Daz Studio Pro BETA - version 4.20.0.17! (*UPDATED*)
Daz Software
Posts: 36
Daz 3D is pleased to announce Daz Studio Pro BETA - version 4.20.0.17!
Highlights:
- See the Highlights thread (and/or Change Log) for details.
- See the NVIDIA Iray thread for additional information.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Previous Public Build (Beta) Threads:
- ...
- 4.20.0.17 (April 21, 2022)
- 4.20.0.12 (April 8, 2022)
- 4.20.0.11 (March 25, 2022)
- 4.20.0.8 (March 17, 2022)
- 4.20.0.6 (March 11, 2022)
- 4.20.0.5 (March 9, 2022)
- 4.20.0.4 (March 3, 2022)
- 4.20.0.3 (February 24, 2022)
- 4.20.0.2 (February 17, 2022)
- 4.16.1.47 (February 14, 2022)
- 4.16.1.43 (February 4, 2022)
- 4.16.1.40 (January 31, 2022)
- 4.16.1.34 (January 21, 2022)
- 4.16.1.31 (January 14, 2022)
- 4.16.1.21 (December 22, 2021)
- 4.16.1.17 (December 17, 2021)
- 4.16.1.6 (December 1, 2021)
- 4.16.1.2 (November 22, 2021)
- 4.15.1.96 (November 12, 2021)
- 4.15.1.91 (November 3, 2021)
- 4.15.1.84 (October 29, 2021)
- 4.15.1.72 (October 7, 2021)
- 4.15.0.30 (September 2, 2021)
- 4.15.0.29 (August 31, 2021)
- 4.15.0.28 (August 27, 2021)
- 4.15.0.26 (August 19, 2021)
- 4.15.0.25 (August 17, 2021)
- 4.15.0.14 (March 18, 2021)
- 4.15.0.13 (February 24, 2021)
- 4.15.0.12 (February 19, 2021)
- 4.15.0.9 (February 11, 2021)
- 4.15.0.2 (January 7, 2021)
- 4.14.1.28 (December 15, 2020)
- 4.14.1.22 (December 4, 2020)
- 4.14.0.10 (November 24, 2020)
General Release Threads:
Post edited by rbtwhiz on
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Comments
So far no obvious differnces from 4.15.1.72 for me, however these changes (which I haven't checked out yet) look promising:
Refactored the “Keys” tab of the Parameter Settings dialog
Added a “Type” column - displays the interpolation type (/values) of a given key
Added an “Aliases” tab to the Parameter Settings dialog
The tab is only displayed in the context of a single property that is, or has, an alias
Added a “Deltas” field to the Parameter Settings dialog
Only displayed in the context of a single property that controls the application of a morph
Displays the number of deltas in the morph or text indicating that the morph deltas have not been loaded
Aliases are something of a PITA; expressions seem to get aliases up to the root of the character, meaning that keyframes on the head don't key the expressions unless "A" is enabled. Having the information in parameter settings will help understanding, though of course not fix the problem of an object level key creation taking forever and consuming vast amounts of memory/disk space. The Deltas stuff sounds interesting; I'm continually amazed by the number of morph deltas happening to bones in my characters, this might help me undertstand what is going on.
Animated scroll views (e.g., asset views, asset container views, property views, etc.) now support keyboard modifiers to speed up or slow down mouse wheel scrolling
Holding the Ctrl/Cmd modifier key speeds up scrolling (page step)
Holding no modifier key performs standard scrolling (wheel scroll lines step - 3 by default)
Holding the Shift modifier key slows down scrolling (single step)
Nice pic!
Just a quick thanks for all the morph info updates, and other less bling-y changes but still very important. More clarity the better.
Is there any way in the beta to import and use an OpenVDB volume?
4.15.1.91: Anyone else seeing flickering & delayed updates when panning the camera around in Iray photoreal? I think it is more pronounced with multiple GPUs, but it still happens around G8F eyes for example, with a single GPU. Draw mode in draw settings is on photoreal (the interactive renderer seems to not have this problem).
I tried all NVIDIA drivers up from the recommended 465.89, both gaming and studio. 465.89 is apparently not a studio driver release this time around. The previous beta version of DAZ (I think 4.15.1.84) works fine with 462.59 Studio drivers.
That is all the info we have right now, it seems to be a note that something is forthcoming rather than an announcement that it is ready to use.
The update causes issues for me with a 3090, latest game driver.
