Weird Water Trouble
Tramp Graphics
Posts: 2,411
I've been working on a new piece for almost the last month now, and am having a very odd problem with the water when rendering the image.
In the image, I use the Haru Goten set from Hisayan Image Labs for the buildings, ground, and water plane, the Japanese Onsen by Uwe G (with its native water plane's polygons turned off), and the clear water shader from Sickle Yield's Poser/DS conversion of Spacebones' Water Props with a color adjustment to the diffuse color (but no texture map), an added bump and displacement map (with adjustments to the Bump and Displacement settings), and adjustments to the refraction setting (refraction index changed to 1.33)and opacity (the latter changed from 39.8% to 50%), as well as horizontal and vertical tiling changed to 5. The problem, as seen in the attached image (cropped to avoid obvious TOS issues) is these odd milky blue blobs that appear in the render, but not the preview, and not a reflection of anything in the scene. I've already tried a few different options to try and get rid of the problem to no avail. Troubleshooting takes forever because I can't do spot renders with this piece without crashing DAZ Studio, so I have to render in the Stand Alone 3DeLight and it takes a Day and a half to two days to render. Has anyone had this problem before or any ideas on how to fix it?
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Comments
What are your specular settings? Your spec needs to be basically white, at 100%, and with highlights somewhere from 50 to 80% to work properly with the reflection/refraction combo, in my experience.
OK, Here are the full settings for the water:
Diffuse Color: 35 63 47
Diffuse Strength: 100%
Glossiness: 90.8%
Specular Color: 255 255 255
Specular Strength: 100%
Multiply Specular through Opacity: On
Ambient Color: 13 13 13
Ambient Stength: 50%
Opacity Strength: 50%
Bump Strength: 100%
Bump map: FS Lake water-13 bum.jpg from Fairy World's Fairy Pond.
Negative Bump: -1.00
Positive Bump: 1.00
Displacement Strength: 127%
Displacement Map: FS Lake water-13 bum.jpg from Fairy World's Fairy Pond.
Minimum Displacement -1.00
Maximum Displacement: 1.00
Reflection Color: 255 255 255
Reflection Strength: 100%
Refraction Color: 255 255 255
Refraction Strength: 100%
Index of Refraction 1.33
Horizontal Tiles: 4
Horizontal Offset: 0
Vertical Tiles: 4
Vertical Offset: 0
Lighting Model: Glossy (Plastic)
UV Set: Default UVs
Smooth: ON
Angle: 89.9
Render Priority: Normal
Propagate Priority: Off
Follow Blend: 100%
Multiply Specular through Opacity should be off and there is nothing gained from have both displacement and bump on if they are using the same map, turn bump off.
Is your scene enclosed? Is there a roof or a skydome in place?
Hmm. I'm testing the set again now with some different lights and render settings to try and replicate the error.
This is weird. Even with default render settings, bump and displacement, I can't get it to replicate that look. I tried it with default lights, advanced ambients and uberenvironment in different renders and I still don't get the globby things!
I don't own the Haru Goten set, maybe it's something to do with that?
If you want my render settings, they are:
Pixels: 3000 x 2400
Aspect ratio 10 x 8
Bucket Order: Horizontal
Bucket Size: 8
Max Ray Trace Depth: 4
Pixel Samples (X): 4
Pixel Samples (Y): 4
Shadow Samples: 12
Gain: 1
Gamma Correction: Off
Gamma: 1
Shading Rate: 0.2
Pixel Filter: Sinc
Pixel Filter Width (X): 6
Pixel Filter Width (Y): 6
Motion Blur: Off
rendered in 3DeLight stand alone from my Temp folder.
Can you literally remove the other water planes in the scene, rather than just switch visibility off ?
I'm not sure if bumping up the horizontal and vertical tiling from 4 to 10 would help at all, or even affect the blobs in the least. The only thing I know it would do is make the waves smaller along the X and Z axes and more numerous.
OK, I tried removing the bump map and settings, leaving only the Displacement map (since they're the same anyway) and reduced the reflection to 75% to see if that would solve the problem to no avail. I started a new test render last night before bed, and the render is about 60% done, having just exposed the corner of the pool, and guess what, the "blobs" are still there with no difference whatsoever. So the blobs are definitely not reflections. I'm not sure what else to do except completely replace the water plane.
Well, my latest "test" render finally finished, and the results speak for themselves, the blue blobs are still there. Removing the bump map and bump settings and changing the reflection setting didn't do anything except make the actual reflections fainter. There was no effect on the "blobs" whatsoever. So, either there is a problem with the displacement/bump map I'm using (highly unlikely), or there is a problem with the water plane itself.
Have you tried turning off displacement, and checked for meshes in the scene that might be set to render but not be visible?
Also: I learned from our wonderful Tony that you can speed up transparency rendering quite a lot by applying UberSurface to the surface, setting Occlusion to Manual, and samples to 128. Raytrace bounces and refraction are always going to be an unavoidable hit to time, of course.
Well, I think I've found the problem. My current render is about 50% done (already) and has just revealed the top corner of the water, and guess what NO BLUE MILK BLOBS!!!!!!!!!! :cheese: At least none so far.
There must be something corrupted in the Haru Goten water plane, at least on my copy. This doesn't surprise me because I've had other constant issues with other parts of this set (and some other sets of his in DAZ), the main ones being all of the doors and panels for a given building collecting in a single stack every time I reopen a scene using it. (I end up having to delete and reload the buildings each time I reopen a scene). I don't know if anyone else has had this issue or could replicate it, using his sets, but, this has been my experience. It is, otherwise, a very nice looking set with a lot of functionality, and, once again, I don't know if it's his models or my system that are causing the bugs. I'll post the results when the render is complete. The only other thing I'd really like to add to the scene is some steam coming off the water, but I really don't know how to pull that off.
Well yay!
Ron's detail smoke and steam is what I use for that. Steam is so hard to do in 3D that it's always faster to do in post. If you don't want to buy Ron's brushes, you can thrash around online and probably find some free ones that will work for you.
Making 3D steam is prohibitively difficult at the moment, yep.
Anywhat The last render was a bust. While the "blue milk blobs" are gone, 3DeLight crashed a little over halfway through the render, so using the Distant Lands water is out. Back to square one. The reflections and refractions all looked nice though.
I don't know what to do anymore. I'm either getting blue blobs, an incomplete render with 3DeLight quitting on me halfway through, or both, If I use a prop water plane, I get the blue blobs, if I use a figure water plain, 3DeLight quits on me halfway through the render.
It's been a while, had to do my Monster Mash challenge image, which took most of October, and finally got back to trouble-shooting this piece. My latest attempt involved deactivating the large prop water plane that came with the Haru Goten set (since it's mostly not visible anyway) and trying to rely on the Onsen's built in water plane. I also applied a diffuse texture and trans map (both from the Fairy Pond set, which is where my displacement map came from). The good news is the blobs weren't there. The bad news is I'm getting the same render crash as with figure based water planes. This is what I got about 2/3 of the way through the most recent render attempt: