Daz Studio Pro BETA - version 4.20.0.17! (*UPDATED*)

Havos

nicstt said:

luka said:

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone reported this or had this kind of issues, but my Ghostlights are not working once I updated to 4.15.1.91 or 4.15.1.96. They are working on 4.15.0.30 and 4.15.1.72 so hopefully someone knows what's going on. I'm using a 3090 with the latest Studio drivers 472.47 and windows 10 v21H1.

I just use tonemapping more now ghost lights don't work.

I'm finding I actually prefer it.

I'm still cheating of course, but it's art and I can pretend I'm an artist because of said cheating.

I would not consider changing the tone mapping as cheating, as that is exactly what a camera would do if you take an indoor photo without a flash.

The problem with just boosting the exposure to compensate for lack of ghost lights is the render will take a lot longer to remove the grain. Here the extra illumination the ghost lights provided is of help, in particular when the only other light is coming via a window.  You can get round this problem using the denoiser, but I had never liked the denoiser that much, it removes too much detail in order to get rid of the noise.

In general I look at the loss of Ghost Lights with some nervousness. I use them quite a bit for indoor scenes, and if they no longer work it will delay me moving up to the new Iray version until a decent alternative arrives.

 

VEGA

Havos said:

nicstt said:

luka said:

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone reported this or had this kind of issues, but my Ghostlights are not working once I updated to 4.15.1.91 or 4.15.1.96. They are working on 4.15.0.30 and 4.15.1.72 so hopefully someone knows what's going on. I'm using a 3090 with the latest Studio drivers 472.47 and windows 10 v21H1.

I just use tonemapping more now ghost lights don't work.

I'm finding I actually prefer it.

I'm still cheating of course, but it's art and I can pretend I'm an artist because of said cheating.

I would not consider changing the tone mapping as cheating, as that is exactly what a camera would do if you take an indoor photo without a flash.

The problem with just boosting the exposure to compensate for lack of ghost lights is the render will take a lot longer to remove the grain. Here the extra illumination the ghost lights provided is of help, in particular when the only other light is coming via a window.  You can get round this problem using the denoiser, but I had never liked the denoiser that much, it removes too much detail in order to get rid of the noise.

In general I look at the loss of Ghost Lights with some nervousness. I use them quite a bit for indoor scenes, and if they no longer work it will delay me moving up to the new Iray version until a decent alternative arrives.

 

You can create ghost lights through "Create Advanced Iray Node" -> under display set "Iray Matte"-> Refrac. Index 1, Refrac. Weight 1, dissable all gloss. Problem is that without ghost lights there is no way to get a good amount of light indoor. Because Iray have bad color management outside will look like a big white blob, not exactly how high end cameras nor eyes work.

johndoe_36eb90b0

Richard Haseltine said:

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

The change in Iray is deliberate, and will presumably remain, as the old behavior was not physically correct.

That's not really helpful.

Physically correct or not, the new Iray behavior breaks so many products, some of them (like ghost lights) central to everyone's workflow.

Majority of the broken products probably won't be updated by the original vendors because that would break them for users who haven't updated DAZ Studio (often because they can't due to older hardware no longer being supported).

That leaves end users, 99% of whom have no clue on how shaders work to try to fix it in all their scene files they accumulated over years.

The least NVIDIA could do if they won't provide some sort of legacy mode is to provide us with a detailed, step-by-step, instructions for DAZ Studio Iray implementation on how to get the same visual results we had before the change.

The change log does show that Daz is trying to mitigate the impact of the change. I agree that allowing some of these non-physical behaviours, at least as an option 9e.g. through the advanced node properties function) would be useful, but all Daz can do is make representations to nVidia.

But my point was that DAZ shouldn't be the one fixing this -- it should be NVIDIA, because they have broken your product with this change of their paid Iray SDK.

I assume that DAZ didn't have custom math on top of Iray that caused it to render light and transparency differently before, but instead used default implementation provided by NVIDIA Iray.

Now that implementation has changed, with a good reason I admit, but also with a blatant disregard for hundreds of thousands of 3D assets and scenes created with the previous Iray implementation in mind.

Unless DAZ workaround can also fix existing scenes and not just newly created ones it is worthless.

DAZ should really escalate this to Iray product manager Alexander Fuchs at NVIDIA, I doubt the Iray team is aware of how much damage they did to your ecosystem with this change.

johndoe_36eb90b0

Havos said:

nicstt said:

luka said:

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone reported this or had this kind of issues, but my Ghostlights are not working once I updated to 4.15.1.91 or 4.15.1.96. They are working on 4.15.0.30 and 4.15.1.72 so hopefully someone knows what's going on. I'm using a 3090 with the latest Studio drivers 472.47 and windows 10 v21H1.

I just use tonemapping more now ghost lights don't work.

I'm finding I actually prefer it.

I'm still cheating of course, but it's art and I can pretend I'm an artist because of said cheating.

I would not consider changing the tone mapping as cheating, as that is exactly what a camera would do if you take an indoor photo without a flash.

The problem with just boosting the exposure to compensate for lack of ghost lights is the render will take a lot longer to remove the grain. Here the extra illumination the ghost lights provided is of help, in particular when the only other light is coming via a window.  You can get round this problem using the denoiser, but I had never liked the denoiser that much, it removes too much detail in order to get rid of the noise.

In general I look at the loss of Ghost Lights with some nervousness. I use them quite a bit for indoor scenes, and if they no longer work it will delay me moving up to the new Iray version until a decent alternative arrives.

Tonemapping is not a solution to this problem.

Watch this video to get the idea of what is involved in good scene lighting:

TL;DR -- good scene lighting is a complex endeavor and ghost lights in Iray were important part of accomplishing this. You can't use point lights and spot lights to simulate softboxes, diffusers, and curtains. Fudging with tonemapper produces noisy scenes with blown highlights which take ages to render while relying on denoiser produces results that look too artificial.

j cade

Havos said:

nicstt said:

luka said:

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone reported this or had this kind of issues, but my Ghostlights are not working once I updated to 4.15.1.91 or 4.15.1.96. They are working on 4.15.0.30 and 4.15.1.72 so hopefully someone knows what's going on. I'm using a 3090 with the latest Studio drivers 472.47 and windows 10 v21H1.

I just use tonemapping more now ghost lights don't work.

I'm finding I actually prefer it.

I'm still cheating of course, but it's art and I can pretend I'm an artist because of said cheating.

I would not consider changing the tone mapping as cheating, as that is exactly what a camera would do if you take an indoor photo without a flash.

The problem with just boosting the exposure to compensate for lack of ghost lights is the render will take a lot longer to remove the grain. Here the extra illumination the ghost lights provided is of help, in particular when the only other light is coming via a window.  You can get round this problem using the denoiser, but I had never liked the denoiser that much, it removes too much detail in order to get rid of the noise.

In general I look at the loss of Ghost Lights with some nervousness. I use them quite a bit for indoor scenes, and if they no longer work it will delay me moving up to the new Iray version until a decent alternative arrives.

 

turn dow burn highlights and crush blacks (+exposure)  and honestly I find interiors pretty simple to light

 

no lights other than the hdri and scene lights like lamps all rendered for 142 seconds with denoising because I'm on my old laptop but I do this pretty frequently and find it relatively fast to render

daylight

night time

how it looks with crush highlights/blacks at their defaults

 

the new iray version should also have an improved denoiser that preserves detail better incidentally.

Imago

twraven said:

Imago,

I"d like to try and reproduce this. I am not experiencing the same problem, but would you be able to tell me the content that you are using that causes this problem?

A quick example is this hair prop: https://www.daz3d.com/k-nicky-hair-for-genesis

I created a scene where I changed the chest size of G1 from 100% to 110%, here are the results. In 4.12 the hair are in the right place, in 4.16 they believe they can fly and manage to do so. But it's not limited to it, many other hair and clothes are prone to that in 4.16 while in 4.12 they all work as intended.
I don't use G8 too much, since it's too hard to use in animations due to its overly broken rig, but I saw it happen with it too. I don't remember which product it was, I was so pised to see that I simply closed everything and went back to 4.12.

 

 

Cyberdene

VEGA said:

Just because those thing aren't to their "reality" mindset, don't mean to cut the functionality completely. Let people use what they want.

Exactly this right here.

prixat

Looks like we now have ACES colour space!

prixat

One Click 'Clay Mode' with option to exclude items on an individual basis.

no__name

prixat said:

Looks like we now have ACES colour space!

