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Nope, not you. Sorry if you took it personally. I don't think anyone who has ever posted in the "lab" threads was of the "make art button" mentality, but these users unfortunately do exist in the community at large. And boy can they get loud when they find out there is more work involved...
Here's a yet another teaser. The shader on all these surfaces is RadiumFabric - the one that will come out after the big kit. It can do a lot of stuff, including physically based metals.
And I hope everyone remembers that I've had the Radium naming thing since forever ;)
So, there are no specular lights in this render, only GI/IBL and glossy reflections. The map used for IBL and "filling in" the reflections is Omnifreaker's kitchen.
The metal is sort of randomly artistic, it's controlled with an implementation of this technique: http://jcgt.org/published/0003/04/03/ - you choose two colours and they are converted into a physically plausible combination of Fresnel parameters.
Looks good, but, I'm sure it will get confused with Iradium which is the subtitle for the new DS. Whatever, it's exciting and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
CHEERS!
Quite likely it will. Especially because, well, the results don't look that much different, do they LOL
For me, "radium" is a metaphor for poetry. I don't know if you have heard of that dead Russian poet by the name of Vladimir Mayakovsky, but it's from his works. See here: http://cloud-in-trousers.blogspot.com/2004/09/taxes-ii.html
And then there's that song... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvSTZhOH7LI
Any chance of a teaser render of skin with the other new shader?
CHEERS!
My lights, Kettu's shader but the skin presets are mine.
Kettu, the Hue/Saturation/Lightness min/max values should probably be clamped to smaller leves. A range of -1 to 1 is simply to large to fiddle with. The hallmark is of course raytraced SSS and it is beautiful.
Are there any other kind?
Well, I think I've wrote the steps needed in Parris's thread. But here are some hints.
You need:
* Linear workflow (gamma corrected textures, everything in linear space, output to gamma space). Output gamma should be 2.2.
* Plausible materials (never, EVER, use pure white - 255,255,255 for the diffuse) and lights. The Disney's Principled BDRF paper says albedo (total reflectivity) stays generally around 40% in linear space (works out to around an RGB value of 168,168,168 at 100% levels).
Example values in gamma and its linear counterpart:
RGB 24,24,24 = 1% Linear
RGB 90,90,90 = 10% Linear
RGB 124,124,124 = 20% Linear
RGB 160,160,160 = 35% Linear
RGB 192,192,192 = 53% Linear
RGB 230,230,230 = 80% Linear
I generally use 192,192,192 for lights since that allows me to raise or lower temperatures easily than if I set it to 255,255,255. At that value, i need to work out the offset for strength. It also has the advantage of being more granular and can be extended in range more easily. 2 x 192,192,192 works out to 106% strength.
* Establish a white point based on the above material. You should get plausible looking lights and light setups that way. In simpler terms, your pure diffuse white material with an RGB value of 160, 160, 160 will look almost pure white (255,255,255) when there's light casting on it. That light intensity you use to get to that point is your maximum intensity.
* if you use several types of lights in your scene, you need to divide that max intensity between direct light and indirect (ambient light). You can use less than max of course, but should never go above. Think of it as doing energy conservation the manual way.
* At grazing angles, specular can go up to 255,255,255 at 50% if you use diffuse, 100% if there's no diffuse (reflection can go up to 75%). When viewed perpendicular to the camera, they drop to something like 3 to 5%. You need fresnel in your shader for that. Outside of US2 and Kettu's shader, I haven't seen any shader in DAZ Studio with fresnel attenuation for specular and reflection.
* Same as white, black is not an RGB value of 0,0,0 but should be around 16,16,16 to 24,24,24 (best stick to this value). Why 16,16,16 then? That value works out to 0.2% in linear space. I use that value to see if how that blends with very dark areas/shadows. If its the same, then you need to raise ambient light a bit.
* Total reflectivity is diffuse + specular + reflection. The more diffuse you have, the less the specular/reflection. The more roughness the diffuse, the less glossy the specular and the higher the fresnel strength. The same applies to reflection - rough means blurry reflections. It's not enough to have energy conservation in lights, but you need to use that in materials as well.
* Smooth metals are generally Lambert (low roughness diffuse). Even when its rough, it's still a very Lambert diffuse. Vice versa, rough materials generally are still rough even when they're smoother. And there is such a thing as a smooth coat over diffuse.
* Build your scene without textures or HDRI first. They should generally look plausible even without them. Add textures later, since they generally need to be converted to linear space. Most of the time, they will either need to be corrected in an image editor or be compensated in some way (raising strength levels or rougness for diffuse/color maps).
* Even on an empty scene, it's best to use an environment sphere to get reflection looking correctly (and to see if your reflecting materials doesn't reflect more than it should).
* The layered approach works pretty well. As noted in the Disney's Principled BRDF paper, most BRDF falls short of real world materials. Even the more advanced like Ashikmin Shirley or GGX fails since they do not have a long enough tail (wide specular) at very high glossiness. You need to use a wide and narrow specular with fresnel enabled on both to get close to plausible.
* The layered model isn't just limited to specular and reflections, but can also be used with diffuse as well.
* Never, EVER use ambient unless you're doing emissive materials.
* Don't use velvet. Use a low glossiness, high fresnel specular instead.
Awesome. Thank you for all this. I've been reading through this and Parris's thread all day and will be applying it to a scene I've been working on.
I'm expecting to run into problems with displacement maps but I'll see how it goes.
I'm taking the never, EVER literally, but just to make sure, does that apply even when there is an image in the diffuse channel? Usually objects with images have diffuse set to 255,255,255
Also, for lights, does that also apply to UE2. When using an HDRI/TIFF map, the diffuse is also set to 255,255,255.
Adding textures later makes a lot of sense and is actually how I often go about it for certain objects, but in this scene the main focus is a brick building, I'm not sure how I could get it looking right without textures from the get-go.
*Render settings were set low for brevity.
Here's an image of a stripped down version of a recent scene with the way I originally had the materials, using an HDRI in UE2.
Disregard the background and green door. I'm mostly trying to get the brick building as Photoreal as possible, the other buildings will get blurred out in post.
None of these are the default, out of the box settings, I tweaked everything using trial and error trying to get it as Photoreal as possible, and as you can see I'm not even close.
I'm changing everything over to gamma 2.2 and rendering an update now.
I think diffuse is off by default in the UE2 environment sphere surface and had to use ambient instead. Ambient levels generally depends on the HDRi you're using, but I generally set it to 255,255,255 at 400%. It's mostly based on experience with omnifreaker's HDRI which are very dark.
Updated render, I'm missing something. It looks different, and rendered faster, but something's off.
Gamma correction on: 2.2, went though all the diffuse images and set them to 2.2 and checked all the greyscale images were set to gamma 1.
Also Lowered anything that had a diffuse of 255,255,255 to 168.
Visually, it's noticeable the gamma has been increased and there are less shadows.
I'm going to lower the intensity of UE2 to 75% and see how that looks, but there's something else I'm not getting.
Lowered the intensity down to 40%.
I don't get it, after converting to a linear workspace, the light doesn't look like it's coming from the same place.
For all the brick and concrete surfaces, diffuse is at 100%, glossiness 81.1, specular is set to 40%.
The materials and textures are .jpg, so it's safe to assume that's playing a large part in the lack of Photorealism, but I can't understand why converting to a linear workspace would change the direction of the light source.
Jeez, it's quiet in here today.......
Well just in case anyone was following my misadventures, I've decided to apply shader cleaner to the whole thing and start over from scratch tomorrow morning.
Is that Urban Sprawl? The old or the newer one?
Is that Urban Sprawl? The old or the newer one?
Yes, Urban Sprawl 2, the newer one.
What are your UE2 and other light settings?
For my very last attempt I had intensity at 40%, Saturation 0, Contrast 100%
Occlusion Soft Shadows
For test renders I have Occlusion samples at 8 and shading rate at 2
Everything else was left at defaults.
Samples and shading rate are generally quality settings, so that shouldn't make much difference.
Here's what I'm using for the shot.
Intensity 100% (default)
Intensity Scale 100% (default)
Color: 192,160,136
Saturation 0, Contrast 0 (doesn't have an impact since I'm not using a HDRI).
Occlusion Strength 100%
IDL Strength 100% (doesn't have an impact since it;s just Occlusion w/Soft Shadows).
Occlusion Color 0,0,0
Max Trace Distance 150 (default).
UE2 Quailty Settings
Occlusion Samples 128
Shadow Bias 0.050
Shading Rate 32 (default)
Max Error 0.1
Plus a single distant light
Illumination On
Color 192,192,192
Intensity 450%
Shadow Type Raytraced
Shadow Color 0,0,0 (default)
Shadow Softness 2.5%
Shadow Bias 0.010
I've forgotten just how big and elaborate that set is. Most of the concrete except the brick has some blurred (glossy) reflection. I do feel the default bump settings are way too high though. Plus most of the glass have baked in diffuse, and when you don't use that, you can see the insides are just empty. Most metal surfaces used have diffuse too, so you can't use pure metal MATs with low diffuse. I generally use plastic or car paint MATs on those.
The street marks are finicky, since it uses opacity maps and the asphalt looks too 'wet'. There's also some reflection problems. Turning off raytrace (so it isn't reflected by other the asphalt) for the marks solves the problem. You can see that in the 2nd render.
Oh yeah, I;m not using any of the specular/glossiness maps, reflection maps and reflection strength maps. So, all reflections are raytraced. The environment sphere was using omnifreaker's KHPark at 255,255,255 with ambient strength set to 400%.
Render time for a 1080p version is 3 min 33.72 secs.
Thank you for taking the time to do that!
That looks pretty good too for putting it together so fast.
Thats basically how I did it too, no reflection maps, everything RayTraced, and I apply a car paint or metal preset I have saved to any metal surfaces.
I noticed the same thing with the glass, so I used a metal preset for most of the windows and was going to add additional blur in post.
I noticed most of the brick walls use displacement maps as well.
Hmm.........do you think it might just be that this set doesn't quite work for Photoreal renders? It's beautifully designed, and StoneMasons 3DMax renders look great, but even his promos have a matte-painting look to them.
Well, Stefan is pretty active in the Iray threads, so he may be gearing up for some photoreal textures. And with how great his sets are, even the old stuff, all that's really needed to make the jump are updated texture sets.
I noticed he's active in the iray threads, which makes me think his new textures will be iray optimized. Which I don't mind for stills, but animations are a different story. There is no way a scene this big is going to fit into the 4gb memory on a graphics card iray requires.
I guess I shouldn't say no way, but it's highly unlikely.
I think the textures are generally fine with his set. I have Urban Sprawl 2 and Contemporary LIving, mostly because I'm not into fantasy or scifi themes. He is one of the vendors that meticulously craft his materials very well. Most diffuse materials are set no more than 204,204,204.
What bothers me most about Urban Sprawl is the surface zones and how some props are 'tied' together. But that's probably due to the 'traditional' old school way of building things. I'd love to have the set 'broken up' into smaller pieces that you can instanced depending on need. Should work well on both 3delight and iray. That includes Octane, since he's also an Octane user.
I can do it myself of course, but that would take some time and quite a bit of effort. Plus, it would only work for me, since I'm not entirely sure if it's legal to share props based of other people's stuff.
My lights, Kettu's shader but the skin presets are mine.
Kettu, the Hue/Saturation/Lightness min/max values should probably be clamped to smaller leves. A range of -1 to 1 is simply to large to fiddle with. The hallmark is of course raytraced SSS and it is beautiful.
Now that does look really nice, I have to say I'm excited about this. You may want to correct her irises a little though as she does look a little cross eyed.
CHEERS!
Regarding Stonemason's street sets, I don't think he meant them to be terribly hi-res. They were merely 3D environments into which figures could be placed and the emphasis would still be on the figures. Could you imagine how complicated it would have been if all the buildings and streets were hi poly and hi res!? Imagine the file sizes and load times too. It's amazing he was able to cram as much into sets like Urban Sprawl as he did. We simply don't have the computer or graphics firepower to do things like they did with 1933 New York in King Kong. I think striving for full photorealism on what are still essentially home machines will always leave us wanting. There are short cuts and compromises though, we just have to find out how to make the best of them.
The road in those renders doesn't make sense, it looks like it's just been raining, but, there's nothing else around it that looks that way so it looks odd.
CHEERS!
I agree.
Ok, I agree with you to a certain extant. Just by our very nature, as artists and creative people we're always going to be wanting for more, it's just how we are. I'm generalizing of course, but it's just to make a point.
Wowies and Kettus renders a few pages back look like photos until you truly scrutinize them. You yourself have gotten some very impressive human skin renders that, at least to me, approach Photorealism.
Once you scrutinize these renders, there are giveaways that demonstrate they are computer generated images, but that's why I'm using the phrase approaching Photorealism.
Not all asphalt is grey or light grey. Freshly layered asphalt tends to be very dark and oily. And with the right amount of heat, they can look pretty reflective.
Yes of course, that will certainly make a difference, but I was actually saying the metal surfaces in both renders looked pretty good, and that makes sense since we used similar methods.
The thing that's not really selling for me is the Brick & Concrete. I was thinking it was user error on my part (and it probably is), but I'm starting to think it's the bump/displacement mats that have a painterly look by design, making it difficult to get Photoreal renders the way you did with the renders you posted a few days ago.
The thing with me is that I grew up in the era when special effects were largely done practically and so CGI, even if it's well done, stands out a mile to me. There are generations now where CGI is all they've ever known so they accept it more. For me the wonder element of special effects is largely gone. You know how it's all done now, it can look impressive sure, but, you're not thinking 'How did they do that!?'.
Technically, I think we've reached the point were we can do renders that look as good as the characters in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, however, I doubt, with what we have at our disposal, we'll get to the level that Benjamin Button did. They broke the uncanny valley with that one, but, I don't think we'll get there with DS some how.
We can but try though....
CHEERS!
Not all asphalt is grey or light grey. Freshly layered asphalt tends to be very dark and oily. And with the right amount of heat, they can look pretty reflective.
Probably, but in real world terms, streets don't stay that clean for long. Below is more what it should look like..
CHEERS!