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I so have to play with this...
Please do =)
I'm making separate presets for this stuff ATM (and a better setting for the skin shader). And it seems to me that there's something wrong with the point light template in the shader mixer. As soon as I add a mixer point light, the IDL cam stops generating photon maps.
Scratch that, I think I managed to generate a working preset. *fingers crossed*
Shader mixer is soooo unpredictable.
Still does that?
I think it's something 'not connected'...it's been doing that for while, which is one reason why I seldom ever used SM lights. I think it was mentioned first in relation to the caustics scene included in Studio. That's why I was getting reflective caustics, but not transmitted ones...I think I filed a bug report on that, but I can't remember, for sure.
Looks like the whole IDL camera is a fragile structure. Sometimes it renders perfectly after reloading a scene, but sometimes it doesn't. So I'll write "load last" on the icon, I think.
The caustic camera must be similar in structure.
I wish we could see the actual code =(
Experimenting. I don't like going without AoA lights, but if I can make use of a good bounceish light without taking 100 hours, I'll happily adapt...
Shading rate -- is higher better or worse?
Will, if the cam says "no dzglobal map" but doesn't say "no lights generate photons" before it, try deleting it and adding the attached separate preset when you basically have finished setting up your scene.
It's best to Ctrl-click it and set "add" instead of "replace all" (same as with light presets).
I haven't had any such problems, but downloading that too...
As always, higher shading rate means faster but splotchier.
Ok, cool. Lowering it, then. ;)
So far I'm really liking the results, but I have to stop messing with it and let it finish. ;)
Will it play nice with Arealight?
(I don't normally like using arealight, but if it worked better with this camera than normal stuff, I'd be tempted)
The UberArea? I haven't tried yet, but it should. Just make sure you enable the falloff on the area light and set it to 2. The falloff start and end should be 0, then it will be physically plausible. And of course, with the correct falloff, light intensities should be around 40K range.
Any special tricks to SSS? Trying a human figure and it sort of grinds gears.
Edit: And the second I say that, progress after 20 mins... guess it's just going to take a while. ;)
(probably pushing it too hard, with shading rate: 1 and large image and stuff)
With SSS, if your image is large, you can increase shading rate actually. Shading rate works in "image space", so the bigger your SSS surface is in pixels, the higher it can be for there not to be banding artefacts. It also means you can render a closeup of a face with higher shading rate than a distant figure. Counterintuitive, yeah.
Along with the lights and cam, I'm going to post a polished version of the "simple" skin shader from that scene, with nicer values: SSS/diffuse mix = 60%, SSS scale = 0.2. You could try them =)
Shading rate of 2 works okay with this scale for a full body shot and a 618x1000 px image. With this, I get about 5 to 6 minutes "face-plant time" (c) Zarcon for this simple scene, on my home laptop (specs in my signature). Total is 8 minutes 56.64 seconds.
I wouldn't recommend AoA's Subsurface for the skin - or it should be fixed before use (in shader mixer, disconnect the image map from the opacity root). As-is, that image map makes DS generate commands that tell the renderer to run the _whole_ shader on every transmission (shadow) ray hit.
Yeah, I made sure to avoid AoA SSS. I generally do that anyway, it's just too dang slow.
What I've been doing is painstakingly copying skins that use it to the default US skin (Phillip). It might not be the best thing ever, but it runs waaaaay faster.
So here's the 'regular camera' vs 'idl camera.'
The difference is incredibly subtle, mostly visible in the shadowed undersides that get lit with proper bounce. It also takes the render time from 5-10 minutes to just over 2 hours.
Actually, it's not counterintuitive...if you know WHERE that number gets plugged into the equation at...it's the denominator.
So a shading rate of 4, is saying it's one quarter. But a shading rate of 0.1 is saying 10x!
And it's not quite exact, but those are close to time it takes...say a scene with a shading rate of 1 renders in an hour, at a shading rate of 4, it will be around 15 minutes, but at 0.1, closer to that 10 hrs.
I'm having a difficult time with this scene...the SM SSS shader you cooked up takes forever to render, for me (yes, even longer with other 'native' lighting)...along the lines of an hour and a half. Swapping out to a non-SM shader cuts it to 15 mins or less (even if it's an SSS shader). I didn't try the AoA shader, but my guess, it would be worse.
Great way of explaining this, man. Kudos!!
Supposing everyone remembers what this is, of course =)
No [SEHT]! AoA would certainly be worse because of the "shader" hitmode it enforces on the transmission rays (diffuse too, but it's justifiable in the case of GI). Makes me truly suspect that shader mixer must be sensitive to something about the host OS. For instance, I was putting the scene together at work, where the office PC runs Win7. I never got any of the errors I'm getting here at home with Win10.
Tell you what, I'll see if I can spaghetti a raytype check in shader mixer to only use diffuse not SSS for diffuse ray hits. There _is_ a brick for it, but no idea if it really works LOL _Might_ help somewhat.
It's still not half as good as the new RT SSS with the irradiance channel, but hey, we're trying to squeeze the best out of the vanilla thing...