Hmm, but ain't without shaders ability to swap textures from linear sRGB/rec709 to others color spaces gonna be quite a burden?

I mean you can manually convert them with OCIO I guess but eww... Would be great to have somewhat proper color management \o/

 

FP_2722134

Question, has anyone noticed an increase in the number of randomly transparent images in the last couple of version?

I noticed it skin, but it's by no means confined to particular scenes or typess of textures.  I went back and opened a scene I'd rendered and put away *months* ago, zero changes, the same scene renders part transparent (which can be proved by putting both original and new render into Photoshop and putting over a coloured layer, new is semi transparent, old is opaque), zero changes between original version and now.  It doesn't appear to be confined to specific images or textures so I'm just not sure where to start....

Latest public build, latest nVidia driver.

 

 

no__name

jamie-2724106 said:

Question, has anyone noticed an increase in the number of randomly transparent images in the last couple of version?

I noticed it skin, but it's by no means confined to particular scenes or typess of textures.  I went back and opened a scene I'd rendered and put away *months* ago, zero changes, the same scene renders part transparent (which can be proved by putting both original and new render into Photoshop and putting over a coloured layer, new is semi transparent, new is opaque), zero changes between original version and now.  It doesn't appear to be confined to specific images or textures so I'm just not sure where to start....

Latest public build, latest nVidia driver.

 

 

Yes it's been reported. Switch to the non-beta build to get an older version of Iray without that problem.

FP_2722134

no__name said:

jamie-2724106 said:

Question, has anyone noticed an increase in the number of randomly transparent images in the last couple of version?

I noticed it skin, but it's by no means confined to particular scenes or typess of textures.  I went back and opened a scene I'd rendered and put away *months* ago, zero changes, the same scene renders part transparent (which can be proved by putting both original and new render into Photoshop and putting over a coloured layer, new is semi transparent, new is opaque), zero changes between original version and now.  It doesn't appear to be confined to specific images or textures so I'm just not sure where to start....

Latest public build, latest nVidia driver.

 

 

Yes it's been reported. Switch to the non-beta build to get an older version of Iray without that problem.

 

Awesome, thanks, I'm not going mad then! :)   That'll teach me to follow the forums more closely...

VEGA

no__name said:

prixat said:

Looks like we now have ACES colour space!

Hmm, but ain't without shaders ability to swap textures from linear sRGB/rec709 to others color spaces gonna be quite a burden?

I mean you can manually convert them with OCIO I guess but eww... Would be great to have somewhat proper color management \o/

 

Yeah this, skin textures were created without spectral rendering in mind. I highly doubt someone will be using it when you need to convert 500+ textures in a big scenes and there's no way Daz is gonna convert them and provide updated materials. Currently it's as nice as it is unuseable.

frank0314

jamie-2724106 said:

Question, has anyone noticed an increase in the number of randomly transparent images in the last couple of version?

I noticed it skin, but it's by no means confined to particular scenes or typess of textures.  I went back and opened a scene I'd rendered and put away *months* ago, zero changes, the same scene renders part transparent (which can be proved by putting both original and new render into Photoshop and putting over a coloured layer, new is semi transparent, old is opaque), zero changes between original version and now.  It doesn't appear to be confined to specific images or textures so I'm just not sure where to start....

Latest public build, latest nVidia driver.

Please report it by submitting a bug report. The more reports they have with exact details and how to reproduce it the easier it is to find the problem.

nicstt

johndoe_36eb90b0 said:

Havos said:

nicstt said:

luka said:

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone reported this or had this kind of issues, but my Ghostlights are not working once I updated to 4.15.1.91 or 4.15.1.96. They are working on 4.15.0.30 and 4.15.1.72 so hopefully someone knows what's going on. I'm using a 3090 with the latest Studio drivers 472.47 and windows 10 v21H1.

I just use tonemapping more now ghost lights don't work.

I'm finding I actually prefer it.

I'm still cheating of course, but it's art and I can pretend I'm an artist because of said cheating.

I would not consider changing the tone mapping as cheating, as that is exactly what a camera would do if you take an indoor photo without a flash.

The problem with just boosting the exposure to compensate for lack of ghost lights is the render will take a lot longer to remove the grain. Here the extra illumination the ghost lights provided is of help, in particular when the only other light is coming via a window.  You can get round this problem using the denoiser, but I had never liked the denoiser that much, it removes too much detail in order to get rid of the noise.