Hair caps are rendering as black on their foreheads and everything seems darker than usual. Going back to the beta before.
Are you using ghost lights, emissive surfaces with low opacity? They seem not to work in this version of Iray.
You're right, ghost lights are also broken. Had the flickering issues even on a blank scene with just a primitive & and there's a few other odd issues too. Definitely rolling back to previous beta.
You can get ghost light to work, kinda instead of the default 1500 kcd/m^2 it's like 10 bilion, but then you get strange artifacts. Also when you render you don't get any statistics no texture consumtion, geometry nothing. Another approach to Ghost Lights, instead of reducing opacity, replacing the image with black picture doesn't work either.
Same issue rendering black fur and nails, rolling back
For "ghost" lights, creating a plane -> Create advanced Iray node proprieties -> enable Iray Matte in parameters then set to 1 refraction index/weight seems to do the trick.
That said, in addition to broken hairs, their is some weird stuff happening just opening few saves :
https://imgur.com/j3LaNew
https://imgur.com/KtOD1jD
Less critical but seems to have broke some older/custom shaders too:
https://imgur.com/rIx5rZz
For 'black' surfaces I think it's related to 'custom' shaders :
https://www.daz3d.com/mega-updo-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8-females
or
https://www.daz3d.com/secluded-island
'Instancied' props that crash Iray (no errors msg in the the log) :
https://www.daz3d.com/island-house
For Daz weird "broken" surfaces :
https://www.daz3d.com/school-s-out-19787 (school's name on the wall)
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/easy-panties-for-genesis-8/148416 (NSFW)
Not sure if that helps
.
I finally decided to try this beta (I'm still on 4.14 something beta as it's the most stable and error free so far).
Can also confirm I'm seeing the same issue with ghost lights, so this beta is definitely a no go. Maybe one day I'll try g8.1 and the pbr shaders for it, but looks like this beta is all borked like the others
Thank you for your feedback everyone. The Studio devs are looking in to these issues you have reported, and will be posting a new version once they get them solved.
Although, as always, there are no guarantees on ghost lights. Iray tries to be as accurate to reality as it can be and reality doesn't happen to have ghost lights in it, so all the previous ways of making ghost lights were just using unintended features in Iray to get them to work. So other issues might get fixed in a way that closes those loopholes.
The change in 4.15.1.91 vs 4.15.0.30 is that the "cutout opacity" is now being multipled in to the emissive surface light intensity; I expect this will affect any surface which is both emissive and less than opaque. Here's a rendering from 4.15.0.30 with tonemapping off. There's an emissive plane on the left with a cutout opacity of 1E-10 and a pointlight on the right. I tweaked the light intensities so the two are about equal:
I'm guessing this has something to do with the various bugs reported a while back (when 4.15 was released) where planes with transparency seemed to cast unexpected shadows and possibly with issues of reflectance vs transmission of water surfaces. I attached a zip containing the last version (either the 160E10 cd/m2 luminance plane) as an uncompressed scene subset (it's 10,000 lines of XML amounting to 256MByte, which is why I zip'ed it...)
Rawb, we definitely understand that you guys are a bit at the mercy of Nvidia with Iray, I work in IT and have to explain to many non-IT people that X or Y is gone because the company cut the feature they like. The changes to Iray of late unfortunately affect a lot of products and workflows we've been using for years. Most hairs still use opacity maps, even the new ones being sold, certain sets have ghost light emissives for projecting light. It's the unstability that's starting to get to us. I would love to use a more recent version of Daz, but the new versions after the last 4.14 beta have just crippled too many other things from what I've seen.
I get you want us to move to g8.1 and other stuff, but until the Studio program itself works the way we expect it to, I can't move. So I just basically reverse engineer g8.1 back to g8 and others are doing that as well. It's a pain in the butt, but losing basic core functionality for lots of products is even more an irritation.
Just because those thing aren't to their "reality" mindset, don't mean to cut the functionality completely. Let people use what they want.
