incomplete product
dannagiusy64
Posts: 467
in The Commons
I purchased this product https://www.daz3d.com/strange-cave
but the renders don't even come close to promotional product images. Is there any add-ons to purchase? there is no water and the lights are flat. I know it's in 3Deligth, the script I used to make it iray made things worse. How can I make promotional images look similar?
thank you
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Comments
Render in 3DL?
Um-m, there is water, it loads as the last item in the scene, and there's a material setting just for it.
There was a thread about converting this to Iray not too long ago: Has anyone successfully converted this product to Iray?
Thanks for the reply. I can't find the material setting. I read many tips and a site where free textures are downloaded. I tried to convert it to iray but it turned out really bad. Usually when I buy old products they come close to promotional images. This no. And the water? is it to be purchased separately? I do not understand
Yes
The original has no lights, so you will have to add some point lights for the flames (ambient doesn't cast light, it just makes the item glow). The intensity of the lights will have to be cranked up to 10 times the default, since decay is set to 2 ("natural" light decays with the square of the distance) or set it to no decay with much lower intensity. The scene will still be quite dim, so, in Render Settings, maybe increase the gain, and set gamma correction on, gamma 2.2 (a typical adjustment). You could also add a spotlight to illuminate that godray from the ceiling and highlight the sword in the stone.
Look carefully in the scene contents and you will see the water prop at the end of the hierarchy (at least it's last in my load). The water material is added separately, for some reason. Select the Water prop and apply the material preset. Did you install the two files for the product? There is a StudioCF file with the material settings for the water, installed to a different place. Check the Product view in the Content Library, under S, Strange Cave. There should be two entries, one for "Strange Cave.pp2", and a second for "Water.dsa". You can see the full file information in the info pane at the bottom of the Window. It might be closed, so click the tiny button in the middle of the frame at the bottom.
Since it is also made for Poser I reckon the images were probably made with Poser.. If you wan't to use it in iRay there is the base iRay shader that comes with Studio that could help a lot..
Thanks, I'll try the water product. I installed it with DIM, so it will be somewhere. In the products in alphabetical order he gives me the cave but I don't see the water. Do you have any light to recommend for this product?
I have the IRAY conversion script, but it doesn't work well, the result is terrible
I have this product, but until now I have never tried it out. Like others have said it is really designed for Poser, so some work is needed to look acceptable in DS.
I rendered this in Iray, and I did not use any conversions scripts, I just applied the Iray Uber Shader over all surfaces of all the objects.
First issue, there are no lights loaded by default, so I turned the torches into emissives, as well as the light beam from the ceiling. I then added a ghost light dome close to the torches to cast the bulk of their light, otherwise the flames will wash out if cranking up there own emissive value too high.
I did apply a different shader to the water.
The biggest issue was with cave walls, which look black and white. The base texture was odd, more like an opacity map. My guess is the walls used some sort of special poser shader node. Therefore I just applied a rock shader I have to the cave walls. The result is below. Not identical to the promo images, but not too bad. Change the color of the emissive lights if you want the blue/red etc look shown in the promo pics.
Okay, there still seems to be some confusion about the product. Yes, it was made for Poser (.pp2) but also has a DAZ Studio script (.dsa) in the same folder that loads the DAZ Studio materials after importing the Poser props (check your log file after loading, it will pretty obvious). The 3DL shader for the cave walls is not the standard DAZ Default, but something much more complex, and will not translate well to Iray, if at all. The rest of the surfaces all use the DAZ Default shader, so shouldn't cause any problems. As previously mentioned, the Water prop gets a separate material preset from the StudioCF file, and uses yet another non-standard shader, but any water shader will do.
There are two files for this product, "Strange Cave" and "Strange Cave StudioCF" (as seen in DIM). The first has the main scene in the Poser Formats section, and the second has the Water material in the Studio Formats section, because that is what it is.
This is a 3DL render with three pairs of very bright point lights (for the torches) and render gain set to 4.
Cool render
you guys are very good. I would really like to be able to use it because this cave is very special. I have installed nearly 3000 products and I struggle to find all the components I need. Did you also use any rock shaders?
there are many shaders, difficult to choose. I also have a shader rock product, but it obviously doesn't work well. The rocks look metallic, I don't know why. I removed the metal from the surface, but it's still metallic. Do you have anything to recommend? Thank you
I've done an Iray conversion, scene file attached. I hope this works for you. This uses the 3DL-Iray converter with a little bit of finetuning in regards to the water. The main issue was that you had to shuffle around some maps that got lost and some that had to be removed entirely (like the water mask). There was also some issue regarding non-subdivisioned geometry, which is bad for normals and displacement.
You can probably improve on it using different roch shaders for the cave itself.
EDIT: Here's a quick and dirty render.
But how does it work for the flame? if I add the emission shader it becomes a flat illuminated object. If I add the lights, the environment becomes all black. What types of lights should I put on?
I just realized that I attached the wrong file to my previous post; I now have attached the .duf file. Download that, and try opening it. It should load the scene as I have rendered it.
As for the flames: After converting to Iray, put the image SECS Flame.jpg of the flames into the following slots:
Set Emission colour to 2600 and Lumiance to 100. Set Lumiance Units to kcd/m^2.
You also have to put the SECS Flame Alpha.jpg into Cutout Opacity.
For the Godray, I just put the SECS Lightray Alpha.jpg into Cutout Opacity, set emission colour to white, and Lumiance to 100. Set Lumiance Units to kcd/m^2.
This will give you the light as above with default Render settings. If you want things to get brighter, decrease the Tonemapping value from 13 to 12 or lower until you get the desired result.
You can also add further light sources, either visibly or out of sight, depending what else you want in the scene. I used the camera's built in light at a low value to add light from the camera's direction. But you could also have a lantern emit light, or some FX-emissives, or use ghostlights (I like using the Ghostlight sets from the store, but you can easily make your own). The lights that come with the cntent are 3DL lights, they won't work in Iray unless you turn "photometric mode" to "on" in the Parameter tab.
Edit: For the cave wall, there's a very good and matching rock shader in this product: https://www.daz3d.com/stoneworks-from-mexico-01-iray-shaders-and-merchant-resource
the "05 Museo de Antropoliga" comes fairly close to the original texture as seen in the product images. But you can use any other rock shader, too.
Grazie