In general I look at the loss of Ghost Lights with some nervousness. I use them quite a bit for indoor scenes, and if they no longer work it will delay me moving up to the new Iray version until a decent alternative arrives.

Tonemapping is not a solution to this problem.

Watch this video to get the idea of what is involved in good scene lighting:

TL;DR -- good scene lighting is a complex endeavor and ghost lights in Iray were important part of accomplishing this. You can't use point lights and spot lights to simulate softboxes, diffusers, and curtains. Fudging with tonemapper produces noisy scenes with blown highlights which take ages to render while relying on denoiser produces results that look too artificial.

I completely disagree; tonemapping is 'a' solution. You might not like or even prefer it, but for some of us, or  maybe a few of us - it is a solution.

It won't be my only one.

TBH, ghost lights made me lazy; I'd use them before considering anything else.

mikmod

Wow, the latest version (for now, I've tried beta 4.16.1.2) fixed atrociously slow loading and saving times by a huge amount (I see at least 200% of loading time improvement). Thanks! :)

I have Octane plugin disabled though, so it's time to test with it being ON.

Update: Test with Octane plugin ON also shows this improvement - nice! Despite OTOY's claim: "Right now, the highest priority is set to Octane Plug-In Slowing Down Daz Studio due to Rigid Follow node which is an extremely critical one."

mikmod

no__name said:

Leonides02 said:

Also, it seems like Spectral rendering is no longer acting the same as before. I previously had skin calibrated with the SSS from "Proper Subsurface Scattering for Iray," but in the latest Beta the skin looks gray, which is how it typically looked in non-Spectral rendering.

Is Spectral working?

 

Seems working to me. 

Transmitted color seems to no longer create gray/green seams at UV border.

Faithful seems alright, Natural still under-expose spotlights.

I havn't used spectral rendering in ages tho, maybe I miss something.

Yup, that bug was there since forever, I could see it at the arm-shoulder seam the most. Now it's gone! :)

mikmod

One bug is still plaguing the Strand-based plugin - try to drag'n'move (by keeping the left mouse button pressed) this slider in the Distribution tab to the left quickly - DS will probably crash instantly. Crash will be caught by the program itself. This bug might also apply to other sliders as well. The workaround is to type the desired number by hand.

no__name

VEGA said:

Yeah this, skin textures were created without spectral rendering in mind. I highly doubt someone will be using it when you need to convert 500+ textures in a big scenes and there's no way Daz is gonna convert them and provide updated materials. Currently it's as nice as it is unuseable.

Well you can still use rec709 for spectral tho. I think color correction could be done (or not) within the shader. And one more for Hdri if any I guess. If anything it might be also possible (or not) to batch convert via script and auto-remap them.

 

Made a quick test via OCIO, used 'Utility-Linear-sRBG' as source and 'ACES-ACEScg' as output. Only skin is converted (face/arms/torso/lips), used diffuse as trans map. Highlights/black at near 0.

ragamuffin57

I am Liking the new Iray but  it just grinds to a halt when trying to render the basic of characters ie 1 character no hair no clothing  1 poly heaven hdri  subd 4 spectral 709 ie 1964 natural .  rendered in the last beta one and a half  to 2 minutes  max with my set up  . Now  12 minutes before iray gets off the starting block!   So new Iray is fab but no good for me at this present time :(

VEGA

no__name said:

VEGA said:

Yeah this, skin textures were created without spectral rendering in mind. I highly doubt someone will be using it when you need to convert 500+ textures in a big scenes and there's no way Daz is gonna convert them and provide updated materials. Currently it's as nice as it is unuseable.

Well you can still use rec709 for spectral tho. I think color correction could be done (or not) within the shader. And one more for Hdri if any I guess. If anything it might be also possible (or not) to batch convert via script and auto-remap them.

 

Made a quick test via OCIO, used 'Utility-Linear-sRBG' as source and 'ACES-ACEScg' as output. Only skin is converted (face/arms/torso/lips), used diffuse as trans map. Highlights/black at near 0.

