, this has been very helpful. I have a clearer idea now. Also managed to fix the 3Delight cartoony issue. However, the black eye remains, on just the Genesis 8 male. Should I make a seperate thread for this? Attached is a pic of a Gen 8 male rendered with 3Delight material. Looking online the recommended is to delete the brickyard folder

Edit: Well I cleared up this issue by loading a gen 8 female and manually checking every value with hers. There were some differences here and there, particularly for refraction value of cornea and eye mosture, changing those to 0 fixed eye back to normal. It is weird because I never touched those settings, wonder how they went wacko

Novica

You might want to take a peek at this Iray lighting tutorial where I baby-step you through how to do lighting in Iray. Also, the first page of my Art Studio thread has links to a variety of subjects, among them lighting tips and tutorials.