Yeah, I finally have SOME grasp of shader mixer for regular surface shaders, and dear flippin hoppin vampire jeebus, it's a nightmare.
Will, is this the same render you posted in Barefoot's 3Delight renders thread? Where you say you are using AoA's Distant _and_ Ambient?
Because if you used those, it's not going to look right.
With the IDL cam, you do not need any environment lights. They will only wash out everything and add render time. A skydome will take care of, well, the sky. Use UberSurface on the skydome (it can be a simple sphere, like I used), plug the map into the ambient channel, and disable shadow casting on the dome, so that distant lights go through it. As long as it's visible to "occlusion" (GI rays), it will light the scene.
If you add environment lights to help you set up the scene through a regular camera, you should remember to disable them before rendering with GI.
It's okay if, without an environment light, like half your scene looks black through a regular camera. Those black areas exactly where GI is supposed to fill in.
This is A5 Azumi through a regular camera. It's a direct light dominated scene, but notice how the floor is underexposed w/o GI, and shadows are pure black.
No, I switched to my usual approach there.
With the IDL experiments, I only used a single distant light. It took 2 hours to render. AoA lights only/regular camera took about 10 minutes.
The really odd thing...I rebuilt the shader, today...simply reloaded SSS brick...and reapplied it. Now...it's down to about 15 minutes.
You appeased the correct angel of the hours!
When I posted the above, it was about 51% at 7.5 minutes, so I guessed that it would finish close to 15 minutes. I was off by a bit over a minute (almost 2 minutes)...Total Rendering Time: 13 minutes 16.6 seconds. So, my guess...the hair. Even though occlusion is off on the hair, the transmapping was 'dragging' the render. Once past the hair things started flying again.
Things like this are a very good reason to have the option to compile a SM network as a sdl file (compiled 3Delight RSL shader)...besides there being a bit of speed up with compiled (or recompiled) for the version of 3DL in use shaders anyway.
My brain has been completely confused reading this stuff. haha...
Edit: I am working on your IBL tutorial when I go to click on accept for making the new light shader Daz gets a fatal error message. Any clues maybe why??
This is sort of strange. What was the skin shader you used on the dudes?
Oh, and which sort of distant light? The one from the "create" menu? I haven't touched those in years, but I remember they used to be much slower than the lights you can find in the "Light Presets / DS Default" content folder. Those are also way more convenient to use because they come with individual shadow samples controls.
Either way, even those lights do not cast photons by default. They can be made to if you add a line to their rendertime scripts.
But shader mixer lights cast them by default. I'm attaching a shader mixer distant light... they're trivial to make, but you need to remember to attach the shadow brick. So try this one.
"Accept" when you're done connecting and want to save everything? This is new, I've never had that happen to me.
What DS version are you using and what OS? And if you locate the log after the error before relaunching DS, what does it say at the bottom?
On Windows, the log should be in [your user folder]/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/ Studio4
And if you click "Save network" and then "Compile shader" before you click "Accept", does it save and compile normally, or crash?
So, a higher resolution test with way more geometry than a sphere/plane.
I added TerraDome2 that I snatched for free in a recent promo here, and a skydome from Merlin's church. TerraDome2 is a _lot_ of geometry. The default 10 km max distance of the IDL cam seems to be huge enough to hit it all, though.
The resolution is much higher, 1112x1800 - it allowed me to increase the SSS shading rate from 2 to 8. Because of this, the "faceplant time" for IDL remains around 5 minutes.
This is the same shader mixer distant light I posted above.
The eyewhites look wrong in the no-IDL version because I forgot to switch the SSS group to make it different from that of the skin. Fixed this for the IDL render.
And the final version has DoF, and it only added less than a minute.
You will notice that specular looks different in the DoF render - even less pronounced on bumpy surfaces like lips. It's like a feature of the 3Delight raytracer. I suppose the devs intend it to always be used with DoF because that specular seems to look more natural IMO.
See, here I am using the same roughness value for the whole skin surface. But! If your lips have the same "specular roughness" as the rest of your skin, they are dry lips actually =) Believe me, dry lips are not shiny at all.
Render settings:
- progressive on;
- GC on, tonemapping curve 2.2 ;
- pixel samples 6x6;
- max RT depth 2;
- pixel filter Catmull-Rom 2x2
// the settings in bold will influence render time //
IDL cam settings: default (final gather, 64 samples, shading rate 4, max error 0.1)
No IDL: approx 8 minutes; IDL: approx. 18 minutes; IDL + DoF: around 19 minutes.
The TerraDome2 material is a UberSurface2 - it has two layers, so I could mix those tiles.
PS About the TerraDome2 thing: its lights, atmos and mats are Poser-only, but the terrain itself and the texture maps are obviously "cross-platform". One caveat - you do need to have Poser to inject the terrain morphs (InjectPMD for DS3 cannot handle these), but after that, you can save a new CR2 from Poser with all the morphs, and it will load in DS just fine. It will create a 100+ MB file with binary morphs, though (for the base morphs and the first ultimate pack), so it will load slowly and take several minutes to save when you first save a DS scene with it, but subsequent scene saves are fast.