I tried Victoria 8 with your settings and it looks way off for me when compared to rec709. It would need to be converted automatically during shader compiling. It's too tedious to do it manually... I wouldn't convert all those OOT hair textures in that picture IMO.

no__name

VEGA said:

I tried Victoria 8 with your settings and it looks way off for me when compared to rec709. It would need to be converted automatically during shader compiling. It's too tedious to do it manually... I wouldn't convert all those OOT hair textures in that picture IMO.

 

Oh yeah it's 100% tedious, I'm just too curious xD

Here result with Victoria 8, seems a bit off/more warmer too. Possible I do something wrong.

 

marble

I do hope someone starts a tutorial thread on how to light IRay scenes without Ghost Lights. I tend to use them a lot although laterly I've tried other methods like adjusting tonemapping parameters but I have no real clue about what I am doing.I have not installed the latest beta versions nor the General Release (I'm still running 4.15.0.2) and I am very wary about overwriting this old version until things stabilise with 4.16.

prixat

'REC709 faithful' is also the only setting that reproduces the secondary light source correctly...

All other spectral settings, even 'REC709 natural', do not.

(That explains how ACEScg completed the the benchmark about 20% quicker!)

Forget that! I multiplied the lumens by 1000. the spot light is now at 100,000,000 lumens and ACEScg works correctly.

kyoto kid

100 million lumens?

Here's a 500,000 lumen "flashlight" these guys at Hacksmith cooked up.

https://youtu.be/5f6mDfc5zg4?t=803

VEGA

no__name said:

VEGA said:

I tried Victoria 8 with your settings and it looks way off for me when compared to rec709. It would need to be converted automatically during shader compiling. It's too tedious to do it manually... I wouldn't convert all those OOT hair textures in that picture IMO.

 

Oh yeah it's 100% tedious, I'm just too curious xD

Here result with Victoria 8, seems a bit off/more warmer too. Possible I do something wrong.

 

I had similar results, the converted textures are more gray to green color and the renders are darker. What I think  is that transmitted and SSS colors are not tuned to the spectral rendering. The skin transillumination distances look correct, but as you can see the color is orange with aces, for me with a bit of a green undertone, skin and ears mainly. I would assume the SSS light would be going from red to white, depending on the light intensity, and not from orange to white as in acescg. So maybe it needs to be adjusted in range +- 0.05 - 0.1 both Transmitted and SSS color. I would supress green color first.

Richard Haseltine

marble said:

I do hope someone starts a tutorial thread on how to light IRay scenes without Ghost Lights. I tend to use them a lot although laterly I've tried other methods like adjusting tonemapping parameters but I have no real clue about what I am doing.I have not installed the latest beta versions nor the General Release (I'm still running 4.15.0.2) and I am very wary about overwriting this old version until things stabilise with 4.16.

Apply the Advanced Iray Node Proeprties script from Scripts/Utilities (not sure on the actual name of the script but it should be clear) to your ghost light(s), turn on the Iray Matte option that is added to Parameters (under the Display group), and zero out the glossy settings so that it doesn't catch reflections. This seems to work fairly well to hide the light (and could probably be scripted).

WendyLuvsCatz

I can render animations faster using iray with 4.11 using denoiser than I can on this build using Filament

unimpressed

marble

Richard Haseltine said:

marble said:

I do hope someone starts a tutorial thread on how to light IRay scenes without Ghost Lights. I tend to use them a lot although laterly I've tried other methods like adjusting tonemapping parameters but I have no real clue about what I am doing.I have not installed the latest beta versions nor the General Release (I'm still running 4.15.0.2) and I am very wary about overwriting this old version until things stabilise with 4.16.

Apply the Advanced Iray Node Proeprties script from Scripts/Utilities (not sure on the actual name of the script but it should be clear) to your ghost light(s), turn on the Iray Matte option that is added to Parameters (under the Display group), and zero out the glossy settings so that it doesn't catch reflections. This seems to work fairly well to hide the light (and could probably be scripted).

 

Thanks Richard. As I said, 4.16 looks far too problematic at the moment so I'm not going there yet. However, workarounds for the Ghost Light issues are all good and well but, as @J Cade and others (above) have pointed out, there seem to be other tricks and techniques that are a mystery to most of us who, like myself, are just trying combinations of lighting parameters in a haphazard manner. I'm sure that we would all benefit from some kind of tutorial explaining the best way to light interiors, for example.