The problem is that the 4.15.0.30 behavior is fundamentally broken for non-geometric emissive surfaces (i.e. things that aren't purely geometric). Here's the candle from the Round Tomb product rendered scene-only (no scene lights are present) using Iray Uber for the flame. It's just one candle - I deleted all the others - so it is the only light source in this scene:
At first sight this looks correct, but it is horribly, horribly wrong - the sides of the candle are illuminated! Here is what 4.15.1.91 produces, it is far closer to the correct render (the errors are because the candle flame is two crossed planes, not a geometric flame, but it renders way, way faster because of that):
I can show what is going on with a smooth-shaded render:
So in the first image those two planes are pretty much 100% emissive. That't because the "cutout opacity" is a bitmap (the cutout opacity value in both images is 1.0) and for some reason Iray isn't considering any part of the bitmap transparent (I converted it to a PNG with genuinely 0 values to make sure). The crossed emissive planes are what cause the curious triangle light in the .0.30 render and what cause the similar rectangule edges in .1.91 The sacrifice is worth it because it renders so much faster. Less acceptable is that the candle flame actually casts a shadow! There's a work-round for that by lowering the opacity overall of the flame and raising the luminosity correspondingly, the same trick as in a ghost light. This allows light to shine through the flame. Tweaking the numbers will eventually produce something which is a very good approximation of a flame while requiring only two emissive rectangles.
We aren't able to reproduce this on our end. Did you reboot after updating your nvidia driver? What driver version are you using?
A flame will cast a shadow - usually it isn't noticeable, if it's the strongest influence on the ilumination of the nearby surfaces, but it does partially or wholly block light from passing through it.
What do you mean by "a flame"; I assume you are talking about Daz Studio, not the real world.
I'm on 471.96
I'm surprised you couldn't reproduce at least "black surfaces" thing, seems to be widespread from my testing (from different users too).
I had to roll back sadly tho (wouldn't mind to do more testing but inability to swap freely between build make things a tad bit tedious).
Unfortunately PBR lighting using emissive surfaces off of real world lighting object props never cut it. The bedroom in my apartment is a rectangularish 200sqf, it only has one overhead light that has a led bulb with the equivalent of 150 watts of light. Works great.
That sole ceiling light lights the room up quite nicely. Building a similar scene in Daz and using a ceiling light prop and turning the bulb surface into an emissive with 150 watts and the room is basically black with a bit of light at the ceiling.
If you look at the scenes in Unreal and Unity they usually have a crapload of pointlights throughout the scene to help with lighting.
If ghost lights are gone because iray changed how it did stuff, fine. But we're gonna need something to replace their functionality and usability, because the current spotlight and pointlight are cumbersome and slow, that's why ghost lights caught on so quickly.
Have you put in a ticket with the exact steps to reproduce it? If not please do so. Include all details down to the last setting, drivers, OS, the whole works. It's all required to be able to troubleshoot something properly to come up with a fix. Until it is reproducible on their end it can't obviously be fixed.
Quick answer: turn off tone mapping when tuning lights. Work light by light, dome, emissive surface, scene light, make sure they contribute appropriately to the scene, then turn tonemapping back on with EV set to 0 and the film speed set to 100 (ASA = DIN 21, the default) and turn all your lights on. You will now have to tweak the EV value according to the number of lights, assuming you balanced each light to give the right illumination at EV0. If you have 8 lights you have at least 1x and more likely closer to 8x the light in the scene when they are all on, each doubling of the (peak) light level requires a 1EV increase in the tonemapping tab.
If you do this you can work out appropriate luminance values for all the light sources in the scene, including eliminating those which really aren't contributing anything (distance candle flames that are out-of-shot ;-) without going into the whys and wherefores of the default DAZ Studio settings (as explained by @RobotHeadArt). If you want you can set the EV back to 13, but then you will have to multiply all the light intensities by a factor of 2^(13-EV) to correct for going from the EV you found above to 13.
If 4.15 if you render with tonemapping off make absolutely sure the EV value is set to 0 - it affects the convergence time even though you can't see it. I have a scene with 8 point lights which converges in exactly 4 hours with tonemapping off and EV=0. If I change the EV to 13 the same scene renders in 3 minutes 18 seconds with tonemapping still off! (The scene uses a canvas, but I don't think this makes a difference.)
In the words of an ancient meme "Ain't nobody got time for that..."
I appreciate the attempt, but I stopped fiddling with point lights years ago. Way too hard to pin down and you either end up blowing out the lighting or you end up with too many intersecting deep shadows.
Way easier to set up light props with an emissive surface for the bulb parts and then use a couple of ghost lights to get a nice soft fill. If I need something dramatic, throw in a spotlight or turn on the headlight on the camera.
I'll just keep futzing in 4.14 until they fix this.
I noticed that the whole Iray Blended Dual Lobe hair shader on hair strands renders now